Game Review: Chronicles of Riddick- Assault on Dark Athena (PS3)

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, which contains both the titular game and its precursor, 2004′s Escape From Butcher Bay, goes a long way to addressing and, for the most part, improving, the various beefs I have with the genre that is my least favourite and yet the most popular among my “demographic”, the first-person shooter. Why is it I’ve never quite warmed up to this bastion of hardcore gaming, and what improvements does Riddick’s interpolation of the stealth genre bring to the table? Read on, Macduff!

SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Because video games are about navigating through screen space (and overcoming the obstacles and enemies within that space), it’s always important for the player to have (and for the designer to impart) a sense of screen geography, of how big the pit before them is, how much time it will take for the enemy to reach them, where the enemies are in relation to the player. Your average first-person shooter doesn’t do that for me; they often leave me feeling discombobulated. There’s no sense of body, of weight, of exactly how high and how far I can jump (in those games where jumping is required). While it’s less “realistic”, I’ve always preferred third-person action games because they give me a better sense of where and who I am.

But because the two Riddick games depend on stealth– on sneaking up on guards instead of blasting your way through, on finding cover, hiding and waiting breathlessly for the moment to strike, on inching your way slowly across a room– becoming more aware of your surroundings is one of its defining game mechanics. It makes that sense of uncertainty an asset instead of a crutch. The inclusion of the blue tinting when in stealth mode– which indicates that you are completely hidden in the shadows and invisible to your enemies– compensates for the lack of body sense. The game’s designers give the player all the tools they need to succeed; should they be spotted and/or killed, the player has no one to blame but themselves. This, in turn, ensures that no matter how difficult the game is– and I found it quite challenging even on “Easy” mode– that difficulty is implemented more-than-fairly.

PACING

I like fast-paced action games, but for many of the spatial-related reasons mentioned above, first-person shooters are a little too fast-paced. The fact that the camera– i.e., the way in which I receive the information necessary to play the game– and the gun-site– i.e., the way in which I play the game– are one-and-the-same has always been a major cause of frustration. If some little alien comes scurrying along the floor at me, I have to tilt down to try and shoot it– and now it’s stinging me, and I have to back up in order to shoot it, and, oh my goodness, there’s something behind me, and I whirl the camera around trying to find that one and it hits me again and I have to tilt the camera another way to hit its weak-point and sometimes when I’m whirling around it overshoots and I have to swivel back and now it’s hit me again and, oh, look at that, I’m dead. Again.

With Riddick, on the other hand, the stealth gameplay dictates a pace that’s more amiable to the aiming/viewing camera. I can line up my shots carefully, wait until a guard comes into view, sneak up on them and snap their necks, strike from the shadows and retreat. Granted, there are a couple of faster-paced exceptions that force the player to adapt the more traditional (and, for me, rather frustrating) run’n'gun approach, and we’ll get to those and discuss the implications thereof in due time.

For now, let’s look at these two games in a little more depth, starting with the first.

ESCAPE FROM BUTCHER’S BAY

TUTORIAL

You can tell a lot about a game, right off the bat, from its opening. As I detailed in my study of Super Mario Bros. (see Russell’s Quarterly No. 5, pg. 24-52), a game’s first level is “the most important” one, for “[it] is the first level that gives us an immediate sense of what is in store for us. It is the first level that makes us want to play the second, and the second the third, and so forth; this flow of desire begins with the very first stage, and if it does not generate the necessary momentum, then the player has no reason to play the game… The first level of a game, then, must contain the entire game in miniature without exhausting the game’s content.”

Butcher’s Bay’s tutorial level does this quite ably. After an opening cinematic establishes that bounty hunter slash mercenary Johns is escorting Riddick to Butcher’s Bay, a particularly desolate and inescapable “slam”, we find ourselves at the gates of the prison with two other prisoners. One of them suggests that while Johns has his back to us that we break his neck; a flash of onscreen text tells us how to do so. The emphasis from the start is on stealth.

Upon breaking Johns’s neck, a number of guards come pouring out of the Bay, guns blazing, and the emphasis switches to evasion. I will admit that I was so disoriented at first that I missed the escape hatch directly behind me, running past it and getting riddled with bullets. On my second attempt, I found the hatch and down I went.

Before that, however, I noted that one of the other prisoners had tried to grab a gun and was electrocuted. As Vin Diesel helpfully explained in voice-over, the weapons at Butcher’s Bay are DNA-encoded. As if to test the theory, after I had knocked out a guard in a particularly brutal bit of melee combat, I attempted to pick up his gun and got a jolt. That’ll teach me to doubt the Diesel.

