Vin Diesel is in the midst of the safest comeback attempt I’ve seen in a long time, in that it appears that he’s revisiting every property he’s ever seen any success in. First he reprised his role in the latest Fast and the Furious movie, alongside most of the original cast in a movie that was all too identical to all movies Fast and Furious before it. And now we revisit the Riddick character in his only multimedia release that ever garnered any form of acclaim; the video game The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. All we need now is a sequel to The Pacifier and the comeback will be complete.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault from Dark Athena consists of both a visual remastering of Escape from Butcher Bay and a brand new campaign. Here, Vin Diesel contributes his vocal growlings to Riddick, a space-warrior-being-thingy equivalent to the exact same character Vin Diesel plays in all his movies. A no-sleeves, buffed up would-be badass who is only capable of speaking in metaphors, proverbs, personifications, ironic statements, death threats and other lines that you’d expect from a self-absorbed action movie star after killing a henchman. Can you imagine what the dinner table at the Diesel household must be like?
Mrs Diesel: Hey honey, can you pass the salt?
Vin Diesel: Salt. The purifier of the galaxy. Salt judges no soul.
Mrs Diesel: Yeah that’s great honey. So how was work?
Vin Diesel: The darkness worked with me.
His son, Unleaded: Dad, Jacob keeps picking on me in gym class!
Vin Diesel: They say that whoever rules gym class rules over death itself. Fear not the dodgeball. Make the dodgeball fear you.
Escape From Butcher Bay sees Riddick as he is captured by his seemingly best friend Johns. The two share some kind of Tom and Jerry-styled “I love you man but I’m gonna capture you and put you in jail for life” type of bromance. Riddick gets locked in the hybrid of Alcatraz and Mordor that is Butcher Bay and yearns to escape so he can sulk the galaxy a free man. There’s nothing even remotely complex to the story and every character, good or bad, are just believable enough to make interesting goons for a Robocop film. But while what little story is shallow, the game does succeed in placing you in that mindset of an escaped con breaking out of an immense fortress. A con that exudes no emotion or human qualities aside from unbreakable confidence but a con nonetheless.
And during this little jailbreak, Riddick will find himself in a variety of scenarios, whether they entail fistfighting ornery inmates, shooting guards, shooting guards with bigger guns, lurking in the shadows a lot or wondering why so many guards don’t have more lights in such a poorly-lit facility. The game flip-flops between melee combat, gunplay and stealth, sometimes in bunches and sometimes more suddenly than Vin Diesel shaves his head. None of these individual aspects are particular deep in of themselves; gunplay consists of “hide behind things and shoot the head” (in fact you won’t get ideal results for shooting anything but the head thank you inconsistent hit-detection). Stealth is a matter of staying in shadows and avoiding bright lights. Fist fighting is two-button affair and simply ask you time your punches right.
But the game succeeds at making each of these aspects visceral, and never leaves any one of them overexposed. The guns at least feel like the volatile instruments of death they should be. There’s an accurate sense of weight behind every punch and screwdriver stab you place at your enemy’s nose. And some great lighting and filter effects give the stealth aspects an exciting thrill. Early in the game, you develop the overexposu…I mean “eyeshine” ability that allows you to see in the dark through a funky lighting effect. The game consistently manages to find unique but semi-logical scenarios to place the player who sits (reluctantly) in Riddick’s shoes to sulk and make liners about.
The pacing is brisk and the game never feels tiresome. There’s almost always something new and interesting waiting for the player, be it a new portion of the jail or the chance to beat up Xzibit. Of all the voice actor choices in the game, X-to-the-Z may be the most inspiring as head guard Abbott, if just because players will be especially motivated to pimp his face with their scalpel. Adopting the Half-Life “one single level instead of smaller numbered stages” format also helps Escape from Butcher Bay become the rare kind of game that you’ll want to play from beginning to end with as few breaks as physically possible in your real life. You may find yourself neglecting the need to use the restroom during play. Speaking of…
Gentleman: Sir, you look like you need to use the men’s room.
Vin Diesel: I am the one looking at you. My bowels listen to me. My bowels fear me.
Gentleman: Well you look to need it more badly. You can use the next stall.
