Assault on Dark Athena commences April 7

It has been a long time coming, but The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena has finally received a release day. In North America, the M-for-Mature-rated action game will ship for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on April 7. Two and a half weeks later, it will launch on the same platforms in Europe. The game will be distributed by Atari, which acquired the game after it was orphaned following last July's merger of its then-publisher Vivendi Games and Activision to form Activision Blizzard.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is an expanded version of the critically acclaimed The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, released on the original Xbox in 2004 and on the PC in 2005. First revealed in May 2007, the game includes the entire original game, which was a prequel to the 2004 film The Chronicles of Riddick starring Vin Diesel. The brawny Fast and Furious star will reprise his role in Assault on Dark Athena, which will also boast a new campaign set after the events of the original game.

Assault on Dark Athena will also feature reworked graphics upgraded and optimized for the current generation of consoles and PC graphics cards. "This isn't a case when we took the old-gen game and up-rezed it," then-producer Pete Wanat told SpikeTV in 2007. "All the textures are being redone so it truly looks like a next-gen game." (Wanat is currently the producer for Wanted: Weapons of Fate, which he discussed on GameSpot's HotSpot podcast earlier this month.)