Imagine my surprise, then, a few guards later, when I found myself in possession of a gun. What was special about this gun that I could pick it up? Strange. I also noted that the ammo is displayed on the weapon itself; this keeps the HUD down to the bare minimum– just a life bar in the upper left hand corner of my screen.

Soon after gaining the ammo for my weapon, I found myself sloshing about in the darkness of a sewer tunnel. My gun possesses a flash-light, but that in turn could alert the guards in the tunnel to my presence. What followed was a tense sequence of moving, toggling the light on-and-off, shooting at a guard, retreating, returning, attempting not to arouse the other guards. It was tense stealth-based shooter game play, and despite the fact that I died a few times, I found myself having fun with an FPS.

That’s when a bright light filled the tunnel, and I heard a voice telling me to rise and shine. Cut scene: I’m back on Johns’s ship, Johns is still alive (I *knew* his character was in the movie), and the preceding was all a dream. And, usually, “it’s all a dream” is a cop-out of grievous magnitude.

But in this case, it worked. First of all, because it operated from a sort of dream logic; the pace was deliberately too fast and certain incongruous details (Johns’s death, the sudden ability to pick up the gun) were present. Secondly, and far more importantly, it constructed a miniature narrative that gets the player acquainted with the various types of actions required to play the rest of the game. Each element fits effortless and systemically within this narrative, flowing naturally; some tutorial stages, by contrast, strain credibility to try and fit all the disparate game play elements into a single level. This is a testament not only to the narrative skills of Riddick’s designers but also to the fact that the various game play elements all fit together naturally in the first place.

It also worked on a formal level. A lot of tutorials feel very different from the rest of the game; for example, the various on-screen hints and prompts are in greater abundance. Some games try to mask this by trying to fold the overtly instructional tutorial into the progression of their plots; some games emphasize this by creating a special “training room” (consider, for example, the tutorial stage in Katamari Damacy). Butcher’s Bay marries both approaches together, by setting it formally apart from the rest of the game (pre-credits sequence, all-a-dream) without ignoring the story’s primary focus and tensions (escaping from the prison, antagonism between Riddick and Johns).

It also serves as the first telling of a game-play sequence that structures the entire game and serves as a potent source of excitement. In this first sequence, Riddick starts off with only his fists and, through combat prowess and some Mr. Sneaky stuff, he gains weaponry, thus becoming more powerful. When it is revealed that it is all a dream, of course, Riddick is left again with only his fists.

When we regain control of Riddick in his cell, we set about the task of gaining some weaponry for ourselves. First, we get some knuckledusters, then a shiv, then, after we get our DNA added into the prison’s database, we start picking up assault rifles and shotguns. We lose all but one of these when we fall into the pit; we slowly regain our weapons until after a boss fight with a guard, Abbott. A cut-scene moves us to a higher security level, and we find ourselves empty-handed again. More than that, our DNA is no longer in the database. (More on this, and the acquisition of the tranq. gun that dramatically changes the game play, later.)

We will find ourselves empty-handed one more time, and one more time we’ll have to work to build up our arsenal. By my count, the player has to start out empty-handed four times: once for the tutorial dream sequence, and once for each security level. What this does is it makes each acquisition of a weapon that much more crucial and that much more game changing. It’s less like picking up a weapon and more like picking up a power-up; it foregrounds the start-weak-and-grow-powerful mechanic at the heart of so many games and ensures that the player never gets to the point where they’re vastly over-powered.

DIFFICULTY

In fact, I often felt slightly under-powered and at times over-whelmed; Butcher’s Bay’s difficulty level is fairly high. Not only did I die on the game’s first screen, but I died several times through-out the game. When you find yourself exposed to gunfire, you’re really exposed; a couple of guards and/or turrets working in tandem can make mince-meat of your health bar in a manner of seconds. When I was able to respond in kind, my weapon’s aiming dot was just that, a tiny dot.

Compare this to the more straightforward first-person shooter BioShock; thanks to a generous first-aid stack limit (Riddick does not carry any kind of health power-ups, but has to rely on strategically-stationed Nano-Med machines) and larger aiming dots, I’ve yet to die once despite the fact that I am frequently surprised by suddenly-appearing psychopathic splicers and frustrated by having to whirl the camera around trying to discover who the heck is hitting me.

