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Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is Starbreeze Studio’s second foray into the Riddick universe and a second chapter to the events in 2004’s Escape from Butcher Bay. Originally intended as a re-release of the Xbox game Butcher Bay, since the Xbox 360 lacked backwards compatibility, Athena evolved into an all-new campaign and gained multiplayer as well. With a polished version of Butcher Bay on the disk, there’s plenty to enjoy here. Assault on Dark Athena is more of a Chronicles of Riddick (the movie) than a Pitch Black as Butcher Bay greatly outshines its successor. 

I heard you like games so we put a game in your game so you can…oh never mind.

If you haven’t played Butcher Bay, Dark Athena is worth picking up solely for that reason. Richard B. Riddick must escape a maximum security prison, and then a maximum-maximum security prison with all the backstabbing, brawling, and cigarette hoarding you could hope for with such a mission. There’s a great combination of horror, stealth and open world elements that make it unique in the realm of first person games and the Vin Diesel/Xzibit juggernaut adds earnest credibility to the ridiculously macho dialogue. The remastered graphics are a nice edition. While still fairly average, both Butcher Bay and Athena cleverly use depth of field and lighting effects to their advantage. In short, Butcher Bay is still every bit as good as it seemed in 2004.

If The Chronicles of Riddick (the movie) tempered Universal’s desire to continue the film franchise, Assault on Dark Athena may do the same for the continuation of the game series. The game flounders between the core stealth mechanic of Butcher Bay and a generic first person shooter sans the compelling plotline and depth. If Athena wasn't an afterthought to Butcher Bay’s re-release, it sure feels like one. Dark Athena begins with the capture of Riddick’s vessel by ruthless bounty hunters and his subsequent attempt to thwart his captors. The first half the game is decently executed, balancing the stealth play and letting Riddick's unique vision and vicious Ulaks--the dual-wielded hooked blades with a gruesome execution style. There’s great satisfaction to be had in gravitating between being the hunted and being the hunter and a thoughtfulness to how you proceed through the initial levels.

There’s also an attempt to include the others imprisoned on the ship into the missions, but nowhere near the depth of the interaction in Butcher Bay, which successfully broadened the gameplay with side missions and hidden benefits to “making friends.” But even the secondary characters you interact with in Athena are less interesting than Butcher Bay’s Johns and Abbott. Also, Riddick is perhaps too nice of a guy, despite his callous attitude, to be convincingly badass. Athena feels like a shallow imitation, and while the stealth sequences make it enjoyable, they suffer from halting load screens far too often, which is unfortunately a carry over from Butcher Bay. Stealth is also broken up by bland segments where Riddick pilots drones and a mech suit, which are far less exciting though not completely objectionable. This is where the game throws stealth out the window and becomes a painfully generic shooter.

And now for something completely different...

It shouldn’t be a spoiler to tell you that Riddick escapes the ship (after all the game employs a fairly run-of the-mill action plot). Right when the game seems like it’s over (and probably should be), Riddick is grounded at a hostile spaceport and needs to fight his way out.  With open, sun-drenched environments, Riddick’s night vision is rendered useless, and Ulaks evisceration is replaced with traditional gunplay. In fact, one of your first missions leads to a gun with unlimited ammo, nullifying the need to use anything else for the duration of the game.

More egregious than the boring shift in approach is introducting and then discarding the stealth element. The game never seems to adapt to the lack of stealth gameplay with each battle becoming a repetitive lesson in trial and error. There’s an irritating mistake in the structure of the game as well. The environmental puzzle meant to teach you about your powerful SCAR gun is clumsily placed. With just the levels that take place on the actual Dark Athena, the game would have felt like a nice mini-expansion, but the latter segments bring Athena into full-length game territory, and the gameplay isn’t strong enough to support it.


The dark...are you afraid? I'm not— the dark is afraid of me.

Before you pack up your Ulaks, there’s multiplayer action to be had.  The standout mode included in Athena is Pitch Black, where Riddick is hunted down in near total darkness with the hunters relying on flashlights mounted to their guns to find him.  Whoever finds Riddick gets to play as him and sneak up on opponents to eviscerate them. It's tense and somewhat scary on maps just the right size to keep the gameplay active. But like the hide-and-seek in the dark mode of Condemned 2’s multiplayer, the novelty wears off soon enough despite nicely integrating the most compelling elements of the single player game.  From there, the spectrum of multiplayer modes is great for the player with A.D.D.  Most of the matches are fast paced, short in length and include somewhat old school feeling weapon/health/shield pickups.  Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and 1v1/2v2 arena matches accompany the Pitch Black mode. There’s fun and variety, but not longevity in Dark Athena’s multiplayer.

You're messin' with the natural order of things here, Riddick.

From the hoarding of bounty cards in lieu of collecting cigarettes to the fragmented attempt at blending stealth and action, Dark Athena feels like simplistic, frustrating, and shallow version of Butcher Bay.  It falters interminably in its second half by ignoring all of the elements that made its predecessor so great. All of the additional content pales in comparison to the prison sim-style of Butcher Bay, but thankfully, its re-release is worth the cost of the game and getting in a few rounds of the inspired Pitch Black mode helps the case. With Butcher Bay setting such a high bar, it’s no surprise that Athena falls short, but it’s disappointing to see its potential squandered on painful trial and error and mediocre shooting sequences. I would have waited several more years to see a fully realized sequel, rather than a fractured expansion that forgets the most important elements of the Riddick universe.

Article written by: Abigail Heppe