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XIII Remake review - Not the remake you're looking for

The remake of the shooter XIII was planned for release in November 2019, but the Friv2Online developers decided to postpone it to November 2020. Looking at the final result, it even becomes interesting: if it's practically unplayable now, in what state was the project a year earlier? About what the friv game makers from studio got, we tell you in the review.

XIII, released in 2003, was not a bad shooter, although it failed in sales, but received high marks from the press and players. Based on the comic book of the same name, it used cel-shading style for this friv gameeand visual techniques borrowed from graphic novels - splitting the screen into parts, pop-up "clouds" above the characters and so on.

Then it was fresh, now it's not so inspiring, but it's still quite original friv game. Therefore, the announcement of the remake of the shooter aroused restrained interest in the audience. And if the content of the updated version of the game does not want to complain - after all, the story remained the same, with minor changes - then the technical execution is frankly disappointing.

The comic book style of the original XIII was quite elegant, and there was a sense of taste in the visual simplicity. The remake offers the usual for a modern shooter picture with slightly rougher contours of objects and characters. That charm has disappeared somewhere, and flickering shadows, periodic frame rate drops and problems with V-Sync do not contribute to immersion in the game world.

Of course, graphics in shooters are important for friv games, but even more important is the fun of shootouts and the work of AI. The remake also has problems with it. Shooting from different types of weapons does not cause emotions, and the opponents run amok in the locations and humbly wait for the player to deal with them.

When you see the protagonist, the enemy will freeze for a second - it's enough to react to his appearance and make a few shots. What's even funnier is that mercenaries who are shot freeze for a few moments and only then fall down, no matter if you fired a pistol to the head or gave a shotgun volley at point-blank range - the reaction will be the same. The bodies of opponents are frozen in unnatural poses, and limbs bend at unnatural angles. About getting stuck in objects, I'm not talking about it at all.

And these are not all the problems of XIII remake. Rassynchronous sound, automatic skipping of cut-scenes, visual bugs, scripts not working, strange hitboxes. On the level in the bank the sloppy execution of details catches my eye - wires from clerks' computers go nowhere, and on the military base the friv game simply refused to give me the key-pass necessary for further passage.

On the other hand, the friv game is good old-fashioned. It's exactly the same shooter they were back in 2003. You just shoot at enemies, use first aid kits, look for armor in hidden places, and sometimes participate in stealth episodes. Nothing superfluous.

However, this does not justify the terribly low quality of the project. The authors explain it by the fact that the development process was affected by the pandemic, but remembering the best games of 2020, which were created in the same conditions, this is somehow not believable. According to PlayMagic, the remake of XIII will be fixed by the nearest patches. Well, we'll wait, but in the meantime, we don't recommend the game for purchase.