I don’t make the comparison, however, to be detrimental towards Riddick; the high difficulty level is fitting and purposeful. When you find yourself opened up to a barrage of enemy gun fire, it’s because you haven’t been paying enough attention to your environment or because you haven’t exercised the right amount of patience. The next time through, you’ll be more careful, wait longer, and look closer. Or, to put it more succinctly, the game’s difficulty teaches you the skills necessary to overcome its obstacles. If Riddick gave you BioShock’s larger aiming dots and stackable health-kits, you could make a stupid mistake and survive it, just barely making your way through to the next challenge. The game would be easier, but you wouldn’t learn anything, you wouldn’t actually be getting better at the game.

And that’s not to say that the game’s difficulty level is necessarily a punishing or unforgiving one. Quite the contrary: the game’s designers want you to get to the next challenge. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve got one bar of health left and you’re about to embark on a particularly tense section crammed with guards. Try as you might, you just can’t sneak or snipe your way to the other side; you just don’t have enough health to make it. Fail enough times and the game will tip the scales into your favour by replenishing another unit of health. That extra unit was just what this player needed more than once. And though I only noticed it happening one time, I’m pretty sure the game also gave me some extra ammo the last time through in an area in which I had been hopelessly outgunned.

These little acts of sympathy towards the player, coupled with the fact that the game’s difficulty stemmed from and supported the stealth game play style, ensured that, while certainly difficult, the game’s difficulty level was fairly implemented and a sign of strong systemic design.

SHOWERS SEQUENCE

If every game should spring from a strong and unique high concept (in this case, bringing a more overt stealth element to FPS game play), every game designer should be able to come up with multiple strong and unique ways to deliver on that concept. Failure to do so can result in long-and-tedious more-of-the-same, in one-trick ponies that squander their novelty’s potential.

Butcher’s Bay, thankfully, features a number of tense sequences that deliver on this central concept, and the protagonist’s ability to see in complete darkness. For example, shortly after gaining the eyeshine ability, you find yourself in the brightly-lit showers utilized by the prison’s guards. To doubly emphasize the need for stealth, the Diesel reminds himself to maintain a low profile.

Strategically-positioned light switches plunge the guards into darkness; using your eyeshine, you can sneak up behind them and perform a stealth kill. However, the guards aren’t completely stupid. They don’t just stand there in the dark when the lights go off; they grab their guns, turn on their flashlights, and head out to investigate.

Staying out of the way yet observing your prey, not being afraid to strike yet not being too hasty: the resulting balancing act results in a tense and rewarding experience. Fail in one way or the other, and one of the guards will sound an alert. Then, you’ll have a fire-fight on your hands.

In fact, that’s what happened the first few times. And once I had mastered the art of taking down the first four guards, I found others waiting for me around the corner, others that I couldn’t sneak up on or around. I back-tracked, searching for some other avenue of escape, some other light switch I might have missed. I went up and down the showers and locker room and still it seemed that I was missing something.

That’s when I went back to the lockers, and opened them. I had noticed before that I could open them, and had grabbed some ammo/cigarettes (more on that unsavory bit of business later on). I thought it was a nice little bonus, a nice way to add a little verisimilitude. I didn’t realize there was more to it than that until I opened the locker containing the guard’s uniform that would allow me to walk brazenly and unnoticed into the guard’s quarters. The sequence that followed was just as tense, as I waited for guards to move away from other guards, made my kill and hid the bodies.

In another game, the designer would have tipped off the player more overtly to the presence of and/or necessity for the uniform. “The locker room. Maybe I can find a disguise here.” But the people at Starbreeze trust that the player will be intelligent enough to put two and two together on their own. (And, it should be noted, most players are much quicker on the uptake than I am.) This makes it more of a real puzzle, and thus its solution proves more of a real reward.

It also emphasizes the stealth theme in a more oblique way; stealth is about paying attention to, sneaking around, and ultimately using your environment to your advantage. Embedding the solution within the environment– that is, in an object that can be interacted with, such as a locker– makes that solution part and parcel with the overriding game play mechanic.

THE TRANQUILIZER GUN

Excluding the melee weapons– such as knuckledusters, clubs, and knives– which figure prominently in the game’s “stealth kill” mechanic but are in that regard largely interchangeable (that is, whatever stealth kill weapon you have is, animations aside, going to bring about the same result: one dead guard), the weapon that best delivers on the game’s marriage of sneaking and shooting is the Tranquilizer Gun. Little surprise, then, that this is the weapon that gets used most often throughout the game.

The Tranquilizer Gun fires a bolt of electricity at a guard, paralyzing them temporarily. The player must kill the guard before the shot wears off– otherwise, the guard will naturally be quite alert. A second jolt from the gun won’t do it; you need to get right up next to him and clobber him with it.

