The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is a combination of two games – the 2004 Xbox cult classic Escape from Butcher Bay and the new added-on campaign Assault on Dark Athena. It also has a multiplayer game tagged on, which no one (quite literally) is playing. The gameplay across both the campaigns is a mixture of stealth, combat (guns and hand to hand) and some occasional puzzles. But it’s in stealth where the game is at its best. That’s not to say that the combat sections are bad; far from it – hand to hand combat is brutal and engaging and gunplay is always tense and swift. However, there is a constant feeling that whenever you move from stealth to all out war, the game is a little less fun and you are just slogging through to get to the next place where you can hide in the dark and snap someone’s neck.
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So it’s a good thing that most of the game is played in a Thief-style stealth perspective. The mechanics of it are simple; shadows and cramped spaces are good, bright and wide open areas are bad. You creep around in the darkness waiting for someone to obligingly turn their back on you and then you pounce with the melee weapon of your choice for a brutal, fast takedown. And when I say brutal, I actually mean it. There are enough people getting stabbed in the face to make it feel like God of War at times.
All of this works fairly well most of the time, but it has its flaws. For example, if you get caught, your options become limited; very limited in fact. With the game not handing you a gun to carry around, it’s usually you versus half a dozen well armed mercs. And you literally have brought a knife to a gun fight. Stealth games work as long as you have an option to fight out of a tight situation. Or a quicksave key.
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The problem here though, is compounded because the game has a rather finicky check-point save system. About 90 percent of the time it will work well, but every now and then it will decide to really screw you over. So after clearing out a tough area, you will be spotted by a lone bad guy who will start shooting at you. And the next thing you know, his friends have joined him to serve you a lead sandwich. And once you die, the game throws you back where you were 10 minutes ago. This quite frankly is inexcusable. I imagine they did away with the quicksave system that was present in Escape from Butcher Bay (PC version) to amp up the difficulty, but they might have gone overboard with it. Thanks to the finicky checkpoint system and some tough battles around the last half of each campaign, the frustration can mount up pretty fast.
Speaking of campaigns, Escape from Butcher Bay is perfectly balanced between stealth and combat. The game keeps mixing things up brilliantly to keep you entertained. Just when you think the tension of creeping around in the dark is going over board and becoming ineffective, the game throws you into a mech suit. The feeling of invulnerability that gives you is a perfect release of the pent up tension of having to sneak around. Between all of that, every now and then the game will throw some weapons your way and turn it into a regular FPS. It even has some rather clever puzzles that add even more variety to the gameplay.
Next page: The verdict
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Sadly though, that spark is missing from Assault on Dark Athena. While the game starts off well and has a solid second act, the third is definitely the weakest of the whole game. For some strange reason, the game completely does away with the stealth mechanics and the last couple of hours are a total shooter fest. It’s a strange decision to end the game with what essentially is its weakest component. But overall, it still has enough quality to stand shoulder to shoulder with the first game. The game also has a multiplayer campaign, but as of now, there is one single server up on the internet and most of the time it’s impossible to find a game. So you might as well pretend it doesn’t exist.
I suppose at this point, I would try to sum up the story for those who care, but there isn’t a lot to it. In fact, if you know the name of the game; you know the story. In Escape from Butcher Bay, Riddick tries to escape from Butcher Bay. In Assault on Dark Athena, he leads a one man assault on a ship called Dark Athena. I guess Dark Athena has more of a stab at writing a story than Butcher Bay did. The ship is looting native colonies on local planets, turning their inhabitants into mindless slave drones and Riddick runs across some fairly interesting characters. But all in all, there is nothing special in the story or the writing to stand out, aside from the aforementioned one-liners.
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Visually, the game is quite brilliant. While Butcher Bay, being a remake, may not be a technical marvel, it has amazing art design and superb atmosphere. Assault on Dark Athena, on the other hand, is as good looking a game (technically and artistically) as I have played this year. The level of detail in both the games is quite superb. The walls of the prison are specked with dry blood and graffiti. It looks and feels like a hopelessly depressing place. Athena too looks and feels like an actual spaceship (or at least how you would imagine a futuristic spaceship would be). The drones on Athena have an eerie way of moving that makes them come alive. When you hit someone, you see the impact your punch/stab left on their face and Riddick’s hands get dotted with blood after a vicious fight. All in all, the game does what many better looking games have failed to do; it convinces you that these places exist and that you as a player are actually in them.
Things are excellent on the sound front as well. While the lip syncing might be a bit off, the voice-overs are superb through and through. It might not have a lot of big names in the cast list of voice actors, but everyone in it does an excellent job, including Vin Diesel himself. The music is well implemented. The musical score rises when you are in a pitched battle and fades away when you are hiding in the dark. The game is a good example of everything done right on the sound side of things.
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Technically, the game is fairly well optimized. I ran it at 1400 x 900 with everything on high at a smooth frame rate on an 8800GTS. And while I ran into one or two AI glitches, where the AI got stuck in the scenery, it was pretty stable and bug-free the rest of the time. I do have some complaints about the user interface. The game uses a circular weapon selection menu; console players of Unreal Tournament 3 will know what I am talking about, but the problem is we are on a PC and we don’t really need that. And while the game lets you hotkey weapons to the keyboard like most FPSs, it rather strangely limits this to two weapons. All of this in a game where you can carry about 7 different weapons at times. Oh and for those of you who are wondering, the game supports the Xbox 360 controller as well.
Lastly, a word needs to be added about the horrible DRM this game has. It has an install limit of three activations, which is simply unforgivable. While others like EA are starting to move in a DRM-free environment for PC gamers, Atari think its fine to limit the game to three installs. So let’s say you install it once on your PC, lend it to a friend and then your PC crashes so you reformat the system and reinstall the game. Now if you want to play the game again in six months or so, you are just out of luck. It will not run. How can any company think that it’s alright to treat a paying customer like this is beyond me.
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Conclusion
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is very good game that is constantly on the edge of being a great game, but it keeps clawing its way back into the good territory so hard you could swear Starbreeze have performance anxiety. As it stands, it’s highly recommended. With two highly entertaining campaigns lasting a total of 14 hours, you are guaranteed good value for money.
(+) Brilliantly atmosphere
(+) Superb voice-overs
(+) Varied gameplay
(+) Good stealth mechanics
(-) Weak shooter bits
(-) Horrible DRM
(-) Some tardy save mechanics
Title: The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
Developer/Publisher: Starbreeze/Atari
Genre: First-Person Action
Rating: 16+
Platforms: PC (Rs 999), PlayStation 3 (Rs 2,499), Xbox 360 (not released in India)
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