The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (Xbox 360)
You, sir, are no Escape from Butcher Bay
4/7/2009 6:16 PM | 29 Comments | Page 2 of 4
What's Hot: A pretty good game...
What's Not: ...at first.
Butcher Bay was quite literally set in a space dungeon, and now this location makes for a good-enough space dungeon: Riddick is trapped on a slave ship and he's trying to escape. It doesn't really feel like a space ship. But who's to know what a space ship is like in Riddickland? Boxy rooms, convenient air ducts and space crates? Fair enough. Let's get on with the sneaking and neck-snapping and eye-stabbing.
The story proper, after the prologue, begins with a combination of the grim and playful. I'm pretty sure the only surviving character from the last game is killed. There's evidence later that the story has changed its mind, and the whole issue is eventually swept under the rug. But starting out by killing the character is a grim way to immediately follow up on the ending of
Butcher Bay. It's a bit like killing Newt and Hicks between "Aliens" and "Alien 3." The playful comes with Riddick's first interaction with the main villain, a space pirate named Revas, voiced with icy efficiency by Michelle Forbes (It's hard not to imagine Admiral Cain from "Battlestar Galactica" gone truly bad. Am I wrong to think that's really sexy?). Riddick stealth-flirts with her in his own unique way. It's a great moment.
"Droopy daggers" was also rejected as a not-cool-enough name for these knives.
So what follows is about four hours of solid and familiar Riddickry. It feels like a repurposed version of
Butcher Bay, although much more linear and without funny packs of smokes along the way. Some of the exact same plot points are used. The new stuff seems to sit in the background. For instance, the concept of drones is clever, but it's mostly a stand-in for the first game's trick of having enemies with weapons you can't use. In
Butcher Bay, the weapons were locked to a specific person's genetic code; in
Dark Athena, they're cybernetically grafted to the arms of remotely-controlled zombies. But the drone gimmick only comes into play a couple of times, each in very tightly controlled and brief situations. There's also a "Newt from 'Aliens'" gimmick going, but it's left hanging for the most part.
And then you suddenly get to the conclusion. There's a mech sequence, an implausible but obvious twist, a weakly executed boss fight and a closing cinematic. And the ending is pretty bleak. In fact, I hated Riddick a little, and not that "ooh, so naughty!" way that you supposedly hated Kratos when he let some poor sailor fall into a monster's mouth, but you actually thought he was cool for doing that. I actually thought Riddick was a selfish coward. He really turned out to be the amoral hero he pretended to be. Starbreeze denied the story any cloying "Little Miss Marker" guff. So none of the real promise of a proper sequel has been realized, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. You got a tightly contained story, a couple of memorable new characters, a handful of disappointing loose ends and an unconventional ending. The whole thing lasted about as long as some downloadable content for
Fable II or
Fallout 3.
