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Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

13 May

Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena contains the sequel as well as a remade version of the original 2004 game Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. I played both games for the first time for this review, so I won’t be making any graphical comparisons between the original Escape from Butcher Bay and the remade version.

Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay

So let’s follow the timeline and start with the first game: Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. As it is with all Riddick games and movies, the main character is Riddick (played by Vin Diesel). People who aren’t familiar with the Riddick license know Diesel in mainstream movies such as The Fast and the Furious and xXx. In which case you’ll have more experience with the hot-headed alpha-male Vin Diesel rather than the cold and calculating character he plays as the role of Riddick: the role Vin Diesel was born to play. Diesel never does emotion well, but he does do cold badass well.

You begin the game captive inside a mercenary’s ship on the way to the ultra-max prison; Butcher Bay. Upon your arrival, a short tutorial will start (which I won’t spoil). Afterwards you’re introduced to the prison warden Hox and his right hand man Abbot (played by Xzibit). Once in the prison you’ll quickly discover that the balance of power does not support your escape plans. Your first mission allows you to change that. Escape is achievable in many different ways, but they all boil down to doing other inmates favors, some of them really fun and interesting, others—not so much.

The social interaction and game economy comes largely into play here and it works well. The economy functions as expected; do people favors and they give you credits. You can then use those credits to buy items like tools, drugs or knives from other inmates. The economy system lasts for a few short hours before you’re thrown into the depths of combat. You never really revisit these aspects of the game. It’s a shame because I felt it was one of the most interesting parts of the game.

The combat itself has three aspects: stealth, melee and shooting. The stealth is remarkably good in this game. So much so that I wish the entire game consisted of it. Even thought most of the combat can be done with stealth, there are times that force you to go head on guns blazing.

This game, much like Manhunt, is all about the shadows. If you stay in the shadows you’re virtually invisible. You can then use your advantage and execute sweet looking stealth kills that are equally satisfying every time. Should you be spotted you can retreat around a corner and hide in nearby shadows to lose your pursuers, as long as they don’t see you entering the shadows. It might sound boring, but after a while they give some of the guards flashlights. You have to do your best to stay away from the flashlight beams as you navigate through the shadows in order to reach the best strategic position to start the encounter.

The melee combat is straight forward. One shoulder button blocks and another attacks but how you combine these with careful timing makes all the difference. All the melee weapons in the game require different tactics because they all have different effects on the enemy. Some will stun. Some will weaken. Others will simply deliver a lot of damage.  The melee system works very well with dispatching standard enemies. It feels satisfying and surprisingly realistic. But…and you knew there’d be a “but”… at some points in the game you’ll be asked to eliminate boss characters with melee combat. This does not work very well—at least not on the normal difficulty level. The bosses simply have WAY too much health and it can take several minutes of stab after stab (in the face!) before they die. While you—the supposed “ultimate badass of the universe” —can only take a handful before you go down. This lack of balance completely breaks the immersion of the game. I had to go check an online guide to make sure I was doing it right…I was. Apparently I just sucked at it.

The shooting functions as a means to an end. That’s pretty much it. There’s nothing original or interesting about it, it’s just there as an option…one that I don’t really appreciate. An enemy will take several shotgun blasts to the chest and survive, but if you so much as graze the head he’ll collapse on the spot. The aim assist is too noticeable. You basically just have to point in the general direction of the bad guys and the curser will magically find them. The one really good weapon was the stun gun which incapacitates enemies instantly and silently. It also has infinite ammunition.

There are also some sections where you control a mech—a big walking robot with infinite machine gun ammunition and rockets. While in the mech suit you’re basically invincible and plow through everything in your way. It’s fun and changes the pacing a little, but when it’s over it definitely feels good to be back in control of the more sleek and agile Riddick.

In the end the game is a bit dated but definitely still worth purchasing. The stealth gameplay alone assures it. If stealth gameplay isn’t your thing, you might want to focus your time on the sequel: Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.

Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

I’ve decided to treat Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena as an expansion pack rather than an actual sequel, because the truth is there really isn’t much new in it. You start right where Escape from Butcher Bay left off; drifting through space in cryosleep when a merc ship moonlighting as a scavenger helps itself and wheels you in on their tractor…chain.

