A remake of the cel-shaded FPS "XIII" was released in November 2020 to dismal reviews, with user review scores on Steam "overwhelmingly negative" and an overall score of only 30 out of 100 on Metacritic, which we did not review ourselves . It was so bad that developer PlayMagic and publisher Microids jointly apologized.

The list of things the remake got wrong is exhaustive: bugs and poor performance were major problems, but the audio remix was also bad, and for some reason the developers decided to go with more detailed and decidedly less stylish graphics. 2003 The original "XIII," released in 2003, was so much fun that the failure of this redo was doubly disappointing.

And now you don't have to take my word for it: GOG is giving this game away until April 1 at 6 a.m. PT/9 a.m. ET; just pop over to GOG's front page, scroll down until you see the big green "Claim Game" button, and click it. That's it. That's it, it's yours.

The new version of XIII stinks, but GOG's original has an overall user rating of 4.2/5: not pure gold, but still very well liked. The comic-like visuals with onomatopoeic effects are a big selling point, but the celebrity voice acting is also interesting: David Duchovny's indifference to the whole thing is particularly amusing in hindsight, and Adam West delivers his usual over-the-top performance.

The giveaway comes in the midst of GOG's ongoing spring sale, offering discounts of up to 92% on over 3000 games, including Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (20% off), Metro Exodus Gold Edition" (70% off), "Everspace 2" (10% off), and "XCOM 2" (92% off) are among the more than 3000 games discounted.

By the way, work on the XIII remake continues. The latest patch, which was released last week, includes numerous changes to weapons, animations, gameplay, and the UI.