The Chronicles of Riddick is kind of a weird Sci-Fi franchise. It launched in 2000 with the stand-alone movie Pitch Black. The 2004 sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick is where we began to see the grand plan, this huge multimedia expansion of the now-a-franchise Riddick. This expansion saw an animated movie, comic books, and - more importantly – a videogame.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay was a genuine surprise, a movie-based game that didn’t blow great big chunks. Starbreeze struck gold, Butcher Bay was better than nearly every other first-person shooter in a year full of shooters. Assault on Dark Athena is also a bit of a surprise, an Orange Box-esque package containing both a sequel and a remake. The important question is - will lightning (and Riddick) strike twice for Starbreeze? Will Dark Athena turn the genre on its head like the first game did?

Assault picks up moments after the end of Butcher Bay, with the ship carrying Riddick being captured by the massive Dark Athena (see the title). The mercenaries aboard Athena didn’t quite realize what they were getting into. Riddick, the notorious serial killer that he is, used the confusion to slip away. Now he will have to fight and sneak his way through a gargantuan spaceship full of people who would love to kill him. Just another day in the life of Riddick, eh?

Ah hell, the story isn’t all that important. It’s basically an excuse for Riddick to run around stabbing people in dark rooms. What the story does is provide a logical setting for the gameplay, and that gameplay is the real star of the show. I had never played the original Butcher Bay, so I was actually surprised by the sheer depth of Dark Athena. Sometimes, you’ll be sneaking, sometimes you’ll be shooting, and the game feels both challenging and rewarding at all of those times.

Riddick is actually one of the few games where I genuinely enjoyed the stealth gameplay. Let’s be honest here, I’m an impatient gamer. I can get into slower-paced games, but I need something to keep my mind going. Games where you just sit there, crouched, waiting for a guard to cross your path just aren’t my thing. In Dark Athena, you’re never really just waiting there. You need to find a path through the darkness that puts you right behind a guard, and then you can take them down brutally and silently. It may sound a little sociopathic of me, but there is a bit of thrill in the hunt. Riddick’s heavy use of melee weapons is part of that thrill. Even when a mercenary catches you, the hand-to-hand combat is challenging and rewarding. The enemy AI follows certain patterns, and figuring out those patterns is the key to surviving.

Unfortunately, the shooting-heavy portions of Dark Athena are a little more annoying. More unfortunately, the final third of the game is entirely shooting. Most of the game is challenging in that fun sort of way. It’s exciting and it makes you think. However, the pure shooter parts of Dark Athena step over the line from challenging to frustrating. Your enemies seem to be able to shoot with superhuman precision, and you don’t exactly have a ton of health. With no health regeneration and healing stations few and far between, you’ll spend large chunks of the second half of Dark Athena with a single block of health. That isn’t a fun challenge, it’s just brutal.

Visually and audibly, Riddick is a stunning game. With the titular character’s ability to see in the dark, you’d expect the developers to do some cool things with the lighting, and they absolutely do. I haven’t seen a game with a better use of shadows. Another thing that the developers excel at is the facial animation. My favorite part of Dark Athena is the section where you meet the prisoners because they are such powerful and convincing characters. The facial animations actually convey emotion and they do a decent job of lip-syncing with the dialogue.

Speaking of dialogue, Riddick has some of the best voice acting that I’ve ever heard in a game. Voice actors are typically an afterthought, so I have to give props to any team that actually hires actual talented actors rather than the random guy that works in the mail room. The characters in Riddick deliver an impeccable performance and they actually bring their characters to life. Honestly, Vin Diesel was the worst actor in the game, and it’s his own game! The other aspects of the sound design in Riddick are just as well designed. This is one of those games where you really want a decent surround-sound system. After all, you’d probably want to hear someone walking up behind you while you sneak around in the dark. The audio mix is well-designed and completely ups the immersion factor.

While this review is mainly meant to address the new content, Butcher Bay remains the real centerpiece of this package. Actually, when Dark Athena was announced, it was only announced as a remake of the original. This should convey the fact that the remake of Butcher Bay is not a lazy port. It isn’t the original game with the resolution bumped up. Although there isn’t any new content in Butcher Bay itself, Starbreeze has completely remade the game with the new graphics engine.

If you’ve never played the original (like me), you’re in for an awesome treat. I enjoyed Dark Athena, but Butcher Bay blows it out of the water. The gameplay is just as fun and visceral, but it never gets as frustrating as the shooter portions of Athena. Butcher Bay is also not quite as linear as the sequel. You have a little more freedom to take on side-missions and explore the massive space prison.

If you’re a fan of shooters or of stealth games, I can’t recommend Chronicles of Riddick enough. Ignore the movie-to-game stigma, Starbreeze has constructed a couple of games that are not only good shooters, but completely surpass their original movies. Even if you have played the original Butcher Bay, it may be worth grabbing this to check out the remake and the new Dark Athena chronicle.

Positives: Great gameplay, animation, voice acting. Well-done remake of the first game.
Negatives: Frustrating shooting sequences.

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