Because the gun takes so long to reload, this requires a bit of stealth and timing. You can’t just walk into a room full of guards and start firing willy-nilly, and if you misfire it will take precious seconds to reload. You still need to wait until the guards are isolated, aim your shot carefully, and be prepared to act at just the right moment.

What sets the Tranquilizer Gun apart from the other weapons—which are not at your disposal, since upon your recapture the warden was smart enough to take your DNA out of the prison’s database– is the required follow-up. While armed with a shotgun, you can hide in the darkness or atop a balcony and line up your shots; because the Tranquilizer Gun requires you to rush up to the afflicted guard in order to finish the job, the added step equals added tension and added exhilaration. It is, more than Dark Athena’s Ulaks, the signature weapon of the Riddick video game franchise.

RUNNING AND GUNNING

While stealth is the name of the game, Butcher’s Bay features a number of sequences that depend more on the traditional shooter formula of shooting the hell out of everything as your rush to your goal. As you can probably intimate by the praise I’ve been heaping on the stealth end of things, as well as my problems with the first-person shooter genre, these were my least favourite sequences in the game. It is a testament to the abilities of the game designers, however, that I found myself having a lot of fun in all but one of these. We’ll cover the fun ones first.

The earliest of these sequences takes place shortly before you acquire the eyeshine ability. Riddick has been tasked with retrieving a radio for a man named Pope Joe who lives in The Pit, deep inside the prison. Also residing there, in near total darkness, are a horde of humanoid creatures that explode satisfyingly with a well-aimed blast of your shotgun. (This visceral and messy exploding-enemy business encourages you to blast through them quickly.)

Because you have not yet gained your eyeshine, and because your gun’s flashlight is burnt out, you must take a number of flares with you as you venture into the narrow tunnels. Throwing a flare will illuminate part of the passageway, allowing you both to see the next corner and the bloodthirsty horde that’s rushing at you. You must throw the flare, switch to your shotgun, blast your way through, and throw the next flare. You’re given a very limited supply of flares, which, unless you’re some kind of gaming god (and I know I’m not) is exactly the number that you’ll need to get through this sequence.

I died many, many, many times before I finally got it right, and part of me has to admit that getting through it had more to do with rote route memorization than any increase in skill on my part. And I did get irritated when changing between the flares and the shotgun; the game doesn’t pause during this process, and you can get yourself attacked while you’re fiddling around with the radial. Ditto for changing between the shotgun and the flares.

But, despite depending on game play skills that I didn’t have and being hard as all get out, I couldn’t help but have fun with the flares sequence. I thought it was a clever way to play with the light-and-shadow motif, that the limited resources created a sense of real danger (one could make the case that the Riddick games also have a survival horror vibe that gets thrown into the stealth-and-shooter mix), and that it made sense for the game to have you be afraid of the dark one last time before giving you the eyeshine ability that gives you an edge over your opponents.

You’re also given an edge, albeit temporarily, when the game puts you in control of a mech. At one point late in the game, Riddick climbs into a Riot Guard suit, which is so satisfying after having to deal with those uber-powered sons-of-seahorses throughout the prison. You’re given unlimited fire power and a generous health bar as you wreak mechanized terror upon your enemies.

This run ‘n’ gun sequence, as well as a later bit that puts you inside the even deadlier Heavy Guard (you get to STEP ON your enemies! awesome!), are so much fun because the player is so ridiculously over-powered. After sneaking around, being careful, and agonizing over every time you take a bullet, wishing you could find a Nano-Med station– it is just plain damn satisfying to cut loose. It provides meaningful balance to the stealth aspects of the game instead of merely acting counter to them.

Which brings us, of course, to the sequence that I found the least entertaining and the most frustrating. Shortly after Riddick has set off a bomb in the prison’s mines, he finds himself falling into a hole occupied by savage man-eating aliens. There’s no dark to cling to, no suit of armour to hide in. You’ve just got to pick up the shotgun, the assault rifle, and some grenades and blast your way through. Three problems:

My first problem with this section is a story problem. For the last few hours, I’ve been using (and loving) the Tranquilizer Gun to dispatch the guards. As I’ve said before, Riddick’s DNA has been removed from the prison database, and since all firearms will electrocute anyone not in the database, I haven’t been able to pick any up. But now, all of the sudden, I’m able to use them again. There’s no cut-scene that explains it, nothing that seems to separate the weapons lying before me from all the others. While I understand the game reason for it– after all, the Tranquilizer Gun isn’t going to be particularly effective against a rampaging horde of aliens– this sudden reversal does create a strong sense of disconnect and takes me out of the experience.

