Review | The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
Format: Xbox360, PS3, PC | Genre: FPS | Publisher: Atari | Developer: Starbreeze Studios | Out now: £34.99 - £49.99
By Greg Giddens
I sat is the dark, cold corridor, sharpening my knife and stalking my prey. I felt nothing. No fear, no adrenaline, nothing but calm - the benefits of experience and being a misanthrope. I slowly approached my target; his back turned, I readied my knife and prepared to go for the throat. “Steal my last beer, you son of a bitch…”
After hospitalising my friend, I felt a strange urge to continue stabbing people, so loaded up Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.
From a quick pre-release play, I wasn’t sure how well I was going to get along with Assault on Dark Athena, the sequel to 2004’s Escape from Butcher Bay. But my worries were quickly laid to rest, much like my friend, within minutes of playing. This is a game with a unique quality and style, and one that proves to be very enjoyable indeed.
//Judging a book by its cover
It’s immediately impressive. Dark Athena looks fantastic, with superb facial animation and brilliant lighting and textures that provide a dark and eerie atmosphere to the environments. It’s one of the few games that can get away with using so much darkness, thanks to Riddick’s see-in-the-dark Eye Shine ability the heavily stealth-based gameplay. To further add to the immersion is some great voice acting by all involved, where each character has a personality and presence. They’re convincing in conversation - they won’t just freeze up and stare at you; instead they will pace around or look over their shoulders, making each and every character a more tangible element of the game. The only criticism with the voice acting lies with the main star of the game. Vin Diesel’s character is somewhat emotionless, and although this suits the bloodthirsty killer Riddick is, it’s lacking in the personality others exude. In comparison to Escape from Butcher Bay, which is also included in the Assault on Dark Athena package, the difference in the lead performance is certainly noticeable.
Speaking of more tangible elements, the combat in Dark Athena is brilliantly brutal, intimate and real. When it comes to close-quarters combat, Riddick takes no prisoners and - sometimes literally - tears his enemies apart. The problem is the execution of the melee moves. Rather than it feeling like the player is dishing out these merciless attacks, it often feels like you’re just triggering combat, passing on suggestions to Riddick, who’ll then in turn pass on the good news with whatever sharp and pointy object he has in his hands. This problem makes the combat rather sluggish, giving surrounding enemies the chance to show you what the business-end of their rifle does.
Early on, it’s problematic. At one point near the beginning, you need to pass through a room full of enemies. Creeping around only works for so long before one of the bastards spots you and calls all his mates over to the check out the dickhead who thought he could sneak through. If the combat moves were quicker and not so scripted, then fighting the enemies would feel less one-sided and maybe I would have stood a chance. But instead they ended up using my body as a handy cache for their unwanted bullets.
After a good hour or so of beating the crap out of everyone you can find, you begin to learn how to compensate for the sluggish combat. You’ll learn to take your time and plan your strikes, so the initial problem of the melee fighting certainly doesn’t compromise the gameplay too badly - and generally, if you can attack your enemies from behind, you’ll have no problem at all. Riddick can perform one of several different execution moves on an unsuspecting enemy with his back turned to you, killing his victim with extreme prejudice and violence which is, quite worryingly, very satisfying.
//Shoot-em-down
Just when you think you’ve mastered melee combat, you’ll find your first gun. Ranged combat is great. The weapons sound and look as deadly as they turn out to be, with damage received and dealt being fairly realistic, to the point where death frequently becomes inevitable. Even when you get your first gun, ammo isn’t always so readily available, so lefty and righty will still get their fair share of blood. Dark Athena attempts to combine the gameplay elements of out-and-out shooters and slower stealth games, and pulls it off convincingly, in a manner similar to Splinter Cell but without the forced stealth sections. What Dark Athena offers is a very challenging game, in which you’re offered the choice between gunplay or creeping - but the latter is obviously favoured, given the aforementioned realistic damage that will see you killed time and time again.
If the damage modelling isn’t enough of a challenge for you, then the opposition AI having magic clairvoyant skills - skills that provide them with your exact location when you try hiding after becoming involved in a firefight - certainly tips the scales in your enemies’ favour. You’re welcome to run around guns blazing, but it really is a death wish, so even though there’s the choice of gunplay over stealth, the best way to stave off death is certainly to stick to the shadows.
