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dkirschner's The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (PC)

[May 26, 2011 01:10:44 PM]

Dark Athena is basically a slightly updated Butcher Bay. It's a direct sequel, beginning with Riddick and Johns again, but ending with Riddick and a little girl escaping. 3/4 of the game is on the ship, Dark Athena, with the other 1/4 on a doomed civilian planet, and it's the 1/4 I think that shines. This is primarily because Riddick gets a SCAR gun that shoots remote sticky bombs. From the minute I got it, I hardly used anything else because it is so satisfying to blow up enemies and things with sticky bombs. Even when a machine gun or stealth would have served me better, I opted for sticky bombs! Other than the SCAR, okay okay, it really doesn't shine in that last 1/4. There are some damn annoying enemies, but god am I glad I got to shoot them with sticky bombs.

But really, the planetside part felt tacked on. I know that Dark Athena was supposed to be an expansion to Butcher Bay, but delays and such ended up turning it into a full-fledged sequel. My hunch is the planetside part became the extra oomph that turned Dark Athena from add-on to sequel. By all means, Riddick and Revas' first fight on Dark Athena should have ended the game, but inexplicably they both live. Riddick escapes in an escape pod which gets shot by a space missile, and he somehow descends through the planet's atmosphere, crashes on a beach, is unconscious for days, and is still strapped in his seatbelt when he wakes up, unharmed. Come on now, that missile, and especially entering a planet's atmosphere after being hit by a missile, would have killed him. As for Revas, she got a dang spike shoved through her neck! The next time we see her, she's talking normally and has no conspicuous hole, wound, or scarring of the neck. But when Riddick can survive a planet crash in a blown up pod and the last boss in an armored suit dies, not to a spike through the neck, but to falling down an elevator shaft, something just seems off.

Taking both games as a whole, I enjoyed them more often than not. Despite some cheap enemies spotting Riddick and his apparently bright red target in the shadows, and some weird sound issues in Dark Athena, the games are full of intense stealth and shooter play. Oh, and also, profanity and Vin Diesel's one-liners, which stop being as cool as the games go on.