XIII

The onomatopoeia is the thing everyone remembers. Fire a shot and a hand-lettered BLAM blooms in the air; creep up behind a guard and a soft TAP TAP marks his footsteps before you take him. Land a headshot and the screen splits into three comic panels showing the kill from different angles, the way Vance drew violence on the page. Ubisoft Paris did not just apply a cel-shaded filter to a first-person shooter in 2003 — the studio rebuilt the presentation layer of the genre around the grammar of a bande dessinee, and it still looks deliberate two decades on when most of its contemporaries have gone muddy.

Underneath the ink, the shooting is more thoughtful than the art style suggests. Ammunition is scarce enough that you are constantly demoted to whatever is lying around, and the game is unusually happy for you to fight dirty: throwing knives, a grappling hook to reach balconies, a chair swung at a man's head, an enemy dragged in front of you as a shield while you fire past his shoulder. Stealth is not a separate discipline so much as an option that saves bullets. Guards who spot you shout, and the alarm response is genuinely inconvenient.

The plot is straight from Van Hamme: a man washes up with no memory, a tattoo of the numeral XIII on his collarbone, and a dead president's assassination hanging over him. David Duchovny voices him, Adam West plays General Carrington, and the casting is played entirely straight rather than as a joke. What lets the whole thing down is the ending, which arrives mid-sentence and points at a sequel that never came. It is one of the more brazen unresolved cliffhangers of the generation.

The PS2 version has the usual sixth-generation compromises. Checkpoint saving instead of free saves punishes experimentation in the longer levels, the frame rate wobbles when the panel effects stack up, and the controls have the slight underwater quality of a console shooter designed with a mouse in mind. Some late sequences lean on trial-and-error placement of enemies rather than on the systems that make the early game interesting.

Worth returning to anyway, because almost nothing else tried this. Licensed comic adaptations of the era usually settled for putting a familiar face on a competent action template; this one went after the way the source material actually reads on the page and got surprisingly close. You finish it slightly annoyed and still thinking about the sound effects hanging in the air.