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Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena by Worm 05/05/2009, 4:40pm PDT Dark Athena is pretty good at first! You get to growl at a ball buster mummy looking woman this time, who tries to tempt you with ball busting mummy sex, naturally our hero is not swayed. You get the fight sequences and stealth killing of Butcher Bay for a while. You get some nice time to talk to prisoners and that's a little reminiscent of Butcher Bay. The aspect ratio bars are more annoying in my screen shots than they are in the game, you can disable it by fucking with the pixel ratio. It's hard to convey with a screen shot, but he's jerking off, maybe because Riddick has his laser pointer firmly aimed at his ass. This small sequence was just prisony enough to remind me of how fun Butcher Bay was and fill my heart with warmth. Though the melee kills dry up pretty quickly, and then you get lots of shooting and a mech sequence, which are okay. It has some pretty cool shooting sequences, like the one in the ship's gravity control unit, the "spine of the ship" Riddick says. As you're killing guys they get sucked up into the air because the gravity is all fucked up I guess. You lose your guns and it goes back to stealth kills for a little bit (except you're outside in the sun) and then it all goes horribly wrong. How does it all go wrong? Well with the "super weapon" segment, which unfortunately continues to the very end of the game. The main issue with the super weapon is that it's the worst gun in the game. I guess you could term this a shit weapon segment, like a part of a game where the hero or heroine is forced to use a totally absurd and situational weapon since he/she has no other options. It'd be a good explanation if it weren't for the fact that Riddick is so fucking pumped about his SCAR gun. It's a sticky bomb launcher but it really doesn't do splash damage, so you either tag him or get lucky by having one on the ground right under his feet, at this time the game introduces little turrets that almost kill you outright, which you need the SCAR gun for. The AI either has great SCAR gun evading abilities or their normal gun evade routine works perfectly against the shitty SCAR gun, they need to just walk back half a foot to be immune and have a pretty cool fireworks display going off around them when they kill you. Eventually the game deigns to give you normal weapons again, but there are still tons of things you need the shitty SCAR gun for, like to shoot open rotten wood doors, beat the super drones, shoot those horrible turrets, flick switches to extend bridges, and I'm sure it doesn't end there. This is the distance at which I don't get damage from detonating a scar shot. You only can have five SCAR shots out at a time, which stifled my creativity. No, those aren't underground mood lights! That's the optimum placement for your SCAR shots right after a certain checkpoint, you'll be doing the same thing on your third or fourth restart. The SCAR gun is really boring beside it's technical issues. It just shoots these glowing white balls and make glowing white explosions, it doesn't gib anyone. The most compelling use for it is pushing crates. You need it to beat the super drones, which mainly involves running around some sort of object and shooting him from one side then circling around and repeating until you have five on him, detonating, and getting a melee kill. It feels like you're being chased around a dinner table. When they drop you can pick up a live grenade to throw it at some stupid explosive tanks to open a door or throw it at a mech, that is if you figure out it would be stupid to kill that mech with your SCAR gun. I just finished in the middle of writing this, and you need the SCAR gun to beat the final boss, which makes the fight really underwhelming. There is what I think was a nod to Bioshock right before it, but it really doesn't soften the blow of how horrible the last third of the game is. If you're picking this up, pick it up because you haven't played Butcher Bay or you want to play it again with a graphics upgrade. Dark Athena is okay and suddenly becomes pretty shitty, and at that point you're just gonna play it through no matter how little you enjoy it.

Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena by Worm 05/05/2009, 4:40pm PDT