The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena [PC]

16 Apr 2009 at 15:10:19 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

It astonished me how bad Chronicles of Riddick was, considering how good Escape from Butcher Bay was. Butcher Bay was one of those extraordinarily rare occasions in which the game not only surpassed the movie it was related to, but actually turned out to be one of the best games of the year.

Assault on Dark Athena is very much Escape from Butcher Bay 1.5. For the asking price, you get not only a whole new campaign, Assault on Dark Athena, but also its predecessor, made prettier through the advances in technology since 2004. And you know what? It looks good.

Escape from Butcher Bay is, weirdly, the highlight of the package. The five-year old game is incredibly well made, striking a balance between fast-paced action and stealth gameplay. One of the unique aspects was the use of side-missions through hub areas as you progress through the game, in a manner reminiscent of Deus Ex, and this still holds up as a novel mechanic in a linear first-person game even today.

Of course, as it hasn't been changed, past issues remain. The game is still bound to the memory issues of the original Xbox, meaning that some areas are needlessly broken up into smaller sections. The hub area around the middle of the game is split into three sections, and requires a lot of back-and-forthing, meaning you're going to be hit with regular loading times. On today's sentient supercomputers, these loading times aren't as bad as they used to be, but they remain an annoyance.

But it's the new stuff you're interested in. Assault on Dark Athena is the pseudo-sequel that picks up where Escape from Butcher Bay left off. While flying away from the prison planet, Riddick's escape ship is picked up by the Dark Athena, a huge craft run by a group of rather nasty pirate-mercenary types. Once again, Riddick has to escape.

The characterisations are brilliant. Riddick is perfect, as always, with plenty of excellently delivered macho-man lines, and all of the main and incidental characters have solid dialogue and superb voice acting. From Revas, the cruel and vaguely sado-masochistic captain of the ship, down to imprisoned ex-soldier Dacher, the characters are extremely well-rounded. Even the random enemies have some fantastic lines, and I was still hearing plenty of new material at the end of the adventure. One hilariously threatened to “rip [my] nipples off,” which makes me wonder if someone on the dev team is a Warren Ellis fan.

However, the gameplay doesn't fare quite so well. Everything is present and correct – you've got stealth sections, melee combat bits, and pitched firefights – but they don't feel quite as organic as in Butcher Bay. Each section seems more broken up and focused on whatever it's attempting to do; if a section has almost no dark areas then you're in for a shooting spree.  This was certainly true in Butcher Bay, on occasion, but you were also frequently free to decide if you wanted to sneak around a set of guards or blow them apart, and you’re rarely given this option in Dark Athena.

Gun battles are a mix. Bullets aren't instant-hit in the Riddick universe, so leading your target is an important skill. As in Butcher Bay, most of the guns you'll be using are stupendously inaccurate with both the assault rifle and SMG shooting far wide of wherever you aim, but this isn't a game about sniping your targets from a distance – it's about getting up close and personal. Slightly more irritating is that the enemies towards the end of Dark Athena will keep coming even after a full clip of ammunition. In some later sections - which are designed as shooting sections, with no real way to use stealth and shadows - it sometimes feels more like luck as to whether you pass a section or not based on how many of your shots go far wide of the mark. Considering that I only spotted one health upgrade in the entirety of Dark Athena, maxing out Riddick's health at five bars, it's all too easy to lose most of this in a single battle against seemingly unstoppable enemies.

All ...

Comment