In terms of value Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is the Orange Box for 2009. On the disc you get both Assault on Dark Athena and the previous opus from developer Starbreeze Escape from Butcher Bay. Escape from Butcher Bay was widely considered to be one of the best games on the original Xbox and it appears here with a graphical and audio boost to suit its HD medium. Not to mention Achievements for both games.

It’s more than just a simple value adding gesture by Starbreeze. Dark Athena picks up immediately after the events of Butcher Bay, proving just how troubled a life the gravel voiced Riddick has, so it gives players the opportunity to experience the stories in the proper context. Another technical reason for the addition was that Microsoft had been unable to provide Escape from Butcher Bay as a backwards compatible title as they had done for so many other Xbox games. Starbreeze decided the best way to expand the story for people unfamiliar with Butcher Bay and provide fans with the 360 version they craved was to offer them both at once for the price of one. Now thats some hug worthy policy right there. I am now a Starbreeze fan for life.

It's not all roses though. On one hand the combination is great; Butcher Bay was and is a brilliant game and well worth your investment and it certainly sets the scene for Dark Athena plot wise. Not to mention it basically doubles the play time you’re going to get out of the disc. On the other hand it does mean that Butcher Bay is casting its admittedly long shadow over Dark Athena and it’s a shadow that the title occasionally has trouble stepping out of.

To give you a brief plot summary at the risk of the odd spoiler. Butcher Bay see’s wanted criminal Riddick being dropped of to the infamous prison of the games title by bounty hunter Johns (fans might recall Johns from his role in Pitch Black). Before long Riddick is raising holy hell and setting of riots all over the prison during several escape attempts. Spoiler alert, but you probably could have guessed the ending, Riddick finally escapes the prison with Johns aboard a space ship. Dark Athena begins with the ship they used to escape getting captured and dragged into the slaver ship Dark Athena. Johns is captured while still in cryo sleep by the mercenaries running the ship but Riddick, who as we know never sleeps, stows away aboard the Athena.

Despite being a third person game series the Riddick game’s are all about stealth. With your eye shine ability allowing you to see in complete darkness you spend most of your time skulking in the shadows and sneaking through vents and tunnels. If this was a sci fi horror game, you would be the monster. If you happen to startle your prey or set of an alarm it’s also not so difficult to take them out quickly with a well timed button press courtesy of the melee combats counter system. Riddick is pretty competent when it comes to fisticuffs and most enemies can be taken out with a few brutal punches and combos, adding in some the games nasty hand to hand weapons just speeds up the process and increases the red stuff splash.

You feel pretty empowered when you use the darkness and your speed to take out three bad guys with rifles using only your bare hands. In Butcher Bay your best weapon will usually be a sharpened screwdriver. While you come across a few fire arms now and again you’ll often still favour your stealthier weapons unless you get in trouble. Dark Athena lets you get your hands on the Ulak Blades that appear in the film Chronicles of Riddick; two serrated knives with blades that curl out of the handles and down over your knuckles. These knives make you an even bigger threat in melee situations and groups of enemies can be defeated easily face to face with a bit of skill.

It should be noted that between Butcher Bay and Dark Athena the boys and girls over at Starbreeze released another gem of a game called The Darkness. Another first person game where you played a mafia hitman recently ‘gifted’ with a powerful but sentient supernatural force. The Darkness was very good, scratch that, The Darkness was brilliant. One of the best single player games you are ever likely to play, that handled mature and adult concepts in a refreshingly mature and adult fashion. It was, as expected, better than Butcher Bay. So that’s why it’s a little disappointing to find that Dark Athena is only as good as Butcher Bay was. Dark Athena could easily be a very, very big expansion to Butcher Bay. Graphically it’s a step up, although this is less apparent in the gameplay with the tuned up version of Butcher Bay sitting next to it on the bench. It offers a few new elements like the Ulak Blades and the Drones, cyborg zombies controlled remotely that you can commandeer, and some larger areas and more impressive sights to see, but overall it’s really a continuation of the previous game. Call me greedy but I was just expecting the five year gap to result in something a bit more in a sequel.

Not that this should be considered a bad thing in anyway. Butcher Bay was an exceptional game with a few small problems, Dark Athena is the same. Just don’t be expecting more open plan levels or a greater space between those annoying load points from Butcher Bay, those things are depressingly still there. One feature I was hoping would be done away with in the sequel was the way the camera angle switches to the third person when you climb on top of a crate or ledge. At certain points, such as shimmying along a ledge, this is useful, but when you're just leaping up onto a box it can get disorientating and annoying.

Dark Athena does have a few notable features over Butcher Bay though. The character interactions and animations have been given a big shot in the arm. Now the exchanges in Butcher Bay were mercifully short in most cases and usually entertaining, but I’m not a fan of the static dialogue moments in most games unless the dialogue is very good. I’m just getting impatient in my old age. I was pleasantly surprised to find the dialogue in Dark Athena was better than good, it was great. The characters you get to interact with are a fascinating set of broken people and your exchanges with them do a great job of eliciting emotion, even if its often disgust. Prepare for some surprisingly harsh language though, we’re talking drunken Jamie Foxx level’s of cursing. Funnily enough thespian Vin Diesel is perfect as a foil to these ranting cursing characters with his cool, stoic demeanour. He might be an easy target to poke fun at but you have to commend Mr Diesel’s commitment to the character of Richard (don’t call him Dick) Riddick.

The second feature of Dark Athena that stands out over Butcher Bay is a multiplayer component. Unfortunately it’s comparable to the multiplayer component on the Darkness; which roughly means some novel game modes but unless you’re in an all Aussie game it’s going to chug like your gran’s car. Aside from the standard multiplayer modes there’s a rather fun juggernaut styled game that takes place in a dark level. Players are armed with a gun and flashlight and one player gets to be Riddick. Whoever kills Riddick first gets to be him and rack up kills until they get shot and so on. It’s a fun, albeit difficult, game mode. It’s nice that Starbreeze took the time and effort to put multiplayer in there but truthfully, they needn’t have bothered. With two brilliant and complete single player games on the disc for the price of one they were all ready spoiling us.

Enjoy the beautiful sunset with your customized Killbot (tm)

Riddick is really an easy sell, if you’ve played Butcher Bay and you loved it, then get it, you will love it just as much and enjoy reliving the original. If you haven’t played Butcher Bay but are any sort of fan of mature and violent games then get it and enjoy what everyone else has been raving about since 2004; plus you get to play its sequel immediately. Even if you didn’t enjoy the films the games are in a league of their own providing a science fiction action game that takes place in the dirty grimy cracks between the worlds of the more familiar space opera genre. He might not have much in the way of luck, but it’s a lot of fun being Riddick. I can see why Vin Diesel is so eager to revisit the character.

Special thanks to the guys at Atari for providing our very first review copy. Hopefully it's the first of many to come!

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