Vin Diesel: Restrooms are the toilets of the galaxy. The breeding grounds for scum and bacteria. Until I came. Now they breed in hell.
Due to this, the five-hour length of the main will seemingly fly by faster than in other games. But all things considered, it’s hard not to be happy with the experience once you’ve finally escaped from Butcher Bay. And really, were you expecting any other outcome to the game aside from Vin Diesel escaping and unleashing an ironic death on his enemies?
For lack of a more ideal measuring stick, I’d say that Butcher Bay is a stronger FPS than say…Killzone 2. Not quite at that level is the new campaign, Assault on Dark Athena. Here, Riddick and his heterosexual lifemate Johns are kidnapped and must escape (again?) from the space station Dark Athena. Along the way, they’ll run into a terrified child, an annoying enemy merc who gets her jollies from picking on anything human, and her army of Borg soldiers. I might add that her version of the Borg inherit a British accent during the assimilation process. The characters and general plot in Dark Athena goes from tolerable to groan-driven and the great pacing in Butcher Bay was locked up and trapped in a mine, devoured by the strange alien naked bird creatures from that game. Here, certain melee and gun-based segments last for too long, and certain new gimmicks don’t fly well. The latter third of the game lean too heavily around a slow-reloading, clunky physics gun that shoots packets of…air.
And there are certain segments that are about as fun as the xXx movies. For example, you don’t get a hold of your own firearms until late in the game, and in the meantime you’re asked to pick up a borg corpse and use its attached rifle. One sequence is a quintessential gun turret challenge from this scenario, except you’re on a slow-moving elevator with railings that can block your bullets, but not the enemies. A certain boss-type character will reappear frequently near the game’s end, and at one point appears three times over. For a brief sequence near the beginning of Butcher Bay, and a lengthy chunk of the end of Dark Athena, these enemy gun turrets so small that they can barely be seen by the naked eye appear, with the capability of ripping large chunks of health and bald head off of Riddick. I’m sorry Vin Diesel, I’m sorry Tigon, I’m sorry Starbreeze, I’m sorry that myself and many others don’t have the 60’ high definition television sets you clearly designed this game for and are forced to squint are eyes at the screen looking for the stray white pixel that’ll gun us to death faster than the quarter miles Vin lives his life by.
Dark Athena isn’t a terrible game, mind you. The core mechanics behind the experience are still solid by genre standards. But the difference between the game’s two campaigns was that while I was saddened to see Butcher Bay come to a conclusion, I couldn’t wait until I got Dark Athena out of my Xbox.
And finally, there’s a multiplayer deathmatch mode. I would wager they included a multiplayer mode because too many reviewers back in the day considered it a grave insult to not include another multiplayer deathmatch mode in the flooded galaxy of multiplayer deathmatch modes. (Just like how too many reviewers nowadays are getting into the bad habit of penalizing everything that doesn’t have a co-op mode.) The one included feels tacked on, consisting of generic multiplayer maps, generic weapons and generic modes. I couldn’t tell you how the one unique mode, “Pitch Black” (a team of flashlight-wielding soldiers in the dark against a single Riddick) plays like because nobody online was playing it. Perhaps because virtual 8-on-1 hide and seek doesn’t quite have much of a universal appeal. In fact the multiplayer here in general has little in the way of appeal it seems, as very few people are playing this game on Xbox Live.
With the multiplayer being a throwaway, this package is really the tale of two games. Escape from Dark Athena is frustrating, bland and would be lost in the crowded FPS shuffle if it weren’t riding on the coattails of a better game. Escape from Butcher Bay is still great, but all it gets here is a visual makeover. But the original game isn’t even five years old, so why remake it so soon? Butcher Bay, while no longer the chromedomed gold standard for high definition graphics, still packs the same gritty, nasty, vicious punch. And it’s not exactly a rarity either; you can more than likely find it sulking in the shadows of bargain bins at any store. Now, if for some reason you can’t apprehend the original game, or must absolutely play the best looking version of every single game possible, then go ahead and buy Dark Athena. And then get back to work on your 3D update to Half-Life/Zelda/Chrono Trigger waiting for their restraining order.
3 ½ stars.
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