31-Oct-2003 PC Zone wanders into a comic book that's got a bit more death, guts and murder than his weekly copy of Dandy
Thirteen. The Baker's Dozen. Unlucky for some, but still a regular fixture at bingo. It's certainly unlucky for Steve Rowland, because he's been washed up on a beach with a distinct lack of memory, a plethora of bodies piling up around him and people wearing spectacles pointing at him and claiming that he's assassinated the President. Worst of all, he's suffering from a rare skin condition that makes him look like he's fresh from the pages of a slinky, ultra-violent Belgian comic book. Still, worse things happen at sea, eh?
As you can see, XIII looks the business. The cel-shading looks fantastic and there are pointers everywhere to remind you that you're in a comic-book; a lot like Ang Lee's ho-hum Hulk blockbuster. When you fire a dart into someone's neck you get three comic book frames of the poor fella getting pierced at the top of your screen along with a dramatic written scream of "Arghhhhhh!" When you shoot someone off a cliff they tumble to the firmament with a streaming exclamation of "Nooooooo!" behind them. When a grunt fires a rocket at you, the actual frame of the scene you're in jangles all over your monitor.
So is it a simple gimmick or an evolutionary innovation? Well, it's a gimmick obviously, and it's one already perfected in the '80s Grange Hill title sequence, but it's still entirely worthwhile. The comic book stylings get intrusive on occasion, but everything else works so well that after a while you simply don't notice the clever animation or the words plastered over the screen during someone's death throes. You get so used to it that if you were to actually leave the house to buy a packet of tic tacs from the newsagents, you'd be wondering why the word 'Ching!' failed to appear over the till in giant orange letters. So the gimmick doesn't last, or rather it just becomes the norm.
The visual style and flair of XIII may be its selling point, but what the screenshots fail to show is the sheer ingenuity of the way in which it tells its conspiracy-laden story. The tale itself isn't an original one, it's the plot of The Bourne Identity with cel-shaded knobs on: amnesia, trained killer, mysterious tattoo, key to a secret bank vault. But XIII doesn't simply use the plot as a device to bookend otherwise unrelated missions, in the way that a game like Soldier Of Fortune might, but instead uses the game engine to tell an extremely good story. Cut-scenes are kept to a minimum and you are made to think about what's going on without it being chalked up in giant letters and underlined in red: this is the Half-Life mode of story-telling.
Take the opening scenes, for example; you wake up on the beach with a lifeguard standing over you (a female lifeguard in a red swimsuit with big hooters obviously). Your health is at 50, the graphics are blurred and hazy. You stagger to your feet and the lifeguard points in the direction of her car and you sway towards it, making painfully slow progress across the sand. Then, out of nowhere, you have a flashback in which you remain in complete FPS control yet everything is grey, clouded and tinged with an unreal haze of brightness. You're on a ship and men are chasing you. You get shot and plunge into the water. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the flashback is gone and you're back on the beach. You see the bright blue sky, and then the red of the lifeguard's lovely bum as your viewpoint tumbles to the ground on the sandy beach.
Throughout the game, this type of narrative tomfoolery actively engages you, making you slump back in your chair regularly and think stuff like, "Hang on a minute. I can trust him, but he thinks I'm someone else. Maybe he's hiding something because he knows the truth. Or maybe not..."
You're drip-fed nuggets of information wherever you go, from the conversation of NPC passers-by to the occasional document you pick up and peruse. The game never tells you exactly what is going on or who you can trust until it really has to. Most of the thinking is up to you.
The joy of XIII is that it continually surprises you with neat touches, and these little gimmicks are what keep you hooked. You can take someone hostage, for example, and the police will back off and hold their fire while you wave a pistol menacingly at the poor soul you've just nabbed. Meanwhile, you can knock out civilians and security guards with chairs, trays, bottles and a variety of other household items should you need a non-lethal approach to problem solving.
These little teases of gameplay genius aren't flogged to death, they only appear once in a while, and it means that variety is always top of the agenda. Even smaller stuff, like the faint shell-shock effect and deafness you get when a rocket explodes nearby, urges you deeper and deeper into the game.XIII is a magpie of games and films, and it isn't ashamed of it. It steals the good bits from everything else and makes one gigantic mother of a 'good bit'. It has the grappling hook from Zelda, the wire-sliding from Splinter Cell, the body-hiding of Thief and the combined plots of JFK, Face/Off and The Bourne Identity. If the bit where you're in the ducts of an icebound military base, sitting above the cell of your kidnapped commander and listening to the conversations beneath you doesn't scream 'This is Metal Gear Solid! This is just like that bit from Metal Gear Solid!' at you then... well... you've obviously never played Metal Gear Solid.
So it steals, it steals in abundance, but it's good enough to get away with it; any game that essentially recreates Sarah Connor's escape from the Asylum in T2 is fine by me.
There are problems though, and they're fairly big ones, with the word "Arghhhh!" hovering above them in big orange letters. The AI is 'someone just shot my best friend in the head but I'll pretend not to notice' bad. Some of the baddies are so inept that a gunshot 20 metres away won't even make them flinch, and for a game that relies on a lot of stealth this is not a good thing.
Baddies do pick up the ammo from dead bodies when they run out, but they never feel half as real as they should. The stealth works most of the time, but it errs more on the side of frustration than excitement. In a wide open space the hazy AI means that it's all too easy to just run around and shoot everyone before they hit an alarm, but in an enclosed space (like the submarine in which you find yourself trapped) your enemies are liable to slam an alert buzzer if you nudge a desk 50 metres behind them. It's confusing and it's frustrating, but I suppose it's also why God created the quicksave button.
You're Nice & Pretty XIII is stylish, clever and beautifully put together. Some
will say that behind the gloss and the plot-twists the game itself is relatively shallow, but the gloss is so good that it doesn't really matter: it's like having sex with Cameron Diaz and then complaining that she didn't have anything intelligent to say about the works of Plato.
If you like realism, seriousness and existential thinking then you might be better served elsewhere; if you want a game that makes you smile and a good story well-told then XIII is your lucky number.
PC Zone Staff
// Overview
Verdict
Slick and stylish. Violence is beautiful
Uppers
Looks awful purdy Innovative and variable gameplay Great story-telling
The worst thing about XIII is David Duchovny, who voices your character with less enthusiasm than he did back when he read grotty letters about architects shagging strippers to his dog in The Red Shoe Diaries. Rapper Eve fares a lot better as Jones, your sidekick, while (rejoice!) Adam 'Sixties Batman' West kicks ass as your trustworthy general
// Missed Opportunity
XIII has an abortive stab at character development with skills that you unlock as the game progresses, but only ever tells you you've got them on the menu screens. It's really quite bizarre. The best of them allows you to see the 'tap tap tap' of nearby enemy footsteps, but the rest are anodyne things like breathing underwater for longer. You can't help but feel as if they gave up on this idea halfway through development but never bothered to get rid of it. If they had tightened it up it would have undoubtedly been a better game.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Looks awful purdy
