Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Review

The lighting is superb

What both games have in spades is a sense that you're not just playing through another FPS. Escape from Butcher Bay in particular often feels like an action-heavy RPG, with numerous side-missions needing to be completed in order to progress through the main story. Even five years after its original release there's very little that comes close to offering the same experience, which has perhaps got even better with age.

Starbreeze really knows how to create characters, as it showed most recently with The Darkness, and both these games feature the same high quality acting. While the lip-syncing in Butcher Bay isn't as impressive as that in Dark Athena, the prison is entirely believable and the characters good enough to be placed straight in a movie. One sequence in Dark Athena rides high above all the others though, with a series of conversations that demonstrates just how far behind a lot of other game developers are.

Back in 2004 part of Escape from Butcher Bay's appeal stemmed from its astonishing visuals, and it's fair to say that the two games don't have nearly the same impact today. If you've played the original Xbox and PC versions you'll likely think little has changed, but going back reveals that the graphics have been given a definite boost. Lighting is much improved thanks to more natural colours, character models are more detailed, everything is in HD (the original Xbox game suffered from a rather soft image) and the frame rate holds steady for the most part. Dark Athena does seem to have benefited from being developed from scratch on the new engine rather than being ported over, but Butcher Bay certainly isn't a slouch compared to today's biggest titles.

It's hard to criticise a game so lovingly created as this, but there are a few little blemishes and the odd major bug. During our time playing through the two games we encountered minor problems, like Riddick performing finishing moves on thin air (after an enemy had already fallen to the ground), an objective that couldn't be completed without a checkpoint restart (a drone with a gun we needed died and fell through a window, and we couldn't follow) and the odd object that needed to be climbed but the game wouldn't allow. More worryingly, at one point the game auto-saved as Riddick was falling to his death, meaning we had to exit the game completely and load an older checkpoint in order to get out of an endless loop of death.

Stealth kills are the way to go

Other problems will vary in severity from person to person, but we're not great fans of the repeatedly used large drone in Dark Athena (bullet sponge doesn't really do it justice), and one on-rails elevator section was so blood boilingly difficult that, after the entire office had a stab at it, we had to shamefully lower the difficulty in order to proceed. As we said, these issues will likely be more troublesome for some than others, and many of the bugs may well be freakish one-time occurrences, but they blight an otherwise extremely polished game.

Having listened to fans who demanded multiplayer, Starbreeze has delivered but we're not sure if it's enough to tempt away CoD, Halo and Killzone players. Team and standard Deathmatch modes are on offer, but more exciting are those which make the most of Riddick. Pitch Black, for example, casts one player as Riddick, complete with his Eye Shine night vision, while the others try to take him out. It's easier said than done in the dark, where Riddick has a very big advantage. To make things even more interesting, the weapons with the best torches are the weakest, so there's a heavy dose of strategy here that is missing in the standard game modes. Our time with multiplayer has been extremely limited, with enjoyment varying wildly from game to game. With a strong user-base a few of the more original game modes might prove to be worth repeated visits, but we can't see many people choosing this over the already popular multiplayer shooters.

With two great games that will take somewhere in the region of 15-20 hours to complete, superb presentation and a sense that you're playing something different to the norm, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena comes highly recommended. If it weren't for a few unfortunate bugs and the odd strange design decision that score below this paragraph might even have been a notch higher.