While not Tom Clancy, it certainly doesn’t seem too far from his genre but this FPS game had a uniqueness that distinguishes itself from most games - the characters and equipment are rendered with cel-shading in the Unreal 2 engine, resulting in a 2D animated and comic book style appearance. It was praised as it evoked the graphic novel source material and portrayals of violence were seen as innovative as blood splatters are shown in a cartoon manner with headshots often displaying three successive comic-book style panels to illustrate the bullet impact. This is probably one of the prime examples for the case that videogames are art. The art direction here is clearly a cut above with even some minute details catching the eye.
XIII blends both action and stealth with an array of weapons and tools at your disposal from pistols, shotguns, automatic weapons, lock-pics and a grapnel. You could use other world objects like brooms and chairs as improvised weapons and even take hostages or as human shields. A nice touch was that you could 'hear' nearby enemies which made comic-book 'sounds' spelled out on screen.
Having an FPS shooter with a complex plot was relatively unheard of but this game kept the comic-book plot always at centre stage, comms, inner monologues, other characters talking, cutscenes all served to dive home the investigation, the revelations and the heart of the conspiracy. Big-name actors David Duchovny and the late Adam West provided exceptional characterisation to their roles. It's sadly a little bittersweet as the game only serves to recount the first five volumes of the graphic novel and while it has a natural end of sorts there's certainly a lot more but sequel plans didn't get made.
While the checkpoint save system which nullified the point of a manual save system, the didn't work incensed me personally, the true let-down of the game unfortunately accounts for far too a significant portion of the player base requirements was it's relatively bog-standard shooter gameplay. This did not reach the heights or innovation of other titles of the era and led to the game's lacklustre performance thus preventing sequels. Bizarrely though it had enough cult status to warrant a remake in 2020 but the less said about that disaster, the better.
Final Verdict: A piece of interactive art and gaming nostalgia for which there is little of it's like to be found today.
