The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (Xbox 360) Preview
Posted by Adam Larck on 03.09.2009
Hands-On: Atari takes what was good from Escape from Butcher Bay and improves on it
I was pleasantly surprised after playing through the new Chronicles of Riddick game. After an almost five year delay since the last one, subtitled Escape from Butcher Bay, I thought the new one would forget the formula that worked so well. The newest game, Assault on Dark Athena, takes some of the better points from the first and adds to them, along with adding all new elements as well.
If you don't immediately go into the game, you'll get treated to an intro cutscene, where you'll immediately find out (if you didn't already know) that Vin Diesel is back as the voice of Riddick. As much as I normally don't care too much about character voices, it's nice to see that they stayed true to the movie series and last game with his voice. The cutscene is a nice way of showing some of the moves you'll use throughout the game, along with some guns and enemies.
Visually, the cutscene looks nice, and so does the game. While the halls can be a bit repetitive, as they all start to look the same, the graphics are well done and Riddick is really detailed.
The game opens up with you in a pipe eavesdropping on two guards (it's never shown that you escaped prison, but implied as you find out in the demo). After listening to them for a while, you can "Interrupt the Conversation" by jumping down and killing them with your Ulaks (Riddick's two curving blades). You then melee fight another guard, where I found a pretty simple way to fight. While defending, the blades will flash white before an attack, if you melee during this flash you do a counter that's an instant kill.
After dispatching the guard, you're treated to another cutscene explaining some backstory and giving your current mission, The Ship. The mission is to "Proceed through the Dark Athena to assist Dacher in fixing a getaway ship."
It was after this cutscene that I found my first problem, the health bar is small and ugly. There are so many ways to make it look decent when you see it, but it is only four square bars for the demo. When I went up against the drones in the next room with guns, I got mowed down quite a few times. Thankfully, after killing one drone, you can pick their body up and use their guns against the other one.
Eventually, you'll get to the spot where you kill the drone operator and take his card to use the drones. This seemed to be the majority of the demo, which disappointed me. Focusing on Riddick would have been better. You control the drone for a while, where you kill a good number of guards and stop a fan with one of their bodies. After taking control of another drone and clearing the rest of the way, control switches back to Riddick as he goes along the new path and finally picks up his first two guns, an assault rifle and shotgun.
You'll also pick up a NanoMED Cartridge, used at the health stations to heal you. The heath stations look and act much the same way they did in the last game (stabs you in the neck to heal you). It's a nice touch to see that they kept it the same from the first game, but I'm interested to see if they will be spaced far apart in the full game (the demo only had one, towards the end of the level).
After scaling a ladder, the final part of the game will have you going against five guards. You can either go down the ladder or jump down to face them head-on, or you can take the way I found out. By stealthing (X button), killing one with a headshot, then running back from the edge a bit, the guards immediately forget about you and allows you to keep using the same method.
This brings me to my first problem about the demo. The guards seem too easy. While the drones offered a good challenge early on when you don't have a gun, with the gun it seems a hit-and-run method works great. Why don't the guards remember who they're looking for, or at least where he was? Why don't they come after you? While it's a nice touch that they look for cover and yell and curse at you during fights, a more aggressive A.I. would add to the effect of being an escaped criminal.
After the fight, that's the end of the demo, you run to the end of the hallway, the screen goes black and it takes you to the Start screen. Overall, it's a nice preview of the game. It allows you to get a good sense of the game controls and the weapon switching, which is done with the RB then choosing your weapon with the Right Stick. The difficulty is also able to be changed from the Pause menu (for those who are wondering, I played the game on normal).
In the final version, I hope to see more emphasis put on the stealth mode. With the game having a dedicated button for stealth, and the screen changing color depending on if you're in the light or dark, it was rarely used in the demo. Hopefully, in the full game, more options will be available to complete missions and more of the game will rely on stealth kills and sneaking.
Also, the drone control segments were nice, but you never feel a punishment for killing one. When one dies, you can immediately replace it and go right back to killing. I'm not saying drain Riddick's health for this, but maybe alerting more guards may be a good penalty.
The full game will be out on April 7 in North America for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.
