Only if…
(Played as part of the Chronicle of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena on PC through GOG with a controller. Last hour or so viewed online as a result of save data corruption.)
Playing the Chronicle of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay more than a decade after its release is a baffling journey full of “only ifs”: only if there is a manual save feature; if only Riddick can stealth kill rather than just back stab; only if there are more segments for the still robust for today first-person boxing mechanic; only if the now delisted GOG release is less buggy… The list goes on. While I believe Greg Kasavin meant every word he wrote in that positive review back in 2004, the game just does not hold up compared to releases both before and after it.
Escape from Butcher Bay as the title implies is a story about prison break. Within its gritty space sci-fi setting, the titular prison Butcher Bay is rigged with camera and wall-mounted automatic guns. Act of aggregation would be “rewarded” with taser rounds and later in the game lethal bullets. Stealth and brawl sounds fitting for an inmate trying to break out narrative. But as the game escalates, the game started to feel like a more regular corridor shooter. Only I enjoyed it even less than vanilla DOOM 3.
The first thing made worse is the lack of manual save. In vanilla DOOM 3, as bullshit as choosing between holding a flashlight and holding a gun design is, I can kill a demon, quick save and not worry about losing progress too much. Butcher Bay’s head scratch inducingly sporadic checkpointing can make the game very frustrating, even more so than some early segments in Sekiro I played.
The second thing is its analogue feeling. Riddick would pull the guns muzzle up whenever he is too close to a wall, which would have been fine if the game does not suddenly decide to be a DOOM 1993 clone. You got alien monsters spawning endlessly, wall mounted guns and heavily armored armed guards out to get you, yet you would pull up the muzzles up for safety reasons. And the door would automatically shut before you can shoot an enemy yet it would open for the enemy that gets you.
2002’s Star Wars Jedi Knight 2 Jedi Outcast and 2012’s Sleeping Dog both share seamless transition between firefights and brawls with Escape from Butcher Bay, but not its half-assed stealth. Combined with their emphasis on the brawls within their narratives, I consider both better games than Escape from Butcher Bay. Half-assed feeling of stealth came from the following aspects:
On the one hand, there is Riddick’s signature night vision, since the movie Pitch Black. But it’s just night vision and the reflection would be too much in well-lighted areas. It’s not thermal vision, so Riddick cannot see where the enemies are or where they are looking. Plus, enemies in dark areas usually have flashlights, combined it with the fact that Riddick is not particularly agile, the stealth can be very frustrating.
On the other hand, there is the lack of true stealth kill. While Riddick can pull the bodies after the foul play, his lack of finesse during the killing can be enraging. It’s more of a one-hit back stab kill than anything. Combined it with the guards’ binary states of “patrol” and “combat”, Riddick never feels like the sneak bastard he should be.
The first-person boxing is sole selling point of this game. While one cannot except a character action experience out of this, the combination of right trigger and right stick direction would make the first person brawl here much more nuanced than other first-person shooters. Unfortunately, past the halfway point where Riddick had to fistfight a bat wielding head prison guard, the game is reduced to a shooter and I had already mentioned why I dislike gunplay in this game.
Overall, the Chronicle of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay feels like a relic of 2004. With emphasis on inclusion of so-called Hollywood talents and bad design decision simply screams late original Xbox. 2004 has several games I would call my favorites, Half-life 2, Halo 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater and Biohazard 4. Guess Butcher Bay just would not be that fifth one from this year.