As the mercs are breaking into your ship, you find a convenient crawl space to hide in. When they finally make it inside you’ll be introduced to the games main antagonist: Revas, the merc ship’s captain. From there you move on to Assault Dark Athena, dispatching drones soldiers and mechs in an effort to escape the ship. You’ll do this by mostly going head-on, guns blazing. But there are a few sections where stealth and melee gameplay is handsomely complimented.

Among some of the new weapons of the game are the twin knives called Ulaks. These knives improve the calibre of the melee combat dramatically from the first game. Now you won’t have to hit someone 10 times in the face. Just a few very quick swings will drop your enemy. They also have some of the coolest kill animations I have ever seen. Other than that the melee combat is pretty much just the same as found in Escape from Butcher Bay. The stealth gameplay is only slightly changed. It’s much easier to quickly react to being spotted.

But most of Dark Athena revolves around shooting, and that’s pretty much identical to the original. You are basically stuck with the same selection of guns except for the S.C.A.R. gun, which makes the entire last half of the game a cake-walk. The only other addition is how you can pick up drones and use their grafted-on guns when in a pinch, but in the cases where you would actually have any use of this ability, you usually want to stay quiet and sneak instead.

The first half of Assault on Dark Athena is great, it’s consists mostly of stealth gameplay and the characters you meet are interesting and entertaining. But I feel like they blew it for the second half, you go around in the open blasting people with a freaking cannon—not very subtle. And the last boss has horrible game design written all over it, you will literally have no idea what to do unless you get really lucky or read a guide. In the end it doesn’t live up to the original, and that’s even after having just played the original now.

The package also includes a multiplayer feature with several modes, the most interesting being “Pitch Black”. In “Pitch Black” one of the players are chosen to be Riddick at the beginning of the round, and as the name suggest the level is in total darkness. The player playing as Riddick has the advantage of being able to see in the dark through the “nightshine” ability, but has very little health and has to avoid the other player’s flashlights. If Riddick is spotted he will die almost instantly, but then again if Riddick get’s close enough to an opponent to do a melee attack it’s an instant free kill. If anyone kills Riddick that player will become Riddick.

The few times I got to be Riddick I found it really entertaining and it appealed to the sadistic side in me, but when I wasn’t Riddick I found myself running around like an idiot almost never seeing anyone—let alone Riddick—before the match was over. You also have your standard fare of shooter multiplayer modes which can all be ignored since the shooting in this game is not exactly top notch.

So in the end I have to conclude that this game is worth purchasing, but only barely so. It’s got so much content that you’ll likely not want to play this game in just a few sittings, and if you like this sort of gameplay it’ll be more than worth it. This is a game with many different parts, and all of those parts aren’t polished to the same level of shine. But the parts that do shine, shine brightly enough for the rest.

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Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

Published by: Atari

Developed by: Starbreeze AB

ESRB: M for Mature

Platforms: PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360

Release Date: April 7, 2009

Genre: First Person Shooter / Stealth

Good v. Evil: Fable 2

12 May

By Randy Yasenchak

Elder-Geek.com’s newest feature “Good v. Evil” is a video series dedicated to the games that give you moral choices. In the development process of these games, sometimes one type of playthrough unintentially becomes superior to the other. Not everyone has the time or the patience to play through both sides of these tales. So were are here to let you know which way to play feels best.

Sometimes it’s good to be bad.

The Fanboy Phenomenon

06 May

I often hear people proclaiming themselves to be “fanboys and proud of it.” I despise that statement and it’s the sole inspiration for this article.

The term “fanboy” isn’t an official word in any language and has no known (firm) roots, so therefore we have to accept the popular understanding of the term. A fanboy is described as an individual who has an obsessive and irrational loyalty to a specified subject, in this case games and game consoles. This is the accepted definition of the term and if you disagree you’re just going to have to live with it until you can change the majority’s opinion to match your own.

Fanboys and Sports:

So I started trying to compare the fanboy phenomenon to other forms or entertainment or ideals, and although you can easily apply the term too many sects in politics and especially religion, I found that the term was most easily compared to sports fans, because although religious and political zealots certainly are obsessive and irrational, they aren’t necessarily loyal; they will abandon a faith or political party if it changes to much compared to their conservative ideals. So for that reason I went with sports, or in particular; sports fans.

