O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
I’ve replayed The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, in its PC “Developer’s Cut” release, back in 2004-2005 quite a few times. At the time and to this day, this game felt like an experience unlike anything else. Being an action adventure with stealth, quests, FPS, multiple solutions to problems, constantly changing situations it wasn’t quite an “immersive sim”, yet it wasn’t just a simple action adventure either. And I’d say that ever since then, the only other game that attempted to be something as varied and unique was The Darkness, a game also from Starbreeze Studios released 3 years after EfBB. A lot of the members from this team later went to form MachineGames that started with something more unique, the game being Wolfenstein: The New Order, but even that title has never been quite as varied as EfBB and all of their follow ups have been more and more primitive and generic.
The game was a critical success, remains to this day an example of how good tie-in games can be (this title was released to coincide with The Chronicles of Riddick movie) and in 2009 an extended version/sequel was released – Assault on Dark Athena. This new release contained almost the entirety of Escape from Butcher Bay content, but now on the updated engine and with some tweaks and rebalancing, and an expansion-sequel campaign that was about 2/3 the size of the original game. It wasn’t received as warmly, later had several strange attempts at digital release, including the DRM-Free GOG version which I’ve bought back in the day and replayed right now, but now it remains completely unavailable for purchase digitally. And since I’ve not played this game ever since 2009, I was curious to see just how much my opinion on it might change today.
As already mentioned, both Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena have a shockingly varied mix of mechanics and ideas. It’s a first person perspective title, however it has “full body awareness” – meaning that you see Riddick’s body in first person and the game is animated as if it was a third person perspective title, with all of the nuances of movement and no “floatiness”. This approach also allows the game to switch to third person when performing certain actions or during the cutscenes and dialogues. The dialogues may have choices, but only when it allows the players to do optional objectives/side quests of which there are plenty. There are collectibles, a money system, a few shops, an upgrade system to health that is often the reward for exploration or side quests. Health system itself is pretty curious – dividing the health bar into several squares and when one square is not fully depleted, it regenerates after a while, but if it is depleted, you have to use healing stations with limited healing abilities. So there you can drop the limited resource management into the pile of concepts.
Action can be done with ranged and melee weapons, or just fists. This game still feels really cool as far as first person fighting goes, as it’s not as complicated as, say, Zeno Clash, but does require some thinking and using correct moves to not just be a button mash. And when you are able to get guns, of which there is a huge variety too, despite the fact that most of both titles you spend without one, it turns into a really cool and nice feeling FPS. The original game had a few “realistic” elements here too with the unused ammo lost if you reload without fully using a magazine, but in Assault on Dark Athena this aspect has been simplified.
And the stealth here is a bit similar to how it behaves in Thief or classic Splinter Cell, but simpler. There are two states of visibility, usually, when you’re in shadow and when you’re lit by anything (including enemy flashlights). And when you’re in shadow and crouching, you’re basically invisible and can kill enemies from behind or move around as enemies are searching for you. When you’re not in shadow, enemies notice you relatively quickly, but that’s still influenced by the distance from them, the height difference and if you’re in their line of sight or not. Given that you die relatively fast to gunfire, especially in the Assault on Dark Athena re-release where it seems to be more damaging, more often than not, you try to stealth even when using guns just so you can shoot from the safety of darkness and try to kill everyone before they realize where you are.
But here’s where differences between the games start. Escape from Butcher Bay, both the original and the re-release, is a story about Riddick trying to escape an inescapable prison of Butcher Bay. And since the prison has many different levels of security, with each ultimately unsuccessful attempt to escape, Riddick is moved to an entirely new location with entirely different focus, gimmicks and ideas, each of them having a very distinct look and feel to them. There are sections where you can walk around and talk to people, doing optional objectives and exploring, there are dangerous sections during the escape where strange creatures live. There are mechs that you get to pilot, moving down all resistance. And there are many moments where all Riddick has is his own wits, while dealing with numerous deadly enemies. Every major chapter of the game is like a complete reset and then something new and unexpected happens. And it all feels very “real”, for a gritty sci-fi universe that is. With lots of cool characters, amazing visual design and memorable one-liners from Riddick, voiced by Vin Diesel.
Assault on Dark Athena feels very different. While it’s also divided into several very distinct chapters, overall the sequel/expansion is a more straightforward cinematic action game. On one hand, the visual style and cutscenes are amazing and are clearly 5 years ahead of the original. On the other – there are many moments where the game becomes bland and almost generic and the final chapter of the game feels really odd. It happens, like the prologue, on a planet and due to hardware limitations, most likely, that planet feels super fake after the world of Butcher Bay or even the Dark Athena ship that you could believe in. And the last hour of the title is just tedious action that repeats the same beats over and over again until the title abruptly ends with no sense of closure.
Additionally, what alluded to before, not all content from the original PC release of Escape from Butcher Bay was redone in the 2009 re-release. The visual differences are usually an improvement, but at times look odd, as there are many cutscenes where new darker look makes the faces of characters speaking to be completely covered in shadow or other occasional issues. A few levels have been slightly tweaked – an earlier underground maze got simplified, by removing an extra needed step, while a mech section that was originally added with the original PC release, got a few audio tweaks. The ability to quicksave was removed entirely, though now every time you heal the game saves and autosaves are in general a bit more frequent. Some of the visual features that were unique to the PC version got cut and can only be accessed by console commands. Incredibly cool prototype videos of the early versions of the game that you could unlock with collectibles got removed as well. And the Developer Commentary mode was removed as well, although apparently it was available as a DLC for whatever reason and was thus never officially included into any of the digital releases. Otherwise, the title has just been tweaked and rebalanced, and while most of the changes are great, there are a couple (like the health, as I’ve already mentioned), where the game feels harder for no particularly good reason.
Even though I got a bit too tired by the end of replaying the Dark Athena story, I still was glad to revisit EfBB. There really isn’t anything quite like this game even today so the fact that the title cannot be purchased digitally is a huge shame. Especially since the game still works just fine – a few visual issues with shadows, strange ragdoll physics tied to framerate, but otherwise it still runs perfectly fine. If you haven’t played The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, the original or the re-release inside Assault on Dark Athena, it’s a damn shame, because maybe there won’t be a (legally available) chance for you to do that again. If you’ve got it and haven’t played it, or if the day comes when this title is made available again – definitely give it a go. It’s still amazing.