We last found our hero, Space Vin Diesel, breaking out of a….
Yeah… I have no idea.
You see, I never watched any of the Riddick flicks nor did I ever play the Butcher Bay game from the last console cycle. Let’s be honest, most of you haven’t either. I guess I was too busy being disappointed by The Matrix sequels earlier this decade to have ever bothered with this sci-fi property. Still…
I was minding my own business the other day, see? I’m in my kitchen playing Retro Game Challenge for the DS (Micro-sized Review: BAAAWWWWEESOME!), and there at the door is a package for me. But wait: it gets better. In this package is a FREE VIDEO GAME inside of it… FOR ME!
I smell it a little bit to check for poisonous materials. I poke it to check if it’s some sort of secretly disguised explosive material. Surely this is the terrorists trying to win. Nope, just a video game with a note attached. Maybe someone I moderately care for has a ransom over their head? Wrong again. All they want me to do is give my opinion. A free game for a mere opinion?! You want the guy who, just the other day, was debating with friends which Cereal Mascot would be the best villain in a Mega Man game to sway minds? Buh-okay! I can clackety-clack out some read-a-ma-bobs for the price of a video game ($44.87 according to Wal-Mart’s always low-price guarantee!)
I wonder, can I be impartial enough to give an honest review without being swayed by the super-awesome, pee-pants soaked excitement of getting a free video game out of nowhere? I mean, one time I was at the grocery store and was asked to partake in a taste test of two potato chip brands. I chose “other” over “Lay’s super delicious Crunch-tastics!” and afterward felt dejected throughout the rest of my food-buying experience. If I don’t give my honest opinion, though, I’ll just be one of those sell-outs who gave Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 a good review because the company gave them a free movie ticket. No way, man, that’s not me. I’m gonna go all indie up in here. Still, I feel a bit like the time my grandma got me Adventures of Lolo for my birthday. Would I have ever touched this game if I was not handed to me? Meh, probably not.
And yet… here we are.
First, can I complain about just how many damn company logos I had to go through just to get to the title screen? I swear the game loads nearly ten company logos in the beginning. After the title screen finally shows up, one gets the option to play the first game in the series, Escape From Butcher Bay. I’m always appreciative when I have access to more stuff without “unlocking” or, even worse, getting pitched to buy something else off of Xbox Live. Thumbs up to the conglomo-group of Vin Diesel LLC for making this decision. Still, I chose to skip it. I feel it’s a bit cumbersome to play 8 hours of another video game just to get caught up on a story for a stabby-killy game.
For us folks who are two movies and a video game behind on knowing what the hell is going on, here’s what I can gather: Space Vin Diesel washes up on some shore, and is pissed (naturally). He also looks damn good in a space wife-beater, and has sweet space welding goggles. There’s some silly obligatory heavy-handed one-liners said by our hero, but soon we’re off doing what we REALLY wanted to do: stabbing people in the throat!
Riddick has a super-human ability to amplify the darkness, and therefore the game has you spending lot of time squatting in corners or behind space boxes. Not long after, one finds out that Riddick has a price on his head for being too damn awesome. What better way to avoid the horrible fate of death by a band of killers than by running right onto their ship completely unarmed? Riddick is almost as crazy as this main character in a movie called Find Me Guilty. That guy was a hoot! He, like, WANTS to be found guilty! Who would do that? Not me, I say. You could probably go buy that movie in most stores if you haven’t seen it. There are even stores that are open 24-hours, so, you could probably go buy that movie RIGHT NOW!
Assault on Dark Athena controls fairly similar to another Space Epic (rhymes with Shmalo), but unlike said other space shooty game, this one has long periods of dialogue. The good news is, I was pleasantly surprised with nearly all of the voice acting. (That includes you, handsome bald guy!) The voice acting for the female lead especially is on-par with any Hollywood movie. It might even beat the acting on said Sci-Fi channel movie Mansquito.
The character models in the cut scenes can occasionally be mannequin-like. Diesel’s scenes seem to especially be a let-down (nothing personal, big guy). However, most of the time the game displays human-like facial movements wonderfully. I was really impressed with the graphical touches during most scenes involving the prisoners. The modeling is top-notch all around. Every character moves with human-like reactions, and you rarely see a duplicate baddie. Well… almost. There are “drones” in the game, which all look alike. But, they are drones, see? They aren’t called “unique-ies”!
