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 3 of 4
What's Hot: A pretty good game...
What's Not: ...at first.
But the joke's on you, and not just because you paid the price of a full game. Are you ready for the punch line?
The game is only about half over.
The rest of the story
Just because a gun is cybernetically grafted to a zombified soldier doesn't mean you can't use it.
The rest of
Assault on Dark Athena is a long slog through B-side material that kills any goodwill the early part of the game might have built up. Not only that, but it doesn't do anything to address any of the shortcomings of the first part of the game. It doesn't even feel related. It feels like someone at Starbreeze was told to stay late and cobble together about four more hours of filler to tack onto the end of the game.
But this isn't just dull filler. It's frustrating filler. It's the worst kind of repetitive padding. It's a crawl through Snipertown, with all your weapons taken away. It's long stretches between save points, and even longer stretches between health stations. It's every cowardly game design trick in the book. Falling off ledges into insta-death water. Fighting bosses and sub-bosses with no feedback for how well you're doing or what you're supposed to do. It's turrets placed in close quarters around blind corners. It's an almost complete disavowal of stealth, stabbing and storytelling for weak gunplay down narrow corridors. It's five guys with shotguns who will repeatedly rush you. It's crossing tangled catwalks under the watchful eyes of tiny snipers in the distance. It's fighting one sub-boss, only to have another sub-boss immediately appear after you've killed the first one. It's everything you hate about shooters. And at the end, you fight the boss a second time, only now she's wearing the most ridiculous outfit this side of Magneto's hat in the X-Men movies.
Hey guys, who am I? Who is this an impression of? Can you tell? Lara Croft!
By the time I got to the real ending of
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, it had methodically undone everything I liked -- or at least was willing to forgive -- about the first half of the game. And it even reneged on its dark ending in favor of something downright family-friendly. Aw, Riddick, you're such a cuddly teddy bear of a mass-murdering space criminal. Come over here and let me chuck you on the shoulder, goshdarnit! Ya big goof.
