Xbox 360 Review: The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

When The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay first hit the original Xbox, gamers rejoiced at the well thought out blend of stealth game play along with your classic shooting arsenal and melee attacks. The game was only enhanced by stellar graphics that pushed the envelope on lighting and shading for last generation consoles. But, what really made Butcher Bay stand out from the crowd was the fact that it was a movie adapted console release. Excellent movie based games are diamonds in the rough. Usually gaming companies force these titles out with release schedules that don’t allow for adequate development and testing. Butcher Bay bucked the trend and gave console fans a title that to this day is still remembered.

Butcher Bay was so good, that it was only a matter of time before a sequel was released. Enter The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Before you jump up and yell for joy let me warn you: Assault on Dark Athena on the Xbox 360 is not what Butcher Bay was to the original Xbox. It is actually far from it. However, where Dark Athena comes up short, it more than makes up for in the hands of gamers unfamiliar with Butcher Bay. Why? Because Dark Athena comes packaged with an upgraded High Def Butcher Bay.

Despite some archaic clunky gameplay this Butcher Bay release is a definite must have for players new to Riddick. The upgraded Butcher Bay also features a few sequences that were limited to the original PC release. You star the game as the criminal Richard B. Riddick trying to escape from Butcher Bay. You’ll have to make your way through various inmates who present side missions for you or just want to try their hand at gutting you. It’s all a lot of fun. You get to sneak around and deliver a covert assassination, or just go all out with a fist or knife battle. The Voice Over acting is exceptional, and probably ranks somewhere in the best acted game scripts ever. The game is well paced for the most part, and you feel a steady build towards the end.

Assault on Dark Athena, by contrast, feels like a poorly slapped together game that spoofs its predecessor. Before I go into the negatives, I’ll just say the Voice Over acting provided by Vin Diesel and his supporting cast is still amazing. Also, the movements and graphics all have rich visual feel you’ve come to expect in a next-gen console. However, the game suffers on multiple fronts.

For starters, the gameplay is filled with tons of monotonous backtracking. As you conduct side missions from various inmates, there’s a lot of this, you’ll have to continue going back over ground you previously covered. Despite Riddick’s terse remarks and apparent tough-guy exterior, he ends up feeling like a servant or a dog playing fetch. This isn’t only annoying, but it severely takes away from the pacing of Dark Athena.

The sequel also suffers from the occasional texture pop, as well as several collision detection flaws. You’ll see your hand go through objects that by all appearances look to be solid.

There are a few scenes in Riddick that just seem forcefully tossed in to frustrate gamers. The first is an annoying scene where you have to scale a wall of large shipping crates while avoiding a searchlight. If you are caught in the searchlight, a guard on the opposite end of the board will begin firing at you. I’ll warn you right now, if you’re not doing this on Easy difficulty, you are in for the longest and worst section of gameplay ever. For one, the searchlight moves in such quick intervals that you’ll get impatient and want to just start climbing up the wall. Secondly, sometimes you have to grab on the side of a crate and move hand-over-hand to another crate. By the time you’re at the next crate expect the guard to be firing. Next, the lighting here is so bad that for a while you’ll wonder just where the heck you are going. I could go on and on, but suffice to say that you’ll find yourself in a sad mood after playing this board.

Whereas in the original Chronicles of Riddick, you were able to decide between how you would take out your opponent, Dark Athena forces you to use into a very rigid gaming structure. You’ll have to stealth kill first, then shoot, then go on to knife fighting, and back to stealth kill. What ends up happening is the game loses fluidity and instead of ending up the neat blend of shooting and stealth of shooting in Butcher Bay, you have a pretty chopped up gaming system that begs constantly keeps you off-balanced.

On a positive note, I’ve got to say that the AI surprised me. Usually in stealth games after you kill someone and their comrades go into a flurry, you can just backpedal and wait for them to forget you ever existed – even though the body is right next to them. In Dark Athena, the guards waited quietly in the corner and made me think everything was honky dory before popping out to blast me.

Buying The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is more like buying an enhanced Butcher Bay, and then entertaining the idea of playing the sequel. For the price, it’s still a good buy for players new to Riddick because gamers will get two games for the price of one. But, if you played Butcher Bay before you may want to just rent out Dark Athena. It doesn’t hold up to its predecessor and butcher’s the Butcher Bay legacy.