Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

So, as most Xbox Live Gold Member subscribers did today, I went ahead and downloaded the Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena demo.  Weighing in at 634MB, it was a good sized demo, and unlike recent demos, actually gave us some meat with our gameplay experience.

For anyone that played the first Riddick game, you will feel pretty close to home with Dark Athena.  It follows the same, stealth action style, where it is better to sneak up on your opponents, and slash the crap out of them before they know what hit them.  Darkness is your friend, and light is your betrayer.

The demo takes place in the ship of your enemies.  You start in an overhead pipe, where your first course of action is to cause some serious violence, like jumping down on top of two people, slicing them with your Ulaks on the way down.  It is a fitting entrance to your experience, and a good example as to what you should expect with a Riddick game.  Your time is spent slunking down halls, creeping up on people and killing them.  You do run across some guns that you can pick up, somewhat too often, considering how hard it was to find an non-DNA coded gun in the first game.  But to be honest, I felt like the demo was trying to coax me into performing stealth over guns blazing.

One new control scheme that shows up in the demo are drones.  The ship that you are in is filled with these mindless drones that are controlled by people sitting at control stations.  At one point you kill one of these controllers, and you take over the drones, using them to help you escape from a locked door.  It was a nice way to break up the action, and it gave me a good reason to use a gun, after a lot of my Ulak kills.

The visuals in the demo are good, but they were never over the top.  Some of this could be due to the amount of time the game has been in development, but it is by no means a bad looking game.  The bigger issue here are some big time bugs that need to be worked out.  Several times, I killed bad guys and saw their weapons floating in the air.  Sometimes the guns continued to fire, in mid-air, after the enemies had died.  Also, one time, I was controlling a drone when the room I was in became compromised.  Riddick lept from the console, and I was in control of him, but my display looked like that of a drone.  The only way to make it go away was to die.

The demo is a good representation of what you will play, but with a month left for release, it might be too late for the Starbreeze and Tigon teams to hammer out these bugs.  Also, it is a demo, so these items could be fixed, but it is a bit worrysome to see some of these glaring bugs show up this late in the game.  You will be able to find out for youself on April 7th when the game finally releases here in the States.