Any average sports fan usually has a team or player they favour and stay loyal to no matter how badly they do in the sport. This is highly irrational, if a team or player falls back in their sport it is most likely because they are inadequate compared to the other teams or players. At the same time if a team or player rises ahead of the curve then they have proven themselves to be superior and therefore worthy of applause and recognition. And although these superior teams or players have a larger chance of attaining fans, some or most of those same fans will then stick with the team or player even if they fall behind. Yes there can be several reasons for this such as a physically hurt player, but in the bigger picture it’s very simple; the best team simply is the best team.

As previously stated, this mentality is highly irrational. I know a lot of people will try to make the argument that I’m not a sports fan and therefore my input in this topic is worthless, however just because I’m not a particularly big sports fan doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the skill and dedication most if not all sports requires of its players…again though that only counts for those that are at the top. And besides, you don’t have to be a sports fan to utilize critical thinking.

Fanboys and Music:

I had this discussion with a friend and he brought up the argument that in a way I too am a fanboy when it comes to music, I naturally disagree but acknowledge that there are indeed fanboys in music.

When comparing fanboys in games to fanboys in music you run into a few problems. First and most notably you run in to the problem of taste, but you have taste in games to and that doesn’t apply to the fanboy mentality and so it shouldn’t in music either. Taste is purely subjective and ranges from the simples pop and punk to the most complex classical or experimental music, but even the most close minded genre, artist or band fan is able to recognize the good and the bad in any genre, artist or band, even if those goods and bads are subjective. The more educated music fans will even go so far as to be almost completely objective in their analysis, you often see this in music critics and that’s why so many people discard them, since they don’t care how complex the beat or undertones of the song is or isn’t, they just like the sound of it.

But as I mentioned I do believe there are fanboys in music as well, some people will literally fool themselves into believing they like an artist’s new album even though they deep down were disappointed, this is most often based on the artists’ previous work and this is where we can apply the obsessive and irrational loyalty description. How do I know this you ask? They might just happen to like the changes the artist/band made you say? Well sure, some people do…but others have come out later admitting that they really didn’t like it after all, this usually happens when they’ve simply had enough or have “seen the light”, most people who experience this self denial probably never stop.

Conclusion:

There are many more comparisons I could make, but then this article would be way to long and besides; I think I got my point across. So let’s go back to the first part of this feature and look at the following quotes:

I’m a Sony fanboy, and proud of it!
I’m a Microsoft fanboy, and proud of it!
I’m a Nintendo fanboy, and proud of it!

So far I’ve only explained my later thoughts on the fanboy phenomenon, but not really my inspiration. What ticked me off were not these people being fanboys, if I got annoyed every time I met one of those I would be a wreck. It is their announcement and pride that annoys me, as I’ve mentioned quite a few times in this blog being a fanboy is highly irrational, and irrationality is basically the same as idiocy. Thus these people are proclaiming themselves as proud idiots, which needless to say is HIGHLY IRRATIONAL.

And let’s make one thing clear, the console makers aren’t loyal to you at all. They’re loyal only to the bottom line. They will do anything they can to make money of off you, but in order to do that they (usually) have to make you want to pay for their service and/or product, and when market competition comes into the picture you get quality. If they think they can make better money elsewhere they will leave the loyal fanboys in the dust without even a second thought, it just so happens that because of market competition they usually can’t make better money elsewhere…but if they do that will spawn a whole new type of fanboy relative to that market.

Now remember, all this doesn’t mean that you can’t have a preference towards any particular console or game. Heck, I do! It’s important to remember that preference, or shall we say “taste,” is not the same as fanboyism, here’s an easy to remember way to distinguish the two:

A fanboy clings to the ship even while it’s sinking.
A person with preference knows when it’s time to jump ship.

And that’s it, I’m sorry if this was long but I felt it was necessary. I would also like to add that nothing I’ve said in this post is based on any type of statistic, but more my own experience and understanding of the subjects, so take that for what it’s worth. Hope you liked it and please send me some feedback either to matsp@elder-geek.com or on our forums.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Mats Paasche