//Riddick-ulous
Your enemies may have magic clairvoyant skills, but you do not. Often Dark Athena will forget this and not make it remotely obvious where you need to go next or how to get there. You have a mission screen which displays your current goals, but it’s up to you to find out where to go. You’ll find no map, or arrows on your HUD; instead you need to be very aware of your surroundings and remember where different sections of the ship are. This can lead to a lot of redundant backtracking and frustration, but despite initial perceptions, the game is in fact completely linear. You’re nearly always moving forward and your next objective is usually much closer to you than you may think. On the occasions where you do need to backtrack slightly, the areas you need to access are again very close by, so paying attention is advised. When the game notices you standing around looking like an idiot, an idiot button will appear at the top right (well I say idiot button. It says actually ‘Help’ - but we all know what it really means). After pressing the idiot button, a screen will appear providing you with a clue as to what to do next - useful but embarrassing, for both the player and the level designer.
The occasion slip-up regarding objective markers aside, the areas in Dark Athena are surprisingly varied. The majority of the game is played on the Dark Athena ship, but if you expect each corridor to look the same as the previous then you’ll be pleasantly surprised. It feels like a living, breathing environment, each area with a structure and function. Further adding to the living world of Dark Athena are the impressive physics: bodies crumple when killed and boxes rolls around in explosions, but the most impressive physics element is during a section where you must move around the gravity generator of the ship. In this section, the generator will pull you towards it, dragging you and your enemies sideways. Jump too high and the gravity will grab you, and after killing an enemy, their body will gracefully float away while you grin like an idiot.
//Climb aboard
In between the stealth and FPS gameplay are lightweight platforming sections, involving climbing ladders or stacks of crates, in which the camera flicks into third-person perspective. Once Riddick has finished climbing, with no urgency, the camera will return to first-person view. There are two problems with this camera-switching. Firstly, it can confuse your sense of direction and lead to you plummeting down to where you first started climbing, and secondly it leaves you feeling seriously vulnerable to any potential enemies near by. Mostly the camera stays in first-person mode, though, and causes no problem; and the night vision ability is certainly well-implemented and makes the camera feel more like a real pair of eyes.
Although the camera-switching can prove to be perplexing, there are some very nice touches added that redeem this flaw. Later on in the game, you’ll find yourself remotely controlling Borg-like droids. When in control of these droids, the view becomes electronically fuzzy and very bionic, really giving you the feeling you’re no longer seeing the world from Riddick’s viewpoint, or even that of a human. The third-person camera issues, as with the melee combat, don’t compromise your enjoyment of the game too badly, but they do stick out in an otherwise great game, with the camera-switching feeling especially incongruous to anything.
While we’re on the topic of flaws, Dark Athena’s narrative doesn’t offer anything as epic or as compelling as some comparable titles, but what is does provide is an eight-hour scenario where you can experience what it would be like to play as the most wanted criminal in the universe. There’s no ultimate revelation, there’s no-one important to save; this is just a day in the life as Riddick. It’s still enjoyable, but it’s certainly a little shallow. The addition of Butcher Bay goes a long way to counter Dark Athena’s lacking story, having aged very well as far as gameplay and story goes; its remastered visuals don’t have the same polish as Dark Athena, but the rest of it stands up well against anything similar on the market right now.
//Remastered
Back when Butcher Bay was originally released, the only thing the game was missing was multiplayer. Dark Athena attempts to remedy that problem, but unfortunately it doesn’t produce anything groundbreaking. Multiplayer consists of the usual FPS game types, mostly in the usual style. Although we’ve seen these modes before, they certainly gel with the style of the Riddick franchise, and feel very appropriate - not to mention fun. The bottom line, however, is that regardless of the apt nature of these game modes, there’s nothing remotely unique; and, as a whole, the multiplayer feels shallow and cold, lacking the community of titles such as Halo and Call of Duty.
Even with its problems, though, Assault on Dark Athena is certainly one of the best single-player shooters to emerge so far this year. It’s atmospheric, challenging, and ultimately fun, if slightly frustrating and hampered by the lack of a compelling story. That the Dark Athena package also includes the re-mastered version of Escape From Butcher Bay further increases its appeal. You’ll be hard pressed to find another game this generation where you can have so much fun hiding in the dark.
8/10
