Feature Review: TCoR: Assault on Dark Athena

Players control Riddick from a first-person-perspective. Your mission is simple enough: find and murder the ship’s Captain, Revas, killing anyone who gets in your way. To do this, you’ll need help and information, which you can glean by reaching the ship’s prison decks and talking to the various prisoners there, who are all too happy to tell you what they know if it means trouble for their captors. Using this approach, Starbreeze gets a lot of mileage out of their stages by treating the prison block and other areas as hubs, requiring Riddick to backtrack to familiar areas frequently while achieving goals. Luckily, new enemies and challenges always await you when you return to an area, so it never really feels like a cost-cutter tactic.

The problem is that, as tough as Riddick is, he’s still only one man, and a balls-out, gung-ho assault will quickly see him dead. True to his film persona, Riddick is at his best when ambushing enemies out of hiding, taking them out silently one at a time while the others shake in fear, wondering what’s happening. There are plenty of shadows, crawl-spaces and nooks and crannies for Riddick to hide in while he waits for the perfect moment to strike. Then there’s also Riddick’s eye-shine ability, which allows him to see in the dark, so if you can trap a group of enemies in a room and destroy the lights, he is at a significant advantage. Riddick can find an entire arsenal of weapons, such as various firearms, hairpins, shivs, clubs, and of course, the Ulaks, his iconic curved knives from the film. The firearms are usually quite powerful, but they draw a lot of attention, so it’s best to stick to his melee weapons most of the time.

As always, Starbreeze have gone out of their way to ensure that this Riddick game is as polished and pretty as they could make it. This digital incarnation of Vin Diesel looks so good it might as well be the man himself, and his voice work for the character is top notch, too. One of the strengths of the Riddick franchise is that it allows for slightly more fantasy-like designs than in most contemporary sci-fi, and Starbreeze ran with this idea. The result is some of the most interesting and menacing-looking characters and locales you’ll see in any game. The Dark Athena, for instance, looks like some kind of deep-sea crustacean predator when you see it from afar for the first time, with the spider-like movements of its capture arms reinforcing this image. The grim atmosphere of the game is also helped along by great musical scores, superb lighting, and some well-directed cinematics. You can also glean a lot of extra story by listening to conversations between the Dark Athena crewmembers before killing them, and sometimes they’re really funny.

Assualt on Dark Athena has clearly been a labour of love for Starbreeze, and the game shines in almost every area – even the multiplayer is fairly entertaining, if straightforward and seemingly tacked-on. Some might point out that Dark Athena is little more than a sequel to Butcher Bay, and not all that different gameplay-wise – but I find it hard to see that as a bad thing.