Chronicles of Riddick:Assault on Dark Athena(New Computer Game)

Developer : Atari

Distributor : Milestone

Platforms : Xbox 360,PS3,PS2,Pc

The disk comes with two games, Assualt on Dark Athena, and a remastered version of the 2004 game, Escape from Buther Bay as a bonus. Escape from Buther Bay is a reworked version, with better graphics . Escape from Dark Athena is a sequel the the previous game. The game throws you in a beach with industrial surroundings. The initial level is a tutorial level to learn the control of the game. When you crouch, everything turns blue, and enters a stealth mode. There is a toggle for the nightshine – Riddick’s trademark ability to see clearly in the dark, everything gets really bright and purple in this mode, and it feels great initially if you have seen wither of the movies. In the introductory level, you come across a few “drones”. These are something like remote-controlled android zombies. Nice concept for an army, only, they behave really dumb. Some of them just walk back and forth ignoring everything that you do. However, the first level sets the tone of the game, making sure that you sneak up on enemies instead o fighting them outright. You navigate across a few tunnels, and suddenly, everything goes black.

            Someone must have kidnapped you and taken you abroad the ship – called the Dark Athena. Pretty soon into the game, you receive a set of blades, which are your primary weapons fro the most of the game. For some strange reason, you are in a vent above the captain (called Revas), and you reach out and pluck out her hairpin. There is no real explanation for this action, except when you return it to her well into the game. Why this happens, or if there is any deep symbolic meaning behind this borrowing and returning a hairpin; I cannot say. The cut scenes that kick in at this point quickly become very boring and dreary. By the end of the game, it feels as if your head will explode if it hears the word “darkness” one more time. There might be a meaning to “in despair, I find opportunity”, or something like that, but it makes no sense in the game whatsoever. Riddick has a dry, monotonous, dead voice throughout the game, with none of the mischief and the dry, sarcastic humor from the movies. Vin diesel is thoroughly and completely wasted as a voice actor in this one. You don’t need a dark and brooding voice to say “tell me hoe to open the cells”, that’s just overkill.

The gameplay however, quickly gets to you. Despite all the drones with rotten AI, sneaking up to them and finishing them off with the blades is a pleasure. At least for the first third of the game, you get no real guns, only a tranquilizer dart gun.  You have to navigate through the ship till you come across a kind of prison, where the captain and her mercenaries have kept a number of captives. This is where the game amps up a bit. The voice acting of all the characters is amazing, and they really rile you up to go ahead with the game. For the next couple of hours, the gameplay takes you in circles as you backtrack from section to section trying to get together parts, and opening sections and crawling through walkways. I honestly don’t know why all FPS makes you crawl through all narrow vents. We also don’t know why they have huge fans in bottomless pits. You have to navigate these, and other obstacles, such a giant spotlight that does not really try to spot anyone, but just goes back and forth. The games gets frustrating around this poit because your objectives tell you very little about what you need to do or where you have to go. There is a lot of blind exploration before you find the right way out, which has its own delights.

            Eventually, you will free all the prisoners, and that’s when hell breaks loose. The mercs go berserk, but you get an unbelievable weapon in your hands. It’s like playing a video game within a video game. You get control o one of the drones! You charge in through the mercs with your guns blazing, and the pleasure of holding and controlling a gun about a halfway into the game hits you like a tidal wave. In a short span of time, it gets even better; you get to control a full-blown mech. These are one of theose huge giant robots with huge machineguns and rocket launchers. Unfortunately, for all the power, the mechs seems to be low on ammo almost all the time, so you have to re-supply yourself at stations dedicated to the job. You also fight other mechs at this point.

            After a little bit of that, you finally kill the Revas, take an escape pod a-la R2D2 and shoot out from ship. Just when you think you have escaped, Revas suddenly wakes up again, and shoots you down. You crash land into the planet nearby the merc ship. You find yourself on the beach you began the game with, and this time around, you actually look at the planet around you. You do a littile more of drone killing. You find out that the merc ship is “harvesting” drones by killing people on the planet, and converting them into the killer android zombies. Eventually, you work your way back to the ship, controlling a boss drone, in an attempt to take down Revas and the mercs.

            The game gives a good half life a day of gameplay, if you keep at it. Some of the sections might be irritating, as there is no way to know where you have to go or what to do next. The light shine aspect of the game is totally wasted, used only to navigate in dark tunnels and the vents are too common in the first person shooters. You imagine that the light shine can be used to spot and kill enemies in the dark, but there is no such luck – it’s just another sneak mode. A lot of game play involves moving back and forth over the same sections, which makes easy for player to give up.

            The music is great, and sets the right tome for the gameplay. The game looks good with all the setting maxed out, look pretty even with all setting on minimum. However there is nothing extraordinary about the game, and does not look out that has come out in the last year. The game feels dated, by a factor of half a decade. While not being a bad game as such, it broaches no new ground as so many games of today are doing. This one is only for the die hard fans