Problem two: whereas the flares sequence took place in tight narrow tunnels, much of the area occupied by these creatures is fairly open. Since the creatures scurry along the ceiling and the floor, and since I can’t see the entire environment at one time, I have to constantly toggle the camera around as I run like a mad-man. This, in turn, doesn’t allow me to get a very good sense of where I am in physical space. In fact, on my first few attempts in the early portions on this stage, I didn’t notice the ramp along the left wall. Said ramp was, of course, where I was supposed to go; instead, I had pressed on to a dead-end cul-de-sac and ended up getting massacred.

Problem three: unlike the man-sized creatures in the flares sequence or the human and/or robot targets in the mech stages, the creatures are at knee-level. Which means I have to tilt the camera down to try and strike their weak point– on their freaking backs, not on their face. And when they’re attacking me, they’re too close for me to get a bead on them. Instead, I have to back up as I’m trying to shoot them and as they’re approaching. Often, I backed up right into another enemy. Which caused me to whirl the camera around as I was attacked from all sides and, well, you know the rest of the story.

While I appreciated the flares sequence and understood the need for the mech stages, this part pretty much stuck out like a sore thumb for me. It seemed so different from the rest of it, and because it was so different it was extremely frustrating. I tried to figure out why on earth the game’s designers, who had made so many strong and dynamic decisions in the rest of the game, would drop the ball so monumentally at this late stage.

I think the answer has something to do with “the climax problem”. In genres with a more deliberate pace, such as a stealth game or a block-puzzle game, you don’t have the same “build” and linear progression of difficulty that a more straightforward action game does. In talking about the stealth genre, Street Fighter tournament player and game balancer David Sirlin pointed to boss battles and other action sequences as the ying to the sneaking yang;

“building an entire game around only sneaking around is a bit much—a bit too repetitive… [Bosses] are the high points—the crests—and the sneaking around parts are the low points—the troughs—of our rising and falling action sine wave.”

And while I recognize the existence of the climax problem in the stealth genre, and while my esteem for the depth of Mr. Sirlin’s insight into game design will never quaver, I think I agree with Jerry Holkins (of Penny Arcade fame) when he weighed in on non-stealth action sequences in the Metal Gear Solid series:

“If we are focusing the aperture exclusively on the game play, I can tell you in only a few words what I don’t like about MGS. If I fail at sneaking, the game ceases to be Metal Gear. In the space of a second, it becomes an incredibly clumsy action game. The boss battles are comprised almost entirely of this other system, a mechanism that has now been exposed for what it is: a punishment.”

Now, coming back to Butcher’s Bay, the action aspects are in this case far from clumsy. Both the melee combat and the shooting are tight and in most cases tied into the sneaking. The only time it really doesn’t work is in this creature sequence because it abandons the sneaking entirely.

If that sequence was removed, would the game suffer from a “climax problem”? Climax being defined not in this case as a worthy conclusion, as I think the game’s final boss battle provides that and as this creature sequence actually comes near the end of the game’s long second act, but rather as the “crests” that Sirlin speaks of? No, I don’t think so; the sections after this sequence are as suspenseful as they come, and the segment that caps it is probably the most climactic in the game. This section, in which you must kill two Riot Guards and several gun-men en route to an escape ship, depends on your ability to sneak into the shadow, use your environment to gain an edge over the Riot Guards, take cover behind crates while you try to pick off a gauntlet of guards, slowly gaining ground.

That section is pretty much what the game is about, and there’s not a scurrying alien to be had.

MINOR QUIBBLES

Upon completing Butcher’s Bay, I found myself armed with a few minor quibbles, though nothing major; besides that annoying creature section, it really is pretty close to a perfect game. Those quibbles are, in no particular order:

The load times. Not so much in general, as they’ve been a part of gaming for several years now, but more than once the following scenario took place: I come to a small room between two doors. As I approach the one ahead of me, the loading bar appears. Ten or twenty seconds later, it has finished loading and the door opens. On the other side of the door is an enemy. They’re firing at me. I retreat to avoid fire. The game starts loading the previous section. Ten or twenty seconds later, it’s done; I approach the door again and it starts loading again. Ten or twenty seconds later…

The collision detection for context-sensitive events, such as pushing the triangle to climb up on some boxes. The key to defeating your first Riot Guard is climbing up on a balcony where you’re safe from his fire. And I figured as much on my first attempt and tried to climb up. It didn’t climb. I figured the boxes were too high up and tried to fight through it. Several deaths later, I tried to climb up again. Didn’t work. Tried to kill him on the ground a few more times, once again got my head handed to me. On my fifth attempt to climb up, it climbed up. There were a couple of sections like this, and I think the detection bubble should have been widened a bit; and, since firing is handled with R2 and context-sensitive events like climbing, entering grates, and moving bodies is handled with triangle, it’s not like there’s any danger of someone accidentally climbing up when they meant to shoot somebody.

