Wish I had amnesia for this one...
But first, some history. XIII was a spy-action thriller released by Ubisoft back in 2003, and yes, I'm commending the ingenuity and imagination of a Ubisoft product, what times these are! But this game came out back in the days when the French studio still had something of an adventurous soul about them and made some off-the-cuff titles that would soon become beloved such as the original Rainbow Six's, Beyond Good and Evil and just so many bad Batman games... compare who they were with who they are now and it's undeniable that a whole lot of success has been generated by this current spate of 'copy and repeat' creative-dystopia that they've built, but a lot of the heart is long lost. Heck, by this point I'm 90% certain that Beyond Good and Evil 2 game is going to end up looking and feeling exactly like Assassin's Creed if it ever makes it to shelves, and if it doesn't; that was probably because it didn't fit the crowd well enough.
So with that to mind, I suppose it was no surprise that publishing rights was pushed off from the main studio to Microïds, another French studio who are probably best known for their work on the Syberia games which I've heard a lot about but have not had the chance to play. (And recent events are going to make it hard for me to justify rectifying that). Although to be fair they did get a seemingly fresh company, PlayMagic, to work on the development so perhaps the blame lies with these guys. These new devs had the pleasure of working on and revealing this game over the past year much to the surprise of everyone, as literally not a soul on earth was expecting or asking for this remake to happen, but we'd take it, because the original had so much heart in it that the memories just flooded in. So many memories, in fact, that some of us (>cough< me >cough<) may have overlooked a few of the glaring problems that were pretty visible from the outset.
Firstly was the art-style, which might seem insignificant but this was big one. Shooting games are an art in today's day and age, but back in the early 2000's it was a lot looser of a genre where more creativity would go into it. I use the word 'creativity' as a substitute for 'games where the gun controls weren't very good to play with at all'. But in such an environment it was the games who could still make their combat stand out which really secured the hearts of the players. (If not the public, remember XIII was a cult classic) XIII's cell-shaded visuals were hyper focused on capturing the feel of comic panels being squinted over by an avid reader, as such there were heavy lines around objects, hard square edges around circular objects, a visualisation of sound effects that even had gameplay uses, (such as following the onomatopoeia of footsteps to track the enemy) and pretty much no facial details whatsoever. It made use of the limitations of the hardware and produced something timeless; so how did the remake fair up?
Well looking back this was an important blunder on their part, because in creating more detail a lot was robbed from the original premise. The hardlines are almost completely gone, (I say 'almost' because they are used infrequently on far background objects) the models look derivate from something from Fortnite rather than a unique creation and the cut-in panels are just wrong. I cannot put my finger on it, but they just don't work the way that they used to. (maybe because the other ingredients are so flawed, it's hard to say) What results is a game that looks pretty generic to those that don't remember the original and disappointing to those that do. Although perhaps the biggest insult is the way in which, instead of recreating the iconic original opening scene, this game just features one of the new FBI models strolling into a meeting room and watching it on a grainy projector. Yes, that means we have to watch that great old intro with no remaster done to it whatsoever and over the shoulder of a crappy new NPC who takes up about a third of the screen. For no discernible reason.
But the biggest issue with the XIII remake is even bigger than the art-style. Art was the nail in the coffin that kept the die-hards from being happy, but the raw construction of the game is the 5 feet of cement that keeps everyone else far, far away. Because you see this game is bad. Really bad. Like, unity store asset flip bad. (And I do not use that comparison lightly) Again, in hindsight you can sort of see this from the trailers leading up to release, but I don't think even the most astute of viewer could have imagined it would be this broken! Basically, the AI is warped to the point where enemies lose sight of the player from anything more than point-blank, ragdoll is missing from all enemies that are killed with automatic weapons and severely undercooked for all other weapons, canned death animation are stutter-filled, NPC aim is pathetic, bodies easily and consistently glitch through surfaces, NPCs just straight vanish mysteriously once gone from the player's line of sight, fists appear to hit surfaces meters away from the player, melee sometimes does not work despite having all the visual indicators to imply that it did, and sometimes sequences just straight fall-apart like this was game coded by one person on a five year old laptop. (I should know, I've been that one person before.)
It's hard to understate how mind blowingly broken the game is, I mean it's far beyond laughable and easily to the point of "I paid how much for this?" You hear all the time about AAA games that launch with bugs and crashes galore, 'Watch Dogs Legion' in fact being a recent Ubisoft example of just this, but none of those games are nearly as shattered as this experience. This feels like something that literally no QA ever touched at all, or something that was pushed out in under a year, heck it feels like an under 8-months game! There is no way anyone could justify putting this out on a store for money without feeling deep embarrassment, and I starting to think the developers were aware of this. They've already issued a statement apologising and asking for time to fix things, but it's just surprising; this isn't a case of "Oh, we underestimated what it would be like to make a game like this", this feels like a 'we're out of time and money so we'll just upload this alpha build to get a quick buck'. I'm honestly stunned a reputable studio consciously put this out, and everyone involved with this needs to get in some sort of documentary to explain this mess ASAP.
But when it's all said and done, what has this remake done better than even I could have imagined? Well it signal boosted the original. In the wake of this mess the original had so much support flood to it that it outsold the remake in it's launch week. (Which makes sense considering it's so cheap) And you know what, somehow despite it all I still think this loop back around to show us how homogenous great ideas have become under the guidance of big studios like Ubisoft. It seems there's no more room for great creative ideas that do things you wouldn't normally expect, and when those ideas do come along they're just flashes in the pan that don't last long enough to keep the Devs invested up until launch. It may seem unrelated, but I remember recently watching the amazing gameplay trailer from Cyberpunk 2077 and hearing the phrase "This is the next generation of open world game", then getting an immediate flash forward to the amount of games we're about to get that will attempt to mimic Cyberpunk's scale and ambition with a modicum of the size, talent or ability to do so. This is what the creative industry is, iteration upon iteration, and when you get a glimpse that's a little too unburnished, you can see it's a cycle on the verge of falling apart. (Jeez, these disaster games sure do get me philosophical, huh?)
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