[12:27:10] <Silver>Wow, XIII just keeps getting better and better.

That Silver can say something like that about something made by the French should, in and of itself, convey the greatness that this game possesses. However, not everyone knows Silver as I do, hence this review. XIII, as we've covered before, is a cel-shaded shooter from UbiSoft teeming with government conspiracy, intrigue, and blood. Lotta' blood. But I'll get into that later.

Now, here's where I'd normally detail the plot for a game, but XIII runs as much on suspense as it does on anything else. I'll outline the beginning scene once more, because well, that's all I can do without ruining later parts of the game. You wake up on the shores of Brighton Beach New York (or Little Moscow, whichever name you prefer) weak as a newborn pup, barely able to keep the world around you in focus, all from a head wound that you don't remember receiving. In fact, you can't remember anything - your name, your past, how you came to be washed up on that beach, why there's a key to a Midtown Manhattan bank safe deposit box in your possession, why you have "XIII" tattooed on your collarbone...can't remember one thing. A kind (and no doubt attractive, if you're into cel-shaded girls) lifeguard in a bathing suit appropriate for Baywatch but not so much for the North Atlantic helps you to her lifeguard tower as you fade in and out of consciousness. When you come to, you find her on the phone with someone about your nasty head wound and the possibility of an MRI. At that point, the fun starts.

Audio/visually, the game does very well. The soundtrack is crafted with care to complement the levels and situations almost perfectly. I say almost, because in certain levels - most usually the ones where you have to sneak around without being seen and setting off alarms - the music tends to spike in volume abruptly. If XIII is your first experience with a UbiSoft shooter, then this may not be that much of a problem for you. However, as I've played Splinter Cell, the equivalence of sound spikes with detection by the enemy is rooted deep in my subconscious. Whenever the volume would shoot up, I would spin around and kept muttering self-recriminatory obscenities to myself as I looked for whatever schlub stumbled across me and was going to hit the alarm. And they DO hit alarms. The AI in this game is pleasantly tight, with a good variety of actions depending on the situation. Case in point: Fading back to lure the sentries into an ambush works against sedate guards in a prison, but rarely if ever against professionally-trained GIs and commandos. Against said troops, don’t expect the kind of ego that firing off a few shots and falling back will make them want to continue the firefight. They’ll continue, to be sure, but after slapping an alarm panel, resulting in either mission failure, or bringing five to eight friends to the party.

Graphically though, the game is astounding. The cel-shading is done extraordinarily well, maintaining the comic book feel of the game's roots right until the end. Not just the look of it all, but the little things - the action words, the use of "panels" to confirm a kill shot or warn of nearing enemies, how some things in the scenery are more sharply detailed than the rest, clueing you that they should be used somehow, it all comes together fantastically. I've spoken of the shadow and particle effects already, but the lighting is not to be knocked either. Various phases of daylight helps set the mood of certain stages, there's one level where a full moon on a cloudless night was a critical factor of my anxiety as I snuck around from cover to cover, and the fluorescents in the various military complexes have that appropriate level of industrial-strength, bulk-bought harshness.

One of the nicer effects I've come across is the flashbacks you undergo at certain points in the game. You'll be walking around and come across some conversation or an object that reawakens a chunk of your dormant memory, resulting in a black-and-white FMV sequence, with occasional player interaction (Think the dream sequence in Eternal Darkness at the start of the game, where you're fending off hordes of zombies with the shotgun). Once the sequence ends, you snap back to the present area in a very odd way. First the screen is all-white for a moment, then the world around you slowly regains shape and focus, as if you're coming to from unconsciousness. Bolstering that appearance is the ability to speed things along by moving around a bit, suggesting of shaking one's head to clear it. Beautifully done effect, making for an overall impressive graphical presentation. Even the clipping problems I noted in my impressions - staggeringly reduced from Splinter Cell, by the by - are more than compensated.

The controls were remarkably intuitive, so much so that I was surprised by the sheer familiarity of the setup. I sat and thought about it for awhile until it dawned on me: The control scheme here is a roughly 85-90% exact duplicate of that of GoldenEye from the Nintendo 64. Reload, action buttons, fire button, scope zoom, character movement, camera movement, inventory scrolling, all virtually mirror that of the last-generation console's prize shooter with slight changes due to differences in the physical controller configuration. It's reasonably safe to say that if you owned a Nintendo 64, you played and/or owned GoldenEye at one time or another, and thus, can play XIII with a bare minimum of learning curve.

Overall this game is simply fantastic. After the relatives left the house on Christmas, I threw the game in and couldn't put down the controller for hours at a time until I completed the game. Whenever I did, I left the game alone for an hour or two, until I had a thought of how to get past a particularly tricky part and then it was rush back to the Cube. A true prize for a Cube collection.