I found the map to be extremely unhelpful. I’m used to a map screen that indicates, if not my next goal or side mission, at the very least my position. While I understand that Riddick wouldn’t have a GPS on his person and that not knowing exactly where you are or how different areas re-connect and overlap is part of the stealth experience, I really would have liked a map that had greater utility.

As I mentioned before, switching between weapons happens in real time. By pressing R1, I bring up the radial; then I have to move the thumb-stick in the direction of the weapon I’d like to select. Sometimes I move it in the wrong direction, sometimes I don’t move it forcefully enough; while it’s actually a pretty decent interface, the real-time aspect makes it difficult, especially when I’ve got people shooting at me.

Finally, there’s a matter of the game’s extra content. To unlock it, you have to find packs of cigarettes. While each pack is labeled with some bit of humour hinting at its lethal nature, the “find every pack of cigarettes to unlock the bonus material” thing is a really bad idea and in really bad taste. While I’m not going to accuse them of aiming anything at children, as this is an M game that more than earns its rating with over-the-top violence and copious amounts of swearing, the game’s designers had to know that this decision was going to rub a few people pretty raw. And, since my father died of lung cancer at the age of 38, it rubbed me pretty raw indeed.

ASSAULT ON DARK ATHENA

CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS

I was pretty relieved when I came across the first collectable in the included sequel, Assault on Dark Athena, which take the form of hidden “bounty cards”. This is not only less scuzzy than its predecessor’s cigarette packs, but it also makes sense within Dark Athena’s mercenary/pirate setting.

It’s not the only thing that’s been improved. The use of the left and right buttons on the D-Pad as “hot buttons” that you can assign to frequently used weapons goes a long way towards preventing the player from being murdered while he’s trying to switch to a more useful weapon. The load times are less frequent and less likely to cause a “door problem”; the collision detection for climbing on boxes presented no hiccoughs this time around. And as for the map: well, there is no map. Or, at least, there is no map on the pause menu; instead, you’ll have to consult “you-are-here” displays present through-out the Dark Athena.

You would think, after my above rant, that this would irritate me but it’s actually quite the opposite; I think the removal of the map screen is a very smart decision. The map function doesn’t stick out as being useless or poorly implemented because it doesn’t exist; furthermore, as it would detract from the experience of sneaking around a hostile ship, it wasn’t really necessary in the first place. It’s up to the player to familiarize themselves with the ship’s geography as they sneak around, take out guards, and figure out how all the various nooks and crannies connect to one another. And, since the game puts an even greater emphasis on successful sneaking and the use and mastery of your environment than its predecessor, the removal of the map only deepens the experience.

And, though I deemed the difficulty curve in the first game to be fairly implemented and laden with purpose, I was relieved that Dark Athena seemed a bit gentler. Nano-Med units, and the all-important Nano-Med refill cartridges, seemed to be in more plentiful supply and I died far less often. I think the latter has more to do with the intense refocus on the stealth aspect; I found I spent much more of my time cloaked in the darkness, watching my victims and waiting for my chance to strike. It resulted in a uniquely compelling experience, full of heart-pound moments.

Part of this has to do with the level designs. Cargo boxes give a natural form of cover, and there are a number of platforms under which to sequester oneself. Every area seems to have been designed with giving the player avenues to practice stealth, whereas a number of areas in the original game deprived you of those options.

All in all, Dark Athena is a vast improvement on a game that didn’t really leave much room for it; it’s perfection perfected.

With that said, let’s pry open the Dark Athena and see what’s in store for us. As the game play, while improved as noted above, is largely the same as the included first game, we’ll be slightly more brief this time around and concentrate on the new things that Assault on Dark Athena brings to the mix.

SEND IN THE DRONES

The signature enemy for Dark Athena is the drone, a corpse repurposed by way of cybernetics as a remote-control robot. Now, this is certainly eerie, but you’re probably wondering, what separates the gun-wielding drones from the various gun-wielding mercenaries that run around the ship? The answer delivers on the stealth theme in an extraordinarily clever fashion.

Once you’ve killed the drone, you have the option, as always, to drag its body. But you’re also given the option to use the gun mounted on its arm. Selecting this option causes Riddick to pick up the body and aim. The drone’s gunfire is limited, and the player cannot move or hide when using the drone gun. Using it, then, requires you to drop the body and drag it to a strategic location. The player must wait for the right moment to strike, for as soon as they do, they will be exposing themselves to enemy fire.

