The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena review (2009)

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena review - PC Gamer issue #200 (UK, May 2009)

Around about the time that I was stamping three guards to death, I realised that I was the monster in Riddick. Is it any wonder that the fourth guard who blundered into that scenario, who saw his colleagues on the ground in foetal positions, faces sticking to my boot heels, attempted to shoot me?

You are the creature in the dark, sliding out from the shadows to snap and pummel, maim and otherwise reduce the general population of mindless drone guards. In any other game, you'd be hunting, well, you.

Riddick's story is split over two games, the first a remake of the 2004's melee-focused FPS Escape from Butcher Bay, the second, set on the ship the Dark Athena, taking up the story after Riddick’s escape. It continues the good work of the original, melding some adult themes and dark characters with an interesting 'hero'.

In both games Riddick is feared and revered by the scum he encounters. Prisoners and mercenaries respect violence, and as Riddick there's ample opportunity to practise the art. The mechanics haven't evolved much since 2004: Riddick can use his fists, shivs, bats and eventually guns to slaughter his foes. The melee system gives you four strikes with every weapon, using the WASD keys to move before tapping the left mouse to execute—so to speak—and the right mouse to block. It's all in the timing: controlling the flow of a fight gives much more satisfying and devastating results than spamming the mouse button. Tap your attack as the enemy moves in, and you're rewarded with an awful, hideous death animation. You'll see screwdrivers slide easily into armpits, knives popping eyeballs, and if you block a gun melee attack, Riddick will twist the gun under the attacker's jaw and perform a skillful lobotomy.

Shadows hide Riddick and his crimes. It's particularly relevant in Dark Athena, where the entire ship is stitched together from fluorescent lights and slanted shadows. Riddick has two main advantages in the dark: he can see while his enemies need flashlights, and sneaking up enables instant kills.

There are a few flavours of guard: meaty humans, self-controlled drones, and remote-controlled drones that can track you down with flashlights, but revert to the autonomous type when the link is severed by your attack. In open areas, populated by roaming guards, the dark is useful for reducing the chance of your discovery: the AI guards are stupid and bloody-minded, wheeling around in prescribed patterns until you pique their interest. If you lure them into the shadows, you'll have a chance to swiftly dispatch whoever blunders into your trap.

In both games, Riddick is involved in an elaborate escape attempt. As his impact on Butcher Bay and Dark Athena becomes more of a problem, the response escalates. There's a tipping point in each where the games swap from being a stealth bludgeoner to something more like a traditional shooter. In both, aside from the usual shotguns and assault rifles, you're provided with a tranquilliser gun that enables you to knock people out or sever the remote- controlled drones' connection.

But most fun is Dark Athena's Scar gun, which fires remotely detonated sticky explosives. You can line up five for bossfights and fun times. As you gain different tools, the environments evolve to accommodate. Later levels in Dark Athena are a mixed bag: ingenious locations such as the ship's gravity core where the reward for offing the guards is to see them scooped away by the core, or slightly dull ones, following your escape from the ship where you're dropped onto a planet. Whenever the game places you in shooting galleries, such as you'll find more of in the second half of Dark Athena, it tends to place you in levels and scenarios you’d expect to find in other, lesser games. The boss fights, in particular, are tedious numbered attack scenarios.

Their tedium highlights the largest flaw of both games: the checkpointing. There's no quicksave, instead the game decides when to save your progress. On more than one occasion it did so when I was in a dire situation with just a sliver of health, leading to continual restarts as I died over and over again. True, it forced me to improvise, but this is still an appalling decision by Starbreeze.

Off-putting though this was, I kept returning to the game. Riddick is adult, funny and too much fun to keep me away.