The Chronicles Of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena (includes Escape From Butcher Bay)

Firstly let me apologies for all the effin and jeffin but I effin love developers like this! Starbreeze should be given a jeffin meddle! Not because "Assault on Dark Athena" is a great game (which it is) but because of what they have done with "Escape from Butcher Bay"... utter genius. They have "remastered" the game from 2004 by giving it a shader enhanced face lift and giving it away free with Dark Athena. Two games for the price of one, bargain! The shame about Butcher Bay is that not a lot of people bought and played it the first time round and I feel it will only be the people who did that will buy the sequel. I do hope it will reach a new audience with this new version. Butcher Bay is a stand out FPS with great stealth elements, brutal melee combat and a story that made more sense than the film released at the same time. Dark Athena is pretty much more of the same but the brutality and action has been ramped up a couple of notches.

I hope other developers are watching because I would love to see more of this kind of thing: We see it all the time in the movie industry, Directors Cut, Special Edition, Special Extended Edition, Special Extended Directors Cut...Edition. I'd love to see the original Unreal made with the latest Unreal engine. Quake made with the new Rage engine. The modding community know how to do it, look out for Black Mesa (Half Life in the latest Half Life 2 engine)

I didn't expect much when coming into this game if im honest. I've played a fair few movie to game conversions in the past and all of them have been pretty bad....

However there is a gleam of hope for these conversions and this is it! This game is actually very good. I've been told that Escape from Butchet bay was also decent but haven't gotten my hands on it yet. Anyway.

This game does what it set out to do and does so very well. It's a combination of FPS action and stealth. Graphically it looks nice. Gameplays pretty solid and the AI isn't to shabby either. Didn't find any major bugs or problems with the game which would put people off playing it. As a whole this is a very good game for if you have a spare weekend when you can sit down and bash out a game in a few hours.

Taking in mind the other games around, COD, Bioshock, etc, this Riddick is a wate of money, rubbish pc controls, rubbish graphics, looks and feels like a 4 year old game!!!

A good game if you can find it, thanks to Atari this is extremely hard to find brand new for the PC.

I played the original Butcher Bay back when it was released and it holds up quite well, the redone graphics are excellent and the story is just as engaging. The new Dark Athena story is well acted and has various locations and characters; quite an interesting story though not as long as Butcher Bay.

The new multiplayer could have been better. The actual multiplayer mode is well made, the Pitch Black game type is a riot but it's too hard to find and/or host a game as there is no match making service like Games for Windows Live, which also makes the accomplishments (achievements) a bit meaningless.

Overall I would recommend this, an essential purchase for Riddick fans.