Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

What is it?

Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is the sequel to the acclaimed first person shooter Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (2004, Xbox and PC). Now available for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, Dark Athena is a double feature which includes an updated release of Butcher Bay alongside the new game Dark Athena. Both games feature the likeness and voice of Vin Diesel as the antihero criminal Riddick who, with few words, fewer emotions, and an almost clinical stealth killing ability fights his way through a dark, brutal and dystopian science-fictional world to survive across two similar games.

Both games are included on a single Blu-ray disc and, surprisingly, aside from separate menu entries when you first start playing that remind you Butcher Bay first appeared in 2004, the controls and menu systems are pretty much the same between them. This release brings Riddick to a Sony platform for the first time and includes Trophies and a slate of collectibles for both games along with online multiplayer. Starbreeze Games and Tigon Studios worked on the title, which is published by Atari. Starbreeze’s previous work includes another well-received shooter, The Darkness. The game is rated M for Mature.

Butcher Bay covers Riddick’s escape from the eponymous prison colony and Dark Athena picks up afterwords where he is captured by mercenaries and he’s taken aboard their ship named – you guessed it – the Dark Athena.

How does it play?

Both games often give Riddick varying amounts of shadows to hide in, and this is where they are the most fun. The sneaking and stealth mechanic is mercifully easy to understand and use. If you crouch, and if your screen is tilted blue, you are effectively invisible unless someone shines a light on you, even if an enemy soldier walks right up next to you. That’s it. No camouflage patterns to shuffle, no percentages to read, no hair-pulling moments where you helplessly watch a guard stroll in your direction and hope “please, please don’t see me”.

Crouching lets you perform melee weapon stealth kills with one hit of the attack button and also lets you drag a body away to avoid the next guard from discovering it. Discovery of a body doesn’t light the place up like the Fourth of July the way it does in some other games, but it can make soldiers a little more hyperactive with their flashlight, complicating your ability to sneak up and dispatch them as well. Stealth kills vary visually by weapon and feel satisfyingly brutal.

Melee combat is satisfying with block and punch buttons and the few different melee weapon types are generally cosmetic. When fighting up close and personal, be it your first shiv-enhanced fight in prison or someone on the Dark Athena stumbling on you by flashlight, the fighting feels right and – if your foe is sporting a melee weapon as well – requires you to keep moving and make sure you don’t back yourself into a corner. Melee fighting against anyone with a gun and the slightest bit of distance on you, well, let’s just say that old saying where you don’t want to bring a knife to a gun fight fits the bill here.

The straight-ahead shooter aspects of the game are often difficult, apparently by design. Riddick never outfits himself with more than civilian pants and a black tank-top while his opponents are often sporting flak jackets or, in some cases, a full suit of mechanized, dual-machine-gun battle armor. All of the firearms are projectile weapons, giving shooting a more realistic feel. You’ll come up against assault rifles, submachine guns, and an oddly named pistol just named “gun”, but you’ll find yourself using just a few of them throughout the whole game. That said the single R1-button radial menu makes weapons easy to find and change and the two D-pad buttons you can assign to immediately change to any two weapons comes in very handy.

As I was saying, going toe to toe with a soldier using firearms alone is a quick way for Riddick to die, even with some cover available – although there’s no option to stick to cover in either game. Health is measured in squares, four when full, and damage depletes bits of each square. If he stays still and isn’t hit for a few moments, he will regenerate that square. Lose a square entirely, though, and you can only get them back via a Nanomed healing station that uses up a nanomed key.

Riddick gets hurt so quickly that anything but a basic rifle can take him to zero health faster than you can think to look at the health meter, so you’re forced to try hard to stay in the shadows, peek out when they’re not looking, and either gut your enemies or shoot them from behind. It’s tricky, though, since firing a shot will alert them to where you are until you flee to another dark spot and crouch down again to hide.

It’s also worth noting that the physics model for explosions errs a bit much on the side of the AI here. Taking cover to avoid a grenade or rocket fire often didn’t work due to the shrapnel or blast radius passing through what should have been considerable chunks of solid material. It was a source of great frustration, often stalling progress for checkpoint-reload after checkpoint-reload. Here, also, the lack of an instant save system is irritating, keeping you from inching forward one successful strike on a mini-boss at a time since the nearest reload point is the previous checkpoint.

The story and gameplay are linear, offering one collectible type per game to unlock extra content in the menu system, and while there is no map option it’s never really hard to understand where to go next. The Select button shows your current objective at any time.

There aren’t many boss encounters, and those that are considered mini-bosses can be tough even if you don’t forget Riddick’s key strength is hiding in shadows. This doesn’t mean the game isn’t challenging.

Special mention goes to the tranquilizer gun I found aboard the Dark Athena. Its infinite ammo and silenced shots are balanced by a slow, single-shot reload and relatively short stun effect. Upsides include the ability to kill any stunned soldier with one or two shots from a regular rifle and – most impressively – the ability to one-hit-kill a downed soldier with a boot stomp if you simply run up to their writhing body and hit the attack button regardless of weapon equipped. It doesn’t unbalance the game given that multiple enemies will still ventilate Riddick relatively quickly, but it is quite fun to use and encourages you to take risks to save ammo for tougher encounters.

