The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

The chimera-like nature of this game makes it a difficult one to assign a numeric rating. On one hand, we have Butcher Bay, arguably one of the best looking and playing games of the Xbox generation and definitely the best game ever released based on a movie license. On the other hand is Dark Athena. Although touted as a full blown follow up of equal length (though not a sequel), it ends up playing as little more than a glorified and terribly drawn out expansion pack that offers plenty of potential but never reaches the heights of its predecessor.

Butcher Bay is as stunning now as it was in 2005. It tells the story of Richard B. Riddick (of ‘Pitch Black’ fame and ‘Chronicles of Riddick’ infamy) as he attempts to escape from a futuristic prison, with everything revamped in shiny new High Definition. Updated visuals include motion blur, depth of field and higher resolution everything. The animations and lip synching are the same as the original, which can look at odds with the spectacular character models, but overall I barely noticed. Even better is the retrofitting of Dark Athena's new combat moves, including scores of execution and counter-kill animations which range from simple backstabbing to pant-wettingly brutal slash fests which end with a blade embedded in an unsuspecting guards eye socket. Blood and gore still play an important part of the game's no-holds-barred atmosphere, and has also been given an HD facelift, from Riddick's hands becoming caked in blood to detailed decals being left on walls and fallen foes bodies. If the game's visuals justify the R-18 rating, the audio pushes it a step further. The voice acting is brilliant, from Vin Deisel's impossibly low pitched growl to the auxiliary NPC's, which contains all number of curses and f-bombs, all perfectly contributing to the oppressive sense of inescapable claustrophobia. Game play remains exactly the same, so if you never got to play the original, you're in for a treat.

Dark Athena on the other hand simply tries too hard to emulate the success of Butcher Bay. The graphics are gorgeous, with animations and lip synching far improved over even the BB remake. The story starts out interestingly, with Riddick dropped into a new hostile environment to escape from and only a hairpin to make this happen. What ensues is pure Riddick – stalking through the shadows, eliminating hapless guards one by one, interacting with the ships denizens through well acted and unforgivingly adult dialogue, fighting visceral and entertaining hand to hand combat – right up until you get your hands on a gun. The game then devolves into a generic shooter against super-accurate AI with a control scheme that does not lend itself to gunplay. Worse, is that once you reach what should have been the game's ending (a somewhat anticlimactic boss fight), it arbitrarily continues – dropping you in a new environment which relies on further gunplay (think using rocket propelled grenades to swat flies that can kill you by glancing in your general direction) and even half-baked platforming elements. The developers would have been better served refining the first half of the game, rather than tacking on an extra couple of hours of boring drudgery that has been done -and done far better- in dedicated shooters elsewhere.

In closing, if you're after this game for a continuation of Riddick's esca­pades, then the star rating above is valid. If you've never played Butcher's Bay or are interested in replaying one of the greatest multi-genre games ever made in modern HD glory, then add two more stars, ignore the second half of Dark Athena and enjoy.

The game is unoptimized for PC, despite having a 1GB ATI 6750M it still lags on Full HD, shadows can randomly go umbra, i.e, direct black than being transparent.

The gameplay is not smooth either, but feels stiff and hence haven't even played through the first level completely.

Pretty enjoyable playthrough, iit is a nice combination of stealth and guns and it worked for me. The highlight of this was actually the included original (remastered) “escape from butcher bay”, it is actually awesome, I never got around to playing it, but always wanted to. Glad I did!

This is a good game but the stealth mechanics get annoying after a while as the enemy always sees you too quickly even if you're sneaking up on them. I played the original a few years ago and the revamp of Butcher Bay is pretty spectacular. Dark Athena is actually a really fun game but has some hideously difficult parts in it. Overall not bad but I don't know if it will get a second play through.

First off: you need to Download the TAGES updated driver for this game to run. Once you've done that it doesn't need the disc. I found the copy protection to be really nice and simple in that respect as it is not invasive and doesnt require a connection to the internet constantly. With any luck DRM will become more like TAGES in the future. On a final note the TAGES driver is universal to any game that requires it.

I owned the original Escape from butcher bay when it was release years ago. It ended up being one of the better games i have played. It had fantastic atmosphere and some brilliantly designed features and Set pieces. This update and Addon pack is still just as good (well … its the same really) as the original but adds the Dark Athena Mission pack to lengthen the gameplay.

The Escape from Butcher bay episode is still great fun and takes you through a huge rusting prison complex and beyond. The game forces you to rely on stealth and tactics to progress as you spend most of the time armed with close combat weapons only. The story is a bit weak but the progression through it will keep you gripped till the end.

The Dark Athena Episode is just more of the same. The gameplay is a little more confined but is still fun for the most part. Hand to hand combat has become a real pain though and i found that most fights were just too tough and had to button mash to win. The atmosphere is still good but mimics that of Doom 3 with claustrophobic corridors being the norm. The story is essentially the same as the original; Your here but you dont want to be therefore murder everyone and leave. It would have been nice seeing Riddick doing something else then just escaping places but i guess he is a very limiting character in that respect.

All in all this is a decent game that's had a decent facelift to bring it to new hardware. Whether or not it needed that facelift is anyone guess? seems more like they ran out of Content for Dark Athena and decided to just tack it onto the older game instead.