XIII has had a complicated life. The comic book turned video game ended with a glaring cliffhanger and next to nothing to follow it up for two console generations. That is, until the ill-fated Playlogic remake, which was such a broken mess that publisher Microids hired a new developer, Tower Five, to rework the remake into something playable. Better yet, it’d feature online multiplayer, restored mechanics cut from the original game, and a total visual redux to more closely match the original gamebut better. Was it worth the wait?
Oh goshno! But in a strange way, that’s okay.
I’ve made my peace with XIII Remake (technically it’s now XIII Remake: Remake, but who’s counting?) being a barely functional piece of media. In fact, I kind of like it this way. The closer this latest update brought it to basic competency, the less entertaining it became. Which isn’t how it should work, but every generation of every medium needs itsThe Room, and XIII Remake might just be that for Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
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XIII Remake is beautifully broken. It’s like navigating an abstract art installation that’s accidentally a puzzle game. You don’t play the sections as you’re supposed to, but however you have to in order to reach the end. Like, instead of using a mounted gun in a turret section, you just sit behind the object you’re supposed to be protecting because it’s more invulnerable than you are. Charge guns-a-blazing through a stealth section to protect alarms like it’s a King of the Hill match in Halo, or punch everyone as they point their guns so far up your nose they clip through your face when you’re supposed to ghost through hallways to not kill anyone.
When we inevitably reach the point where there’s AI that can just generate game code like Midjourney generates pictures, this is the sort of output I expect. It’s close enough to a functional game that you absolutely can play it. Yet the impetus to do so is born of nothing but the finest morbid curiosity. This isn’t eurojank - this is an absolute train wreck that you can explore at your leisure. It’s the kind of game that, at launch, put more detail into a deer’s genitals than the balance of combat. Yes, really, that’s a thing, and that’s not even the weirdest occurrence I had with the game’s non-hostile wildlife.
The update does improve the balancing, for what it’s worth. Guns kick hard and have vastly improved sound effects, and enemy AI are also so comically imprecise now that what threat they did pose before as AK-47-strapped roombas has been negated into absolute incompetence. You will watch men shoot shotguns at you from a building away without taking cover, the bullets visibly flying so far around you that there’s no way they will hit. This game operates under its own pseudo-logic that’s outrightuncanny. It’s probably the closest we’ll get to a Naked Gun tie-in game (David Duchovny’s deadpan voiceover is even a fitting stand-in for the late-Leslie Nielsen).
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What’s less of a laugh riot is the new shaders they’ve included on top of retexturing of every asset. The textures are great. The shader is not. Look at this canyon:
This levelhurtsto look at now. The staggering amount of over-detailing is absurd, serving as a perfect example of why most cel-shaded games merely add a single broad outline around whole objects, not every individual crack. Borderlands didn’t add a thick, inky line to every detail for a reason. I’d have much preferred they spent time fixing the enemy AI or at least their animations rather than… this. Every rock in this canyon sticks out like a glaring attack on art design. Even a comic book artist would tell that this much detail is too much. And it wasn’t this bad before. Look at the same level, pre-patch:
Sometimes less really is more. Especially when talking about giant glaring outlines added to every edge of any object in sight.
Speaking of things nobody asked for, there’s somehow more physics bugs, which means you can get stuck in the geometry in brand-new places! Your weapon loadout resets every level now, while other aspects are completely unchanged. Every cutscene is still pre-rendered in low resolution with the remake’s first art style, which creates a weird dissonance between cutscene and gameplay, while multiplayer is an absolute ghost town with only one mode available. The resulting game is a chimera of different teams trying desperately to finish a project that sadly has little chance at sticking the landing. At this point, the bugs are part of the feature list.
XIII Remake, hard as Microids has tried to salvage it, is seemingly beyond hope of redemption, short of an entire rebuild. Their overall line-up of recent games has actually been quite solid, from Syberia: The World Before to adaptations like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It’s easy to understand why they’d want to polish up their lone blemish. XIII on paper is the perfect candidate for a modern remake, but Playlogic literally just rebuilt the same 6th-gen levels without any tweaks, let alone adding a basic level of polish. Tower Five has brought the textures and gunplay up to par, but it’s still the same static levels that are so brief that you’re able to play the entire game in a single sitting.
What’s faithful enough for fans of the original feels dated, and what’s new is incredibly pedestrian by modern FPS standards. The art style is at times both an improvement and a downgrade depending on the level. The lowered difficulty certainly makesplayingeasier but only serves to speed you along before exploring the potential of any scenario. It’s only by being so utterly laughable thanks to glitches and bugs that you can really get something out of it. I appreciate the dedication Microids has taken to XIII, but at this point, a sequel would be better than trying to fix this game any further.
The original is still available for its fans, and this remake is just here for a good lark. It’s absolute comedy gold. If you want a “so bad it’s good” game, there’s few better on the market, though of course that comes with the stipulation that you buy it in a sale, because $30 way too steep for this level of nonsense. It’s truly one of the most hilarious experiences I’ve ever had, if absolutely not the thrill ride it was intended to be.
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