The rest of the graphics? They are pretty gorgeous, too. The shadows reflected onto various objects look really neat. It’s just a shame so many of those objects are boring. I understand that the game wants me to hide in little corners and behind boxes and so forth, but this ship has to be filled with people who have seasonal affective disorder: Nearly all the rooms until the end of the game look the same. It’s room after room of pipes and boxes and dark little corners. Halogen bulbs are only a few bucks now, guys! I appreciate the enviro-consciousness, but seriously… you’d probably have a smaller batch of sneaky-stabby
stowaways if you just lit the place properly. And why can’t I sneak through the ship’s Disco Ball room? How about the spaceship’s Museum of Modern Art?
The majority of the ass-kicking done in the game is with hand-to-hand combat rather than big rifles, and the fighting comes across as more brutal because of this. You really get into the blow-by-blow of the gory fisticuffs. Hey, Riddick is a serious bad mofo, got it?! Guns are SOOO impersonal. Speaking of badasses, you know who else was a bad ass? That guy in The Fast and the Furious! Man, he could race those cars like they were on rails or something! I dunno, I just had a sudden desire to see that movie again? Don’t you?
The problem with the fighting engine is there are far too many triggered events which you have no control over. Don’t get me wrong, it makes the game look cooler for it, but it only adds to the obvious linearity of most areas. In fact, far too many times, the game relies on you to trigger a random event to get to the next area. There was one specific box-filled wonderland that I had to jump onto juuuuust right to trigger the proper graphical sequence. I spent twenty minutes trying to figure this out. Lame. Speaking of lame, this game makes the cardinal sin of FPS’s: jumping puzzles. How many times do we have to tell you game designers? Jumping puzzles are to first person shooters as Domino’s is to pizza places. Please stop doing them. Please.
Oh, and did I mention the AI? Yeah, it sucks. And when I say sucks, I mean it with lots of emphasis. Let me give you some examples of this super-sized suckitudinalness. Hey Mr. Drone guy and your drone friends, look over here! I’m in this corner just waiting to be killed. Oh, instead of shooting from a safe distance, you all run right at me where my tiny blade can reach your vital drone parts? That’s not very smart! My favorite laugh out loud moment was when dealing with a group of the human characters in a room. See, I’m supposed to sneak up on each of them and take them out, one by one. I do this to the first guy, but get caught. (By the way, when someone sees you in the game, they yell out “BAARRRGHH!” to signal their displeasure at your arrival). The “BAARRRGHH!” group rushes me, and I crouch back into a corner. Guess they weren’t programmed with the ability to crouch or crawl, so they all just stood around by the grate I was hiding in. A few seconds later, they go, “Ahh, forget about it…” while their comrade lies on the floor with fatal stab wounds. I do this for all five guys left in the room. First the stabbing, then the “BARRRGHHH!”, then the crouchies, then the “Ahh, forget about it…” Bodies pile up, and apparently it’s no big deal to these guards for more than fifteen seconds. Whoops.
Multiplayer in the game was a pretty good time to be had, I must say. There are some interesting modes that are above the usual deathmatch affair you should check out. My favorite was the Pitch Black mode. One person plays as Riddick, and the rest play as guards. You really have to have coordinate well with your team in this mode. The racist pre-teens online get very angry at you when you fail to cover your proper area. Good times. You know what else had good times? That Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift movie! Maaaaan, they were all like, “I’m gonna drift the Ess out of these cars, B’s… IN TOKYO!!
What? Diesel wasn’t in that one? Bow Wow?!? Eff.
After having my fill of Assault on Dark Athena (Oh, it was dark, man..), I went back and played Escape From Butcher Bay. I’m glad I did; it’s a better game. The level design is better, and there are way less frustrating moments of not knowing where the hell to go. I’d recommend anyone who picks this game up to play it first: not to catch up on the story per-se, it’s just a more fun game.
Okay, so my free video game didn’t exactly blow me away, but it’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of fun to be had in this collection. The main game is too damn linear, but it has moments of being amazing. As is, you are running from one box-filled room to another too many times. Still, the fighting is pretty good; better than Monolith’s Condemned if you ask me. The addition of the original Riddick game is the surprising value of this package; perhaps there should have been more emphasis on actually getting two games for your money. There’s only a small sticker in the corner of the cover that is easily missed. Escape from Butcher Bay is a polished last-gen game, but Dark Athena unfortunately feels this way, too. It’s still, however, one of the better written games on the system. The story, sans the one-liners, is quite engaging and is probably one of the best reasons to pick this one up. Hey, if you aren’t up on purchasing it, maybe they’ll send you a free game, too! Just remember, for you, it’ll probably just be the terrorists.
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