Vin Diesel is in the midst of the safest comeback attempt I’ve seen in a long time, in that it appears that he’s revisiting every property he’s ever seen any success in. First he reprised his role in the latest Fast and the Furious movie, alongside most of the original cast in a movie that was all too identical to all movies Fast and Furious before it. And now we revisit the Riddick character in his only multimedia release that ever garnered any form of acclaim; the video game The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. All we need now is a sequel to The Pacifier and the comeback will be complete.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena consists of both a visual remastering of Escape from Butcher Bay  and a brand new campaign. Here, Vin Diesel contributes his vocal growlings to Riddick, a space-warrior-being-thingy equivalent to the exact same character Vin Diesel plays in all his movies. A no-sleeves, buffed up would-be badass who is only capable of speaking in metaphors, proverbs, personifications, ironic statements, death threats and other lines that you’d expect from a self-absorbed action movie star after killing a henchman. Can you imagine what the dinner table at the Diesel household must be like?

For those of you unfamiliar with Escape from Butcher Bay, the game begins with Riddick being transported by a mercenary named Johns to Butcher Bay, a large prison. Riddick must then make his escape, but finds it rather difficult and must later forge an alliance with Johns who has been screwed over by the warden on his reward to make his escape. Alone, Escape from Butcher Bay is a masterpiece in video game writing and is only enhanced by the new addition to the storyline.

Assault on Dark Athena aims to pick up the story not too long after the events of Butcher Bay. You are now travelling with Johns yet again, and while in cryo-sleep your ship is boarded by the Dark Athena, a mercenary ship. Riddick’s cryo-chamber alerts him of the disturbance and he is able to hide while Johns is captured by Revas, the ship’s captain and a generally mean-spirited woman who doesn’t care who she hurts in getting her way. Riddick stows away aboard the Dark Athena in an attempt to rescue Johns but soon learns that the Dark Athena isn’t just any other Mercenary ship. The story of Dark Athena is a great follow-up to the events of Butcher Bay even though there are many holes in the plot that will leave you wanting more toward the end of the game; I can only hope that this leaves things open for another sequel.

Riddick will find himself in a variety of scenarios, whether they entail fistfighting ornery inmates, shooting guards, shooting guards with bigger guns, lurking in the shadows a lot or wondering why so many guards don’t have more lights in such poorly-lit facilities. The game flip-flops between melee combat, gunplay and stealth, sometimes in bunches and sometimes more suddenly than Vin Diesel shaves his head. None of these individual aspects are particular deep in of themselves; gunplay consists of “hide behind things and shoot the head” (in fact you won’t get ideal results for shooting anything but the head, thank you inconsistent hit-detection). Stealth is a matter of staying in shadows and avoiding bright lights. Fist fighting is two-button affair and simply asks you to time your punches right.

But the game succeeds at making each of these aspects visceral, and never leaves any one of them overexposed. The guns at least feel like the volatile instruments of death they should be. There’s an accurate sense of weight behind every punch and screwdriver stab you place at your enemy’s nose. And some great lighting and filter effects give the stealth aspects an exciting thrill. Early in the game, you develop the overexposu…I mean “eyeshine” ability that allows you to see in the dark through a funky lighting effect. The game consistently manages to find unique but semi-logical scenarios to place the player who sits (reluctantly) in Riddick’s shoes to sulk and make one  liners about.

The pacing is brisk and the game never feels tiresome. There’s almost always something new and interesting waiting for the player, be it a new portion of the jail or the chance to beat up Xzibit. Of all the voice actor choices in the game, X-to-the-Z may be the most inspiring as head guard Abbott, if only because players will be motivated to pimp his face with their scalpel. Adopting the Half-Life “one single level instead of smaller numbered stages” format also helps Escape from become the rare kind of game that you’ll want to play from beginning to end with as few breaks as physically possible in your real life. You may find yourself neglecting the need to use the restroom during play. Due to the addictive nature of the game, the five-hour length of the main campaign will fly by faster than in other games. But all things considered, it’s hard not to be happy with the experience.

For lack of a more ideal measuring stick, I’d say that is a stronger FPS than say…Killzone 2. Not quite at that level is the new campaign, Assault on Dark Athena. Here, Riddick and his heterosexual life mate Johns are kidnapped and must escape (again?) from the space station Dark Athena. Along the way, they’ll run into a terrified child, an annoying enemy merc who gets her jollies from picking on anything human, and her army of Borg soldiers. I might add that her version of the Borg inherit a British accent during the assimilation process. The characters and general plot in Dark Athena goes from tolerable to groan-driven and the great pacing was locked up and trapped in a mine, devoured by the strange alien naked bird creatures from that game. Here, certain melee and gun-based segments last for too long, and certain new gimmicks don’t fly well. The latter third of the game leans too heavily on a slow-reloading, clunky physics gun that shoots packets of…air.

There are certain segments that are about as fun as the xXx movies. For example, you don’t get a hold of your own firearms until late in the game, and in the meantime you’re asked to pick up a borg corpse and use its attached rifle. One sequence is a quintessential gun turret challenge from this scenario, except you’re on a slow-moving elevator with railings that can block your bullets, but not the enemies. A certain boss-type character will reappear frequently near the game’s end, and at one point appears three times over. For a brief sequence near the beginning of Butcher Bay, and a lengthy chunk of the end of Dark Athena, these enemy gun turrets so small that they can barely be seen by the naked eye appear, with the capability of ripping large chunks of health and bald head off of Riddick. I’m sorry Vin Diesel, I’m sorry Tigon, I’m sorry Starbreeze, I’m sorry that myself and many others don’t have the 60’ high definition television sets you clearly designed this game for and are forced to squint our eyes at the screen looking for the stray white pixel that’ll gun us to death faster than the quarter miles Vin lives his life by.

Dark Athena isn’t a terrible game, mind you. The core mechanics behind the experience are still solid by genre standards. But the difference between the game’s two campaigns was that while I was saddened to see Butcher Bay come to a conclusion, I couldn’t wait until I got Dark Athena out of my PS3.

There’s also a multiplayer deathmatch mode. I would wager they included a multiplayer mode because too many reviewers back in the day considered it a grave insult to not include another multiplayer deathmatch mode in the flooded galaxy of multiplayer deathmatch modes. (the same way many reviewers nowadays are getting into the bad habit of penalizing everything that doesn’t have a co-op mode.) The one included feels tacked on, consisting of generic multiplayer maps, generic weapons and generic modes. I couldn’t tell you how the one unique mode, “Pitch Black” (a team of flashlight-wielding soldiers in the dark against a single Riddick) plays like because nobody online was playing it. Perhaps because virtual 8-on-1 hide and seek doesn’t quite have much of a universal appeal. In fact the multiplayer here in general has little in the way of appeal it seems, as very few people are playing this game online.

With the multiplayer being a throwaway, this package is really the tale of two games. Escape from Dark Athena is frustrating, bland and would be lost in the crowded FPS shuffle if it weren’t riding on the coattails of a better game. Escape from Butcher Bay is still great, but all it gets here is a visual makeover. But the original game isn’t even five years old, so why remake it so soon? , while no longer the chromedomed gold standard for high definition graphics, still packs the same gritty, nasty, vicious punch. It’s not exactly a rarity either; you can more than likely find it sulking in the shadows of bargain bins at any store. Now, if for some reason you can’t apprehend the original game, or must absolutely play the best looking version of every single game possible, then go ahead and buy Dark Athena.

-Danny Foster

Tags: atari, dark athena, FPS, PC, PS3, review, riddick, sci-fi, starbreeze, tigon, Xbox 360

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