I'm Hell's messenger. Name's Riddick.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is a respectable repackaging of a five year old game with significant expansion.
Published: June 16, 2009
The gameplay in The Chronicles of Riddick is an odd mix that works surprisingly well on the whole. The game is primarily played from a first person perspective, although the camera steps back for certain actions, such as mantling onto crates, shimmying across ledges, or using health stations. Even while in first person, you can look down and see your body (which is still surprisingly rare in games), alleviating somewhat the common first person shooter problem of feeling like a floating camera.
Gunplay is the standard fare, but the real fun comes from getting your hands dirty in a more personal way. Melee combat is vicious. The animation and sound both conspire to give everything a solid, crunching ferocity that is hard to find elsewhere. With proper timing, instant kill moves and disarms can be performed for added satisfaction. Perhaps the most glorious kills are those carried out on unsuspecting victims.
Riddick is a sneaky bastard, and if he gets the drop on someone, they do not stand a chance. This is a very good thing, because Riddick is quite vulnerable to hot lead, especially on the hard difficulty setting. Remaining undetected is simply a matter of crouching a lot, sticking to the shadows (which can be aided by shooting out light sources) and keeping an eye on patrol patterns. The guards are all quite stupid, and the stealth mechanics have not significantly advanced beyond 1998’s Thief: The Dark Project, but with Riddick’s night vision and sheer deadliness, the game does a great job of making you feel like a predatory animal picking away at a pack of lesser creatures.
Sneaking up on guards and snuffing out their pitiful lives never gets old, but sometimes you just want to run up to a gun-toting guard empty-handed, grab his gun, force the barrel under his chin and make him blow his own brains out. That’s always a good option. The end result of Riddick’s unchecked aggression is always a flaccid ragdoll corpse, which looks a bit ropy in this post-Grand Theft Auto IV world, but it can still be worth a chuckle.
