I have been a busy bee as of late: you’ve probably noticed this due to my lack of articles and the seriously shoddy quality of editing that has been present on Sarcastic Gamer as of late. For this, I can only apologise.

That said, I’ve managed to find some time to play through The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. As late as my timing may be – blame UPS – I figured I may as well write up some thoughts on it, since it was a very fun game.

Oooh, see! First thought down already! We’re on a roll here. Read the rest of them over the jump!

Riddick: Dark Athena (for it shall now be called thee) is, as you might’ve guessed, a first-person-shooter sequel to Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay from a few years back, itself a prequel to Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick. So it’s a sequel to a prequel to a film that has a sequel, making it a sequel-prequel-sequel. Or something. Following so far?

The brilliant thing about Dark Athena from the off is that you’re essentially buying two games for the price of one, making that price tag super attractive: DA comes packaged with a revamped edition of Butcher Bay, giving you the chance to replay the entire opening of Riddick’s story if you missed it first time around. After that, you can move onto Dark Athena, which continues the story where the first game left off.

***slightly spoilertastic, folks***

Butcher Bay, if you are inclined to know, revolves around Riddick’s initial imprisonment in the titular jail, where he also picks up his handy-dandy ability to see in the dark. At the end of it all, he hops on a ship to escape the bay; during this dastardly escape he’s nabbed and taken aboard the also-titular Dark Athena, from which he must – gah – escape again.

You get the idea. There’s lots of escaping involved.

***no longer spoilertastic, folks***

As you might expect from a game based around a bloke that can see in the dark, Riddick involves lots of skulking around in shadows and being all stealthy like a big stealthy thing that knows about stealth, stealthily. Pressing Square (testing the PS3 version) makes Riddick crouch and enter “stealth mode”, at which point the screen turns blue whenever you’re hidden out of sight.

Riddick can also snap necks when he’s sneaking around, and drag bodies into the shadows so that your enemies are none-the-wiser to all the horrible death that’s going on all around them. Which is great, when it all works.

A big problem with Riddick is that your enemies are simply far too smart. All you have to do is peek out at the wrong moment (by holding L1 and twiddling the left-stick) and your enemies will suddenly wise up to where you are and you’ll be dead in seconds.

That, or they’ll simply lose all use of their cerebral cortex and, after checking out anything suspicious, will never ever move again unless they spot you. Which would be great if they weren’t standing exactly where you’re meant to be going. It can be tough, and very frustrating, and it’s a bit of a letdown considering that most of this FPS revolves around being a sneaky little bugger.

When things don’t revolve around being quiet and hush-hush, they’re pretty fun too. Read over to see why.

Tweet This Post

CONTINUE TO PAGE: 1 2