Riddick's Dark Athena: Butcher Bay and Much, Much More

UPDATE! Before you read the preview, check out this new Dark Athena trailer, then tell me it doesn't look completely badass.

The last time you heard about The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, it was being positioned by then-publisher Vivendi as a PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 remake of the original, excellent Xbox game Escape From Butcher Bay with some new content added in. Then Vivendi merged with Activision and stopped talking about the game for a long time, before finally dropping it entirely post-merger. Now Dark Athena is back, and new publisher Atari came through town to show the latest version recently. And, I'm happy to report, it's become a lot more than a simple remake. If Dark Athena is as good as it looks, it already sits near the top of my list labeled "Must Play 2009."

From the sound of it, developer Starbreeze and Vin Diesel's game company Tigon Studios initially wanted to remake Butcher Bay because too few people played the original, and because the game didn't work well with the Xbox 360's backwards compatibility. But thanks to Vivendi's intervening publishing shenanigans, Starbreeze was fortuitously granted a good 18 months longer than expected to crank on Dark Athena, and because of that, the project has swelled into a far more value-packed and exciting proposition than originally envisioned.

To me, the biggest deal about this whole thing is the new single-player content, the Assault on Dark Athena component itself. The PC version of Butcher Bay that followed the Xbox original got some new content, too--a brief, throwaway action level that lasted maybe 15 minutes. So I didn't expect a lot from the content being added in the Dark Athena remake. But I was dead wrong on that one. This isn't just a brief campaign tacked onto the end of Butcher Bay. It's an entirely new single-player experience that's purportedly just as long as the original game, and looks just as great as that one did. Butcher Bay wasn't the longest game ever--10 to 12 hours, say--but combined with Dark Athena, this will be a serious haul.

This new campaign starts minute one after the end of Butcher Bay, with Riddick and bounty hunter Johns' escape shuttle being picked up and imprisoned by roving mercenaries piloting a ship called--you guessed it--the Dark Athena. The mercs are converting their captives into hellish, armed cyborg drones that stalk the ship's corridors and act as the primary enemies, from what I could see during my brief hands-off demo.

Cyborgs operate in two modes. On auto-pilot, they move slowly and methodically, without much apparent awareness of their surroundings, so they shouldn't be hard to deal with in that mode. They can also be controlled remotely by the mercs, though, at which point they turn agile, smart, and deadly. Autonomous drones have a bright white light projecting from their heads, while this light shows red when they're remote-controlled. So you'll get a quick visual cue to indicate what kind of enemy you're facing even before you observe its movements.

Gone are the DNA-encoded weapons from the first game, but an equally challenging new weapon mechanic replaces them. The cyborgs' guns are built directly into their arms--so to use one, you'll have to hoist the entire corpse up and drag it around. There's a natural trade-off here. On the upside, you've got a gun to shoot and a body to act as a meat shield. Downside: your view is partially obscured, and you also move a lot slower.

There will be a few times in the storyline when you get to take remote control of the cyborgs yourself. These sequences seem to have a run-and-gun feel, since you can just pop out another 'borg when yours gets wasted. And you can use them to solve some puzzles, like jamming one into a giant fan to stop it rotating, then taking control of another to move past the fan into the next area.

All the great combat mechanics from Butcher Bay are still in here--the brutally violent melee combat, the intelligent stealth system that turns your perspective a bluish tint when you're safely hidden. I would imagine all the shanks and shivs of the first game will make an appearance, but Riddick has a set of nasty new melee toys, the Ulaks, that will surely take center stage. They look like some kind of Klingon weapon, with blades curving straight downward out of a knife-like grip and ending in a wicked point. You can just imagine the stealth kill animations that will go along with these.

The savvy sense of dramatic grit in Butcher Bay is also in evidence here, based on the smart casting and tense cutscenes I observed. Not surprisingly, Riddick quickly busts out of his captivity--but Johns isn't so lucky. In one scene I saw, he was being interrogated by Revas, the hard-assed merc captain played sternly by Michelle Forbes (Ensign Ro Laren from Star Trek: The Next Generation). Lance Henriksen (Bishop, Aliens) also plays a role as Dacher, another captive who assists Riddick in his efforts to subvert the mercs. In his efforts to fight back from the shadows, at one point Riddick met up with another ally, a little girl who reminded me of the character Newt, also from Aliens. There's no telling what kind of events will transpire in the bowels of the Dark Athena, but this looks like a good setup.

Don't think Butcher Bay is playing second fiddle to Dark Athena with a quick, dirty port job. The original game has purportedly been "virtually recreated" by Starbreeze's artists. The levels and character models have been given a new detail pass, or completely remodeled in some cases. The engine (an improved version of the one from The Darkness) is now using uncompressed motion data, giving much finer movements. So you'll see characters' individual fingers moving instead of the entire hand moving at once like a mitten, for example.

New AI routines are going into Dark Athena, and those will be rolled back into Butcher Bay as well, so the prison guards there will be able to knock over tables for cover and blind fire around corners. And the entire experience is receiving some other difficulty tweaks to make it play more smoothly. Dark Athena's team is made up partially of the core team from Butcher Bay; this all sounds a little like a labor of love, for these guys to get to go back and create the definitive version of an already excellent game.

Nobody's talking about the game's multiplayer mode, which I'm sure will be a nice addition, but also seems unnecessary next to all this single-player craziness. But hey, the more the merrier.

Having played Escape From Butcher Bay start to finish, I'm pretty damn excited about Dark Athena. Maybe you can tell. Unless I'm forgetting how good Batman: The Video Game was on the NES, I'm going to call Butcher Bay the best movie-based game ever made. Heck, it's one of the best games of the last generation, period. If you're one of the many people who didn't play it in its original incarnation, Starbreeze is doing you a huge favor in crafting this vastly improved version. Don't make the same mistake the second time around.