Spring Break
Out of the shadows
Riddick is back for better or worse in his second video game outing, 'Assault on Dark Athena'
John Bailey
Issue date: 4/21/09 Section: Focus
Games, like most animals, like to be loved. But love's a rare enough thing, especially for movie tie-in games, which are the game world's equivalent of those gross TD Select sodas you get at Store24, except that they cost $60.
So imagine my surprise when "The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena" spun up in my disc tray, and I heard love. I heard competent, even impressive voice acting, I saw lively, engaging character models, I felt the visceral smack of my Fisty Blade Thing against the heads of evil cyborg zombies. Love, it's all love.
But then I played the game a little more.
"Dark Athena," a sequel to the earlier "Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay," wants very much to be many different things. The game quickly introduces what I'll call the Three-S system: Stealth, Shadows and Stun Guns, and it's great fun to sneak past and/or zap the few moron guards you run into. Okay, sneaking, snappin' necks, this is what I like. But then, suddenly, you're trapped in an open, well-lit room with no weapons, and six guys with socket wrenches are howling for your entrails, and the stealth shooter quickly becomes a no-holds-barred UFC-in-space simulator. And then a giant robot crashes through the wall, and you suddenly become Riddick, Gundam Pilot, cruising your mech monstrosity through what appears to be a texture swap of a "Halo 2" level.
It's not that any one part of the game is bad - except the limp, uninspired robot bits - it's just that the constant shifting from shooter to stealth to platformer gives me some mean genre whiplash.
And this schizophrenia doesn't bode well for the multiplayer modes, most of which are more fun in other games (Capture the Flag, Deathmatch and so on). The "Pitch Black" mode, where Riddick flees from an army of angry Internet racists, is the exception, although it's merely a diversion.
Actually, thinking about it now, parts of the game are pretty bad. Despite the game's apparent emphasis on stealth, every enemy seems to have the full suite of night vision, x-ray goggles and echolocation. Merely walking into a lit room somehow alerts every guard within a 60-foot radius, even if you're moving silently and the only mook in the room is buried in Space Porn.
So imagine my surprise when "The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena" spun up in my disc tray, and I heard love. I heard competent, even impressive voice acting, I saw lively, engaging character models, I felt the visceral smack of my Fisty Blade Thing against the heads of evil cyborg zombies. Love, it's all love.
But then I played the game a little more.
"Dark Athena," a sequel to the earlier "Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay," wants very much to be many different things. The game quickly introduces what I'll call the Three-S system: Stealth, Shadows and Stun Guns, and it's great fun to sneak past and/or zap the few moron guards you run into. Okay, sneaking, snappin' necks, this is what I like. But then, suddenly, you're trapped in an open, well-lit room with no weapons, and six guys with socket wrenches are howling for your entrails, and the stealth shooter quickly becomes a no-holds-barred UFC-in-space simulator. And then a giant robot crashes through the wall, and you suddenly become Riddick, Gundam Pilot, cruising your mech monstrosity through what appears to be a texture swap of a "Halo 2" level.
It's not that any one part of the game is bad - except the limp, uninspired robot bits - it's just that the constant shifting from shooter to stealth to platformer gives me some mean genre whiplash.
And this schizophrenia doesn't bode well for the multiplayer modes, most of which are more fun in other games (Capture the Flag, Deathmatch and so on). The "Pitch Black" mode, where Riddick flees from an army of angry Internet racists, is the exception, although it's merely a diversion.
Actually, thinking about it now, parts of the game are pretty bad. Despite the game's apparent emphasis on stealth, every enemy seems to have the full suite of night vision, x-ray goggles and echolocation. Merely walking into a lit room somehow alerts every guard within a 60-foot radius, even if you're moving silently and the only mook in the room is buried in Space Porn.
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