![]() This is one of the buggiest games I’ve had the misfortune to play, and is probably the buggiest one that’s full-priced. Dead bodies catapulted into the sky, wiggled through walls and mumbled at me while half-submerged in the ground. An enemy was going to push an alarm button, but luckily he grew a mast from his forehead, which stopped his arms from being able to reach the button. A prison level has policemen walking around with spirit-truncheons following just behind them. I would come across a handful, then restart the level to see if it was because I’d done something weird and, nope – you guessed it – these are clear and persistent bugs for everyone to enjoy. The bugs are stupendous, worth twenty “you won’t believe the bug in this game” YouTube videos. You can almost visualise Microid’s producers checking the calendar, wiping a brow and saying “we’re going to have to stick to the old one, boys”. Even more bizarrely, the game kicks off with a random character, seated in a briefing room, watching the original game’s opening cutscene preserved in the PS2 engine. ![]() The original voice track has been kept for the cutscenes, so you get to enjoy David Duchovny and Adam West in their original glory, but the visuals don’t always match up with the audio, making the story occasionally nonsensical. The comic-book uniqueness of XIII circles the drain and disappears. While it’s not quite on a par with how Sonic the Hedgehog’s teeth or Rise of Skywalker missed the expectations of their fandoms, it’s in the same ballpark. What we get from this bewildering set of decisions are some Xbox 360-era 3D models, drawn round with a black felt-tip pen. They’ve tried to push it further into photo-realistic Call of Duty territory (emphasis on ‘tried’), and then remembered at the last minute to add in the cel-shading. Microids have clearly decided that a new generation of consoles needs more than just cel-shading. It doesn’t just trip up on the way it falls off a cliff, hits every branch on the way down, and then lands head-first into a shark’s mouth. Jotting all this down, it’s fascinating that XIII fails to the degree it does. And hey, a gap’s opened up in the launch titles for Series X|S, and XIII looks like it could fill it. In our opinion, it makes more sense to remaster something imperfect and hasn’t been played by everyone. It’s got a fanbase, but the mainstream audience have never played it. It’s got a unique hook, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. It all makes XIII ripe for a remake, then.
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