So, this morning I finished The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, including Escape from Butcher’s Bay (the remake/remaster of the original Xbox game that was also on the disc), a couple of day’s previously. It was a satisfying, if frequently frustrating, play and I think I would recommend it to people who want to try something a little more ambitious than your average FPS.
For the record, and I should point this out up front, I actually like Vin Diesel. I don’t think he’s a great actor, but he has good screen presence and he seems like a good enough fellow. I also enjoyed the Riddick movies, include the eponymously titled The Chronicles of Riddick, and I especially enjoyed Dark Fury, the Peter (Aeon Flux) Chung directed short. Since, the games were decently enough reviewed and I liked the property, it seemed a no brainer... which it was.
The art direction and graphic design of the game really draw the player in, and you really do get an immersive feeling from the levels. The level of detail, albeit gritty detail, in the levels is something that really needs to be experienced, and the unique space opera meets cyberpunk atmosphere created by the setting and script are like nothing else I’ve played before. The closest experiences to Riddick would be along the lines of mix of the Thief and Deus Ex games, but that doesn’t really do the game justice. Suffice it to say that if you like the movies, you feel like you’re somewhere in that weird universe that is part Alien, part Star Wars, and part Lord of the Rings in space.
Anyways, while playing Riddick and watching the frustration mount, I wondered why it was that I was so frustrated. No, not really, I fully well knew why I was frustrated, and that was because I died almost a dozen times in the tutorial on Normal difficulty. I never had this much problem with a shooter before, and I had just gone through the complete Halo series the week or so before. In the Halo games, you get the feeling of why the Covenant troops called you a demon, and you really do get the feeling that you’re a complete badass. Not so much with Riddick.
Sure, Riddick is a badass in the movies, and he does things incredible badass things with seemingly little effort, but in the game, it’s a different story. In the game, while it seems like it’s wide open, there’s really only a single path through the game, and if you don’t follow that path, it punishes you. In order to be as badass as Riddick, you have to do things over and over until you figure it out, and then you breeze through. (Well, if the AI is working in your favour, that is.) Riddick talks and acts like a badass in the cutscenes, but frequently gets his ass handed to him by smack talking goons.
Playing as Riddick, I never really felt that I was a badass, largely due to dying a lot. (Funny how that works, huh?) Sure, Riddick was all cool and vaguely sociopathic in the cut scenes, but he was largely ineffective in the game play. Now, this is going to make it sound like the game is awful, and doesn’t deliver, but that’s not completely true. There are a number of issues, and a not insignificant one is the fact that I’m playing on a standard definition TV, so it could very well be that the difficulty was solely to blame on the TV. This doesn’t change the fact that the game was frustrating; it just mitigates the blame a little.
In the Halo games, the game play seems to have been built from the ground up to make the player feel like they’re a badass. Sure, there’s a lot of challenge and some frustration, but when the games go, they really go, and you’re cutting a path through groups of Grunts with ease, gracefully grabbing new weapons from the bodies as you run out of ammo. The game play just has a vibe to it that works, and that is probably the key to the success of the series.
With Riddick, it seems like the designers were going for brutal and deadly in an attempt to emulate the movies and to enhance Riddick’s badassery, which was largely successful. The damage modeling system in Riddick is both ablative and regenerating, which is an odd combination, but does bring home the lethality of combat in the game. The combat itself is largely hand-to-hand with Riddick’s trademark crescent blades, which are about as brutal and deadly as any melee weapon I’ve seen in a FPS game since Doom’s chainsaw (and its spiritual successor, the Lancer, from the Gears of War series.)
Mind you, the Gears of War series goes for brutal and deadly as well, and you don’t tend to die half as much in those titles as you do in Riddick. In the Gears games, the characters are as badass in game play as they are in the cutscenes, and you never feel as though they aren’t competent fighters. You rarely get your ass handed to you by goons, and when you do, you know where you screwed up and rarely ever have play the same encounter more than once. Also, the damage modeling system in both the Halo and Gears series is a lot more forgiving than Riddick’s, creating an ability to shrug off damage like any good action hero does, kind of like Riddick does in the movies.
So, maybe it is a design flaw in the games, rather than my TV getting in the way, or maybe it just required a different sort of game play than the usual shooter, as it did have a focus on melee that other FPS games don’t. All in all, it is an unique experience to play this game, and one that I don’t regret at all. (It didn’t hurt that I paid $15 for the game.)
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