In space Riddick will make you scream.
Another Riddick game, another chance to slice and dice as Vin Diesel himself. Seeing as there are many Butcher Bay reviews out there I'll jump right to the main attraction here which is the sequel(or more like expansion), Assault on Dark Athena.
Dark Athena starts off where Butcher Bay ends. You and Johns are floating around space after your escape but run into some trouble when the rouge merc ship 'Dark Athena' harpoons you and drags you into to its docking bay. The captain of the ship knows about Riddick's escape from Butcher Bay and the sizable bounty they'll get if they capture him. Now the core game play is pretty much the same as the original. You hide in shadows, you can do stealth kills and you have a small array of weapons to hit, stab and shoot your way out of anything. However, this time it focuses more on shooting rather than stealth. It's a positive but sadly a negative later on.
The game looks and feels great with nice looking environments and characters. Unfortunately it has a few bugs which range from minor or medium. Most are strangely only in Butcher Bay including one which kept crashing my game all the time. The glitches in Dark Athena are less annoying but I found when in combat or bright areas my frame rate took a dive, even on my new i7 PC which really isn't acceptable. It's hardly anything to make you not want the game though as the frame rate problem is rare and only lasts a few seconds, most of the time it runs as smooth as anything.
Audio wise the game is great. The music fits nicely and the voice work is excellent with such voice actors as Wade Williams(Brad Bellick from Prison Break), Michelle Forbes(Admiral Cain in BGS, Judith Mossman in HL2) and Lance Hendrickson, along with a small list of other minor actors who all do a great job. Vin Diesel obviously lending his voice too and does a great job as Riddick.
Sadly Cole Hauser(Johns) isn't a part of the voice acting in Dark Athena and we only see him unconscious for about a minute. Disappointing to see a main character from the first game ignored like that, although I expect he simply wasn't available to do the voice work so they cut his character out rather than replacing the voice.
The first half of the game is amazing. It has a nice blend of action and stealth. Interesting characters, good locations, and you get your hands on the awesomely fun 'Ulak' blades which you can hack away with all through out the game(and you'll want too, trust me). You'll be sneaking around the ship, helping prisoners and trying to escape off the ship. The enemies are fairly standard with the normal mercs and soldiers plus a variety of drones which are pretty much Borg except they can be controlled by humans too when needed. There aren't any creatures to battle with this time thankfully and they were easily the worse part of the original game.
Now we come to the second part of the game. The part which frankly should never has been made. Sure it would have made Dark Athena only 4 hours long but they were 4 great hours. Everything ends nicely and if the credits rolled at that point I'd have been satisfied...but no, after Assaulting the Dark Athena you go down on the planet for a few more hours. The reason this part of the game is weak is because there is basically no stealth, no sneaking around, no characters to interact with apart from one that lasts only a moment. It's just running, climbing and shooting, which after a while starts to get very boring and feels like any other generic first person shooter. It does pick up in the last area however when you finally see some story and characters again but by that time I was just wanting the game to finish, not a good sign.
Overall it's a great package with Butcher Bay and Dark Athena you'll be Riddicking for a good 20 hours or more. It has a few glitches and weak spots in the game but even with those it has more interesting characters, quality voice acting and plain fun that most games out these days. As for multiplayer...it's dead, ignore it and just enjoy the single player.
Note: I played this game on an Intel Core i7 920, Nvidia 260GTX 216, 6GB DDR3 RAM, 1080p 22" monitor with everything on max.