It’s hard to believe that it’s a full five years ago that we played and raved about Starbreeze’s Escape from Butcher Bay game on Xbox, but time flies and things move on, and few things move faster than the games industry.
Just like Riddick’s Butcher Bay escape, Assault on Dark Athena is a prequel to the movie Pitch Black; it plays primarily as a first-person shooter, but with hand to hand combat and plenty of stealth mixed in. The weapons in the previous game never felt particularly accurate or powerful and this has definitely been improved, and a new “Weapon Wheel” and “Weapon Hot Spot” selection system improves the speed with which you can swap weapons.
Assault On Dark Athena picks up right where Escape from Butcher Bay left off. Richard B. Riddick is a badass space criminal who can see in the dark thanks to him having an operation done on him to inject a reflective substance behind his retinas, and using the shadows for stealth and having light-sensitive eyes makes up much of the gameplay (you toggle Eyeshine/goggles on with a press of ‘up’ on the D-pad). Johns, the bounty hunter who originally took Riddick to the Butcher Bay prison, helped him escape to avoid becoming a prisoner himself. During their ensuing space voyage and during their cryogenic sleep, the ship is captured by the Dark Athena, a gigantic mercenary vessel captained by the wild-eyed Gale Revas. Unsurprisingly Riddick evades capture and that’s where the game begins. Riddick is unarmed and needs to use a lot of stealth tactics at first, and as you kill the mercs and guards you discover that Revas is responsible for some true horrors, not least the ghost drone guards that patrol much of the ship. These drones are enslaved and automated ex-humans with implanted machine parts, controlled remotely from special consoles within the ship or left to patrol with basic AI. When they wander on their own AI they emit red light and are dumb and slow and quite easy to overcome, when they’re being controlled by a remotely by a merc they show white lights and they ’re a tougher, faster challenge to get by altogether.
The gameplay features a lot of shooting and melee combat but is heavily slanted towards exploration, sub-plot side missions and stealth, and despite not being a third person game or having a Metal Gear-style mini map to show you where all the enemies are patrolling/which way they’re facing it works extremely well about 90% of the time. Occasionally your lack of peripheral vision and some clumsy involuntary movement (that genuinely seems to be a quirk of the game engine rather that any heavy-handedness on my part - honest) means Riddick will sometimes climb off the top of a ladder or wander out of shadow and dump himself right in front of an enemy, and you right in it. There’s a lot of clambering around, crawling through ducts and hiding behind objects or in the shadows to be done, and entire sections can be “snuck” through – there’s even an achievement for clearing the cargo bay without being seen (not easy). You have to operate switches, open vent doors, climb onto crates and up the aforementioned ladders. You even have to go hand-over-hand across an overhead rails or shimmy sideways to get to seemingly inaccessible areas, Lara-Croft style. Whenever you interact with an object or person the game switches to third-person mode – you see Riddick switch/operate/climb/talk to the object/person and then the camera snaps back to first person. In the third person view you can use the Med Stations that are dotted around that “take away the pain” in a frighteningly dangerous and violent-looking way. As we said in our review of Butcher Bay, this is an elegant solution to a perennial first person view problem and feeling of clumsiness when climbing and using static objects, but I’d have liked to have more control over the camera.
The gunplay in Athena is quite well done, and as I mentioned previously it’s definitely an improvement on Butcher Bay. Apart from the usual selection of pistol, SMG, shotgun, assault rifle and the invaluable Tranq gun, you’ll get to play with one of the funnest weapons since the Gravity gun in Half Life 2. The SCAR (Sonic Compressor Assault Rifle) allows you to fire up to 5 bullets which attach to any surface; they can then be triggered remotely any time you want (with a press of the L trigger). It allows you to tag several enemies and bring them all down in one go, or maybe tag a particularly large, tough or heavy target with all 5. The melee combat is less important than it was in Butcher Bay, but Riddick still gets plenty of opportunities to use fisticuffs or various shivs, knives, Ulaks (don’t ask) and a baseball bat. Riddick’s physical ability to silently sneak by pressing ‘X’, as well as his physical prowess if he gets spotted both mean that there are usually many different ways of getting past the various obstacles throughout the game.
As in Butcher Bay, Vin Diesel supplies his inimitable voice talent to the game (Riddick’s bass growl is the epitome of what a game hero should sound like), as well as several other highly regarded actors. The in-game sound is stunning, the various explosions, machine sounds and weapon noises are all totally convincing, and the game’s realistic treatment of distance related to sound and reactive music also adds a lot of atmosphere. The dialogue is plentiful (but skippable if you’re in a hurry) and there are a lot of f-words (and worse) bandied around - this is 16+ game and there are some extremely violent moments in it.
We thought that despite being a top game Butcher Bay felt a bit claustrophobic with its relatively confined play areas (but hey, it was set in a prison!) and although Athena plays in much the same vein, many locations open out into much bigger areas, both indoors and out. Some locations have a truly epic feel, and aided by some smart texturing and extraneous details (like superb-looking water) the game is always a pleasure to behold. Somehow Starbreeze have managed to make the darkness volumetric and… well… sexy, and despite not being the biggest fan of stealth games I really enjoyed the sneaky sections of Athena the most.
Perhaps surprisingly Athena has a decent multiplayer mode too, it has 4 expanding maps for 2-4, 4-8 and 6-12 players with Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, CTF, Butcher Bay Riot, Pitch Black and Arena modes. My favourite mode was Pitch Black, played in virtual darkness one player is Riddick, and all the others have to seek him out with weapon-mounted torches to light their way. Riddick can of course see in the dark. When someone kills Riddick they become him, and off you go again…
Assault On Dark Athena also includes a remastered version of the abovementioned Escape From Butcher Bay – in this particular case “remastered” means improved graphics, a complete new music soundtrack, harder difficulty, more aggressive enemies, additional content and the inclusion of the Weapon Wheel and Weapon Hot Spot from the new game. Remarkably enough this game doesn’t feel in the slightest bit out of place, and looks and plays better than a large proportion of today’s offerings.
Assault on Dark Athena might sound too good to be true, but hang on a sec, it’s not all good. There are several instances where the AI lets the game down a bit, with guards spotting you for no apparent reason, and they’ll also sometimes lose interest in you when they obviously shouldn’t and wouldn’t – but developers have to make allowances for gameplay purposes in stealth games so we won’t get too anal about that. Apart from some annoying ladder habits Riddick also has one other annoying quirk, and this is the way he tucks his weapon in when you get close to a wall or crate. This can mean that you’re trying to aim at an enemy and all of sudden the game engine decides that when Riddick is this close to a cover object he couldn’t possibly want to point his gun at the bad guy who’s shooting him, and folds it gently in towards his body or points it at the ground! It’s annoying as heck and happened too often.
Nevertheless Assault on Dark Athena is a quality game with plenty of excitement mixed in with the innate tension that good stealth games create. The score I gave it reflects its value for money as a package, because with Butcher Bay (complete with substantial lick of paint) included for free if you’re looking for a lot of quality gaming for your money then you could do far, far worse.
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