XIII (2020)

XIII (read: Thirteen) is a first-person shooter video game developed by PlayMagic and published by Microids for mh:awesomegames:Microsoft Windows, mh:awesomegames:PlayStation 4, and mh:awesomegames:Xbox One on November 10, 2020. It is a remake of a 2003 video game of the same name.

Development
A remake of the original 2003 video game was announced on April 18, 2019 with PlayMagic developing the game and Microids publishing the game for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The game was originally scheduled for release on November 13 of the same year, but it was delayed to 2020 for further development. In June 2020, the game was announced to be scheduled for release on November 10, 2020 for Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. In October 2020, it was announced that the port of the game for Nintendo Switch was delayed to 2021.

Gameplay
Just like the classic game, XIII is a first-person shooter with elements of stealth and action in certain missions.

XV Reasons Why This Remake Sucks

 * 1) Simply put, this remake is not faithful to the original game at all.
 * 2) The audio in the game is absolutely broken. The sound effects appear and disappear at random times and there are cases where you won’t hear a single thing and then you suddenly start hearing a lot of background sounds that sound out of nowhere, or even worse, they vanish completely after walking a few meters, meaning that you can rarely hear something that is ten meters away from you.
 * 3) The animations are poorly-done in most of the cases. When you kill an enemy, he can either fall to the ground in a very stiff way or move spastically all around the room.
 * 4) Braindead and broken AI. The enemies will stare at the ground or at the walls and won't notice you, even if you are right in front of them, killing their squadmates or they can walk in circles when a nearby squadmate is killed.
 * 5) As strange as it sounds, some of the new mechanics can break how the game works:
 * 6) The game wasted a great opportunity to solve the cliffhanger ending of the original game, because it uses the same ending of the original game.
 * 7) The optimization is terrible and inconsistent, even if you run the game on a powerful PC, there are times where the framerate will get incredibly choppy at times and then get back to normal.
 * 8) The gunplay feels really weak, mostly because the developers didn't even bothered in making new weapon sounds and they just recycled the original sounds instead. Also, most of the weapons don't even have a considerable amount of recoil, with the exception of the shotgun, and this one is way too exaggerated.
 * 9) Plagiarism: This game's front cover art is blatantly traced from this artwork of Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell: Conviction.
 * 10) The hit detection is broken. At times, you will never be able to kill an enemy if you're using an automatic weapon, even if the hitmarkers appear, the enemy will just refuse to die and this can waste more than two of your magazines.
 * 11) The game doesn't have the option to change the camera's Field of View, something unacceptable for today's standards.
 * 12) The PC version uses mouse acceleration for the aiming and it doesn't even has a menu to change the ADS controls; this mechanic shouldn't even be present in new generation games.
 * 13) The multiplayer mode is poorly-designed. There are only a couple of Modes (Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch), three maps and is entirely local, there are no dedicated servers, no Bots support, and The Hunt, the most known Mode of the original, is completely absent here. To add salt to the wound, the maps are really big for only four players, which is the maximum amount of players allowed in local multiplayer.
 * 14) A bit of false advertising. The PC version claims that it has complete controller support, but in reality, this feature is prone to fail, or even worse, there are users that claimed that their controllers didn't work while playing the game or only worked in the menus.
 * 15) It's way overpriced, costing $40 but with all the reasons mentioned above it's not worth the price, You can buy the original XIII on Steam for way cheaper.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Despite the terrible game optimization, the loading times are relatively short.
 * 2) There are more checkpoints than in the original game, something that is appreciated, because the original game had very few checkpoints per level.
 * 3) Despite being bugged, boss fights were improved and introduced divided health bars, where if you chunk down a portion of the bosses' health, they go into a stunned state, where you can do an extra damage.
 * 4) Wildlife was added to the Rocky Mountain stage, making the game feel less empty.
 * 5) Unlike the original game where you needed to be close and a bit lucky to kill someone with it, here the shotgun can kill enemies in one shot most of the times.
 * 6) The idle animations for the weapons are pretty decent.
 * 7) It's one of the few games nowadays, especially First-Person Shooters, that allows for up to 4 player split-screen.

Reception
XIII was negatively received by players and press upon launch. The main criticism focuses on the unnecessary changes from the original, such as the art style and the weapon limit, as well as the game's numerous technical and audio issues.

On Metacritic, the PlayStation 4 version received 39/100, the PC version received 29/100, and the Xbox One version received 32/100.

XIII is the second lowest-rated game on Metacritic in 2020 (in a ranking with at least seven reviews), after Tiny Racer.

On OpenCritic, the game received a rating of "Weak", an average score of 33/100 and a 6% critics recommend, based on 19 reviews.

GamingBolt gave a 2/10, considering as one of the worst games of all time.

It's worth to mention that a great amount of the players complained about the poor optimization, the big amount of bugs and glitches, the unnecessary changes that are not faithful to the classic game and the broken audio and mechanics on Steam, Metacritic and many other websites about videogames.

Legacy
On mh:awesomegames:Steam, it currently has mostly negative reviews with only 13% positive reviews, making it one of the lowest-rated mh:awesomegames:Steam games ever released, sub-par with FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction, Airport Simulator 2014 and eFootball 2022.

The reviews were so bad and the game was so criticized that the developer PlayMagic and publisher Microids issued a joint statement apologizing to players for the unfinished state of the game at release, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic had significantly affected the game's production to the point that the game didn't even met the quality standards of the publisher.

Videos
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