By marrying the use of a weapon to the stealth aspect, the drone gun rivals the Tranquilizer (which reappears here for a long stretch before the player gets their hands on portable bullet-firing weapons) as the weapon I think of when I think Riddick. It’s also another way that the player uses their environment to overcome obstacles. (We get more of this in Dark Athena as well, as there are a couple of occasions in which you can break a window and suck your enemies into the abyss of space before the emergency air lock springs into action.)

In one of the game’s run ‘n’ gun sections, you’re put in control of a series of drones (they’re remote-controlled, remember?). Once one falls, you simply activate the next one; the enemies you’ve killed and the obstacles you’ve overcome remain dead and done, greatly decreasing the sense of failure when one falls. In fact, you’re encouraged not to worry about it, as you must sacrifice a drone in a giant whirling fan, thus gumming up the works, so that the next one can pass safely through.

Because the drone is remote-controlled, Riddick only sees what they see through a video screen, and because of this, the drone is unable to use Riddick’s signature eyeshine ability. By removing the tools necessary to sneaking, it also removes the impetus to do so, thus shifting the emphasis to the run ‘n’ gun aspect.

And as in the first game, you’ll find yourself in control of a mech, complete with a limited supply of rockets. Even though we’re in the suit and clearly seeing what lies before us through a glass bubble, your eyeshine is non-operational here as in the drone-control section. This doesn’t put the player at a particular liability, as you’re unable to shoot out the lights that would make the eyeshine an advantage in the first place. But I still missed it, especially since the first game’s mech sections still allowed you to turn the darkness to your advantage.

AGUERRA PRIME

Speaking of darkness, Dark Athena makes the interesting but natural decision to deprive you of it for a long stretch of time spent on a colonist’s planet, Aguerra Prime. The planet is absolutely drenched in blistering sunlight. You can no longer simply stick to the darkness and sneak up on your enemies; you have to actively search for cover or high ground and then return fire.

The weapon you have at your disposal, however, is no ordinary pistol. The SCAR gun fires little sticky bubbles of air that can then be remotely detonated with the L2 button. A cluster of SCAR bubbles can do a massive amount of damage when set off at the same time, and the SCAR gun also allows you to destroy wooden doors and bridges. It’s a fun and quirky sort of weapon, and it provided a fair amount of challenge in some pivotal boss battles, but I ultimately didn’t find it as much fun as the Tranquilizer Gun or as interesting as the drone gun; it’s a neat concept, but it doesn’t feel as natural to the stealth element as the other two.

HAND-TO-HAND

Dark Athena’s “open” combat sections (that is, the fighting sequences in which the enemy is fully aware of your presence, there’s nowhere for you to hide, and stealth is not an option) put a greater focus on the hand-to-hand melee combat than its predecessor did by depriving you of projectile weapons. When you battle Iron Lord, Margo, Jaylor, as well as the first go-around with main baddie Captain Revas, you must do so with your fists or melee weapons such as a knife, club, or the Ulaks.

The melee combat is very tight and technical. Moving to evade your opponent, moving in to strike, knowing when to go on the offensive and blocking at just the right moment are pivotal. It’s more like a match of Street Fighter than Bloody Roar, as it similarly requires and rewards precision, strategy, and skill.

I found it more rewarding than gun-based boss battles in both games; there’s no whirling around, no getting hit while trying to aim. Needing to be so up-close both increases the danger (by putting you within range) and minimizes it (by allowing you to block). It’s an exciting and compelling counterpoint to the game’s dominant stealth vibe; despite the fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with sneaking at a surface level, because both types of game play require timing and strategy the melee combat feels quite at home with it.

MOVING THROUGH PHYSICAL SPACE

Dark Athena has a few moments that would fall under the auspices of platforming, requiring you to jump over pits. If falling does not result in instant death, it does result in being exposed to enemy fire. In one particularly frustrating sequence in the hanger bay, I had to make a series of jumps from a platform to a walkway, then from the walkway to the platform, and then back again in a room guarded by two heavily-armed and technically indestructible mechs. When I missed that jump, which I did often, I found that there was really no way to get back to the platform without being shot to death by the rapidly enclosing mechs. It required complete and total accuracy.

The problem, of course, is that the first-person perspective generally isn’t amenable to platforming accuracy. There’s no body sense, no sense of how far I can jump or even where I am on the platform. That platforming stands out as easily the weakest and most frustrating part of the game.

