I review The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

Video portion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a_vmMJ2wXg
It is told nearly verbatim so you won't lose anything watching it instead of reading it.

I've only watched, what, the first twenty minutes of Pitch Black before being pulled away by some chore? Therefore, I'm very neutral to the Chronicles of Riddick film series almost entirely. I forgot to watch the rest of it on this DVD I have lying around. Who knows, maybe I'll do that some time soon. Maybe I'll forget about it entirely. However, I have played both of the Chronicles of Riddick games fully and know a bit about the franchise's story along with some help of Wikipedia, of course.

Apparently, unlike most other film or television franchise-based games, the stories of these are part of the authentic Chronicles, so what story there is will probably be more exciting to fans. All I really care about is that Richard B. Riddick is a total badass. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena is actually a package of games, specifically a graphically reworked edition of the previous entry in the series, Escape From Butcher Bay, and the titular sequel. This review will be specifically on said titular sequel. If you need a review of Escape From Butcher Bay, I suggest you watch the antisocialfatman's review contained in this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Ho0KLnqV0 It basically describes my feelings of the game to a T. If you're too lazy to watch, I would just like to tell you that it is an absolutely amazing stealth game with tons of variety found in other genres sprinkled on top that anyone who wants to look totally cool amongst their friends and break out of prison with an assortment of sharp objects should play.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same for Dark Athena. It is much more reminiscent of an expansion pack for the original made by a newer developer trying to make its way up by working on other people's franchises, but alas, this is Starbreeze, the same group of people who made the previous masterpiece that is Butcher Bay.

There are some truly amazing parts of Dark Athena, and I mean amazing, underlined, bold, and italicized. However, the problem is that these amazing aspects used in the game are just quite simply marred by total piss. It's not like it's an amazing game with one poor, incredibly frustrating level thrown in. It's all these neat things being mixed with just plain awful design choices.

For instance, there is still what can be technically described as stealth gameplay strewn throughout, but it nearly always falls flat on its face, and then its butt. Enemies are usually far too thick or far too omniscient to make me feel like I'm being stealthy. There are times when I use a stun pistol to try to take out groups of enemies from afar before they can run up to me and give me a harsh beating. But hey! They don't even notice that their friends are being tasered. Other times, I try sneaking up on someone. I'm not making any noise at all and I am by no means in any sort of field of view of his, but he instantly sees me through the eyes in the back of his head. There are some amazing segments, such as when I had to sneak past two bad dudes in large guard suits, platform my way up to a control room, and launch them out into space, but no matter what, I found out that there is light cast upon me right when I enter the room, and if I try to take it out, they begin to search for who did it, and apparently have night vision, despite me not having it when I commandeer a suit earlier in the game.

The same fifty-fifty quality goes for other parts of the game, too. The ulaks, two curved blades built by caring hands for the cleanest slice of a throat, are the video game industry's greatest melee weapon accomplishment, but there are various high-ranking people you have to kill who all tend to have blade repellent all over their clothes, making the entire effect like shooting peas at your enemy.

Bullets also seem to be somewhat lacking in the qualities of being bullets, often not killing things fast enough and getting to where their original target was after he has already moved halfway across the room. This often means you have to fire at someone going out of cover instantly or else barely anything will hit him.

As for the pros of the ranged weapons in the game, about two thirds of the way through the game, a gun named the SCAR is introduced. It is not, in fact, a modern day assault rifle of the same name, but rather a remotely detonated sticky bomb launcher, and not only does using it on regular enemies feel really cool, but the bombs are really shiny, if that sense of weapon style matters to you. However, there are some, you guessed it, gigantic cons. At the same point in the game, the video game industry's worst enemy accomplishment is introduced. It is this little spider thing that crawls along the walls with a ridiculous field of view and expert marksmanship that takes away more health than any other enemy introduced before. It is also not very loud. When not being awesome, the SCAR is specifically designed to kill these pests as well as complete cheesy physics puzzles as well as kill a boss.

Said boss leads into another problem: the manner in which the game handles repetition. This happens to be in the worst possible way, actually, because it repeats the bad sections mostly, and what is not originally bad ends up becoming a mundane task. The Dark Athena is a pirate ship, taken over by some vagrant found on the side of the road, and she takes over the place and uses its dead crew and some bodies from colonies she milked dry as AI drones, making up the cannon fodder for the game. This is all well and good, but there apparently seems to be an abundance in dead members of some sort of species of Colossus lying around, because about three quarters of the way through you're forced to fight giant drone after giant drone after giant drone, and they can only be killed if a whole magazine of SCAR rounds is detonated on them simultaneously, which is a recipe for very watery vanilla pudding.

Considering the large amount of repetition and not enough good stuff actually being prominent in the game, it occurs to me that the problem behind all of this is that there is just not enough stuff happening. Take, for instance, the roleplaying element, and compare it to that of Escape From Butcher Bay. In Butcher Bay, the level design was built around a bunch of large hubs, full of inmates who needed a fix of their smack or a shiv, and even a pair of glasses, and all of the things you had to do for them were enthralling in one manner or another. There was also a currency system that could be used sometimes for things such as health or, if recent memory serves, bonus items, et cetera and it could be earned by performing tasks for people or getting into awesome fights. In Assault on Dark Athena, all you have is one measly cell block where people tell you what to do in order to continue the plot. They may have dug into their "content" budget after depleting their "fantastic visual effects, acting, and motion capture" budget.

One major highlight that I have to definitely give kudos to the game for is something you would least expect in a video game about a badass picking off guards one at a time and farting one-liners. The game has a very nicely done child sidekick. She is not annoying at all and plays a major role in the plot rather than an escort mission dispenser, and even I, being not afraid of the Silentest of Hills, being not disturbed in the slightest by the goriest of gore, really felt sorry for her as the tides of the story swept here away into a sea of sewer liquid.

Briefly touched upon earlier was the game's esthetic qualities, which I must also very much congratulate for having the best high dynamic range technology ever and having the best 3D animations ever seen in a video game. The thing is that most games are either cinematic in a way, or compelling in a way, filling up one glass but leaving the other empty. Even while the game itself looks fantastic during actual gameplay, it is overall compellingly cinematic. It's not just a Mass Effect with fancy camera angles and all the personality of a steel corridor, and it's not the grandiosity and emotion of Prey without any fancy camera angles. It has the best of both worlds. A cinematic game can be excused from video game hell if there are most parts of two things completed: the cinematic quality doesn't interfere with gameplay, and the cinematic quality is as well done as it is in Assault on Dark Athena. Assault on Dark Athena does arguably at least one of these, and I'm willing to vouch for it successfully working both tasks. It kept me wanting to go onward whenever I encountered a setpiece, whatever anyone's definition of one may be.

What this boils down to is that regardless of what negatives I've given to the audience, there is some good if you look long and hard enough. I'm exaggerating. There are definitely fantastic parts that anyone will love. And if the titular campaign is not enough for you, you will always have a copy of the original Escape from Butcher Bay for you to play in a remastered bit of glorious high definition.