How does it look and sound?

I played Dark Athena first, then stepped into Butcher Bay to see how they compared. I’d mistakenly assumed that Butcher Bay, prominently displaying a 2004 release year in the menu, would look like a last-gen game but I was pleasantly surprised to find the graphics and texture work to be on par, and sometimes better than the generally similar dark, metallic crate and corridor areas that make up a good portion of Dark Athena. Graphically both games are quite good . I found the character models to be good in Butcher Bay and unusually good in Dark Athena. The conversation-tree system when talking to prisoners, for example, reminded me strongly of Oblivion, but the game did share the unfortunate characteristic where a slight change of camera angle would make the NPC look strange.

The sound design and music fit the science-fiction theme and subject matter very well. The bits of background music in the cut scenes and the sound effects in each environment kept the illusion of this dark future intact without overselling it.

The best sounding part of the games has to be the voice work. It’s some of the best I’ve experienced in quite a while. In Dark Athena alone I recognized at least three familiar actors’ voices for the captain and prisoners being held aboard the ship, and the animators worked to do a good job of matching the body language of the prisoners to what they were saying. It’s not perfect, but it definitely gave the characters depth.

Special mention needs to go to the sound design of the drones – cyborgs that are remote controlled by the mercenary crew aboard the Dark Athena. The soft, sleep-like breathing mixed with the quiet mechanical chugging of their support systems as they patrol the ship is downright creepy, as are the cries of pain when they are hurt. One of the game’s unlockables describes the “droning” process in detail and is not for the squeamish, with one crucial detail being that the droning process must begin with a live body.

As for Riddick’s voice, Vin Diesel keeps him an uncompromising and unfeeling killing machine. He remains focused on getting out of each situation alive without reams of exposition talking about any kind of better life he wanted or any other such nonsense. In both games he is on the run in a kill or be killed environment. Still, his flat one-liners are probably the thing that came closest to breaking the immersion for me. I’m reminded of an eye-rollingly gruff conversation he has with a little girl fleeing for her life in the vents of the Dark Athena. Thankfully, he doesn’t need to talk much, and when he does talk, it’s often a short tip to you about how to handle a particular situation, most notably, “stay in the dark”.

How is the replay value?

As linear adventures, both games replay value stems solely from playing through again in whole or in part from checkpoints to find more of the unlockables that are accessible from the menu system, or to complete challenges hinted at by various Trophies.

What about multiplayer?

Dark Athena ships with a multiplayer game mode that copies the basic game modes of other shooters before building on them with a single unique game mode. The Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Arena (duel) modes mimic Unreal Tournament III right down to the power-ups and announcer’s statements. While the guns are all projectile weapons, which makes the matches fast, the map geometry is very simple, you don’t get control over the map rotation, the oddly animating character models glow almost radioactively with your team’s color. The game modes function but the presentation is basic and doesn’t offer the quality and excitement of a multiplayer-focused title like Unreal Tournament III. That, and playing anything but Deathmatch means you’ll be waiting two or three minutes for someone to join your hosted game since few modes have any servers already up.

Butcher Bay Riot is a three-team game where rounds are won by eliminating the other two teams or by taking a power cell back to base. Weapons are bought with cash earned from kills or wins. This also comes from other games, and also suffers from lower numbers of players.

Pitch Black is unique to this game, featuring one player as Riddick and the rest as mercs dropping into a dark set of corridors armed with flashlights and guns to take him out before can gut them from behind. Killing the Riddick resets the round and puts you in the tunnels as the new Riddick with the mercs back up above – a jarring feature that makes 8-man rounds end very quickly, every 20 seconds or so, perhaps even before you’ve chosen your weapon since most Riddicks can’t take down more than one or two mercs before getting taken out. It’s different, worth trying out, but it can still be hard to find games.

Is it worth it?

On the strength of the single player games alone it’s not hard to recommend Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena on the PlayStation 3. Both Butcher Bay and Dark Athena are good sci-fi shooters that thankfully don’t talk your ear off about technology or life stories and instead give you some good sneaking gameplay, tough shootouts, and a minor case of the creeps. While it lacks the incredible production values of a Metal Gear Solid game it does have a completely western feel, dialogue, and conversation style and avoids long, drawn out pontification or philosophizing. And while multiplayer tries hard it’s not worth playing unless you want to go after the 10,000 kill or the 1,000 win Trophies (yeesh).

Dark Athena gets a 3.5 out of 5.

Try the demo.

Not every PS3 game gets a demo on the PlayStation Store but Dark Athena has one.




Special notes: On Sale This Week, and the Windows Version Review

Coincidentally, according to my local BestBuy’s sales flyer you can get Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena for just $39.99 for PlayStation 3, PC, or Xbox 360 this week. Also, if you’re interested in our review of the Windows version, Joe Haygood has you covered here.

Tags: Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena; Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay; Vin Diesel; Metal Gear Solid; Unreal Tournament III, playstation 3, review