The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was the one of last of the great games to be released on Microsoft's previous console, the Xbox. Butcher Bay captured the grit of a fictitious intergalactic prison, threaded it with tense stealth action gameplay, then served it on the finest graphical canvas of its time.

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was graphically marvelous... for its time. Nowadays the average gamer expects better and sharper high-definition quality. To remedy this, the developers of Dark Athena have been hard at work trying to bring Butcher Bay into the current standard of eye-candy. This bodes well for the characters in the game as their highly detailed bodies wont stand out against a previous generation background.

The basic story for Dark Athena launches off where Butcher Bay finished. For newcomers to the Riddick series there is also the option to play through the remade Butcher Bay or lunge straight into Dark Athena. After escaping prison you find your ship has been picked up by a mercenary vessel known as 'Dark Athena' and the mercs on-board have taken a liking to Riddick. Your mission is to take out the hostile crew including their ruthless leader who turns captured humans into mindless 'drones'.

Gameplay for Dark Athena will almost exactly mirror the style of Escape from Butcher Bay with the focus on the same two elements: stealth, and brutality. The shadows are where the player must lurk in order to get the advantage in Dark Athena. Enemy soldiers (Drones) have the upper-hand of superior firepower but you must use cunning and vicious melee take downs to progress through the hordes of baddies; kind of like Rugby League.

Dark Athena will not only feature a vast and fantastic single-player experience but also the first multi-player mode in the Chronicles of Riddick series. Game modes include your standard deathmatch in the form of six prison inmates versus six prison guards, Butcher Bay Riot where teams must steal a power cell and charge up their designated zone to win the game, and the all new 'Pitch Black' which pits a single player as Riddick against six player-controlled soldiers. This game variant will definitely redefine the term “Game of Cat and Mouse”

Chronicles of Riddick Dark Athena is sharpening up quickly and turning over on its good side. The gameplay is original, the graphics are crisper than ever, and the new multiplayer mode adds so much more playtime onto the purchase. Keep an eye out for a review on NZGamer.com soon and also an eye for whatever is lurking in the shadows.