There’s a tense spotlight-related sequence that has the player climbing over, and then hiding behind, and then climbing over a series of boxes and ledges. When you’re climbing on anything, the perspective switches to third-person, allowing you to see where you are in relation to your environment. But the switch suddenly deprived me of my knowledge of where the spotlight was, and at times it was so dark I couldn’t actually see what my character was doing (the eyeshine doesn’t carry over to the third-person perspective). I finally got it right on the fourth or fifth try, but I wonder if a change to either the implementation of the third-person perspective or the design of the level could have prevented this sense of spatial disconnect.

This flaw, no matter how small, is made more glaring by comparison to the rest of the game, which more-so than Butcher’s Bay gives the player a very strong sense of spatial geography. Part of this has to do, of course, with the aforementioned refocus on stealth and the level designs through which that refocusing was accomplished. But part of it has to do with the use of overlapping spaces and locked doors.

A control room in the Dark Athena acts as a sort of hub, from which the rest of the ship’s main areas (the Cargo Bay, the Cell Decks, the Berthing area) branch off. Once you reach the control room, you can gain access to the cell decks and begin chatting up the NPCs. Jaylor gives you a mission that sends you across the way to the Berthing area. There, you notice a vent, for which you’ll need a vent tool. Complete the mission and you’ll get a screwdriver in the storage shed next to the cell decks. The screwdriver allows you access to a tunnel, which leads to the aforementioned climbing boxes/spotlight section. From there you’ll bring back the tools to the cell decks (passing through the control room and passing by a locked elevator to the hanger bay) needed to create the vent tool; back to the Berthing, through the vent, onto the next mission. The conclusion of that mission, which yields a data pad, will bring you past a communications/fan room and back into the control room, back past the locked elevator, back into the cell decks. Give the data pad to the right person and you’re able to use the communications station to begin plotting your getaway.

That getaway will ultimately result in the player using a code to unlock that elevator to the hanger bay. Because the player passes through the control room so often, and passes by that locked elevator every time they do so, it cements the location in the player’s mind. It creates suspense and wonder: I know I’m going to have to get in there, the question is, how and when and what lies on the other side?

Strong mission design, strong level design, and just plain damn strong game design come together into a trifecta of spatial geography. Such is the power of overlapping spaces, hub sites, and locked doors.

JAYLOR

I’ve spoken very little of the storyline for either game; as someone who’s passionate about the video game art form, I find myself most passionate about those works of art that use or explore the non-mimetic aspects of that form. Dialogue, graphics, cut-scenes and plot twists don’t matter as much to me as level design, interface, and the game’s central concept.

But the dialogue in both games is worth commenting on. The game designers are completely committed to the dark sci-fi world created in the Riddick films, a merciless universe of violence and profanity. While some of the uber-macho profanity in the first game provoked a few laughs from myself and those watching, particularly because of the Diesel’s perfectly straight delivery, there was a moment in the second game that made me turn it off for the rest of the day.

In that section, the prisoner Jaylor basically announces his intention to murder and then rape the corpse of the woman in the next cell. There’s nothing subtle about it. He uses language that’s extremely vile and extremely demeaning to women. And, I understand that he’s intended to provoke fear and revulsion, that he’s a villain, that you’re going to get to kill him and so you should want to kill him, and that evil is cheapened (and thus strengthened) when depicted with kid gloves. But it was just so over the top that as soon as it had concluded, I quit the game and turned off the system.

“Well,” said I, noting the little check-mark icon in the upper right corner, “at least I won’t have to see that again.”

Imagine my horror when, upon restarting the game the next day, I found myself at an earlier checkpoint. I had to make my way back to Jaylor and experience the scene all over again. Luckily, I could then skip over it this time.

What I’m circling around is here is that while, yes, this is a game for adults and you should not let children anywhere near it, I wonder if that dialogue could have been toned down a bit. It’s not so much that video games can’t tackle themes of this darkness and magnitude, but I wonder how seriously they can do so in the context of an action game, of an experience meant first and foremost to impart a sense of “fun”.

MULTIPLAYER

My Playstation 3, purchased specifically with this review and the ones that will follow it in mind, is not yet hooked up to the Playstation Network. From what I’ve heard, however, there’s a number of great multiplayer modes available as well. When I do get the system online, I’ll try them out for myself and report my own thoughts back to you.

CONCLUSION

If you’re looking for the quick-and-dirty “Should I buy this game?”, then your eyes probably glazed over long ago. But the answer is, yes, you should definitely buy this game. Whether you’re a fan of first-person shooters or if, like me, you find yourself hopelessly overwhelmed in most of them, here are two terrific fully-featured games for the price of one. I recommend it highly as both a gamer and as someone who cares deeply about the video game art form. So go out and buy it already, and cross your fingers that they make a third.

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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