The game's short length is easily offset by its quality, price, and excellent "commentary mode".
User Rating: 8.4 | The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay - Developer's Cut PC
Chronicles of Riddick is one of those games that combines lots of elements, but isn’t really outstanding at any one of them. But the game has a great pace, a lot of action variety, and it always keeps you moving. Plus, it has a decent story with some really cool characters, a great script, and a great atmosphere, so it’s definitely worth playing for any stealth or FPS fan. This game is a lot better than the sum of its parts. However, it is not as good as the mountains of praise being heaped upon it by Gamespot. I still wouldn’t recommend this game over my favorite games from 2004, like Thief: Deadly Shadows, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, or Far Cry. Chronicles of Riddick has four basic gameplay elements: stealth, hand-to-hand, shooting, and dialog. Most of the missions in the game are short and fairly easy to complete. Thus, the gameplay changes up frequently so it never gets boring or repetitive. The most time that you’ll spend on a part of a mission is about 15 or 20 minutes. So while the game is short, it’s solid from beginning to end. The stealth is good, although it’s not as well fleshed out as in the Splinter Cell or Thief series. You can hide behind crates or in darkness and creep up behind guards and snap their necks or slit their throats. The AI is usually good, but it has faults. Often, guards won’t hear you if you run up to them at full speed. In one sequence, I was disguised as a guard and a couple of guards in one room somehow recognized me. I ran into another room and those two guards followed me shooting. The other guards in that room just stood there and patrolled around without noticing that their two buddies were going mental and shooting at somebody. Once you get a firearm, stealth becomes totally unnecessary, as the guards make for some pretty weak fodder. Hand-to-hand, like stealth, is good, but not outstanding. Fistfights have a savage feel to them, since you get such a closeup view of your fists hitting the other guy’s face. The best part about the fighting is watching your opponent’s face get bruised and bloody as you smack him down. The hints and tips suggest that there is some depth to these sequences, but I found that one or two simple techniques like “Block and counter” got me through every fight. Perhaps the best part about hand-to-hand combat is grabbing a guard’s gun and forcing him to blow his own head off with it. This is a move that is dangerous and hard to pull off. The first-person shooter elements are solid, but not spectacular. The behavior of your enemies is very simple. They occasionally use cover or execute rolling maneuvers, but that’s about it. A room full of five enemies is easily conquered by finding one cover area and then using it to pick off guards one-by-one. This is made easier by the fact that the guards won’t use any advanced tactics to flush you out, nor will they use any teamwork. Plus, your health partially regenerates when you aren’t taking damage, (a mechanic that works somewhat like the shields in “Halo”) so you can wear down your enemies and draw out a fight as long as you want. The weapons are also very ordinary. They don’t look or sound all that cool, nor do they have any interesting functionality, except for maybe their laser sights. After playing with the weapons arsenal in other first person shooters, you probably won’t be impressed by what’s here. By far, the best part of the game is the dialog. You can go around the hallways of the prison, interacting with the prisoners and occasionally, the guards. They will give you missions and sometimes, money or cigarettes. The script is gritty and to the point, and it’s perfect for the game. Riddick has tons of great, mean, one-liners. He spouts them off like a cold, angry Arnold Schwarzenegger. All of the voice performances in the game are top-notch, especially Vin Diesel. The game does a great job creating a cast of memorable characters, each of which are unique. Nobody in this game is likeable. Everyone is a conniving jerk, in their own way, except for Riddick, who is strangely appealing, despite the fact that he is a violent criminal. The guards are sadistic lowlifes that you will have no moral qualms about killing. The graphics on this game are great, but not as good as the PC’s best. The eye candy in this game can be fascinating and annoying at the same time. Characters mostly look realistic, but there are some imperfections that stick out and make them look like wax robots. This game looks very similar to Doom 3. The lighting system is weird. It makes for some great environments, but some bizarre-looking characters. There are all sorts of areas where a guy will have one side of his face completely dark, and the other side so brightly lit up that it’s bleached white. Riddick looks almost photo-realistic, and so does everyone’s clothing, which is the best done clothing that I have ever seen. This may not sound like much, but it is truly amazing to behold sometimes. I would still rank the graphics below those of Half-Life 2 though. Other than the occasional exploding barrel or flushable toilet, the environments are also disappointingly dead and empty. You can’t push stuff around or take stuff off the ground. “Chronicles of Riddick” sports ragdoll physics, but that’s about all the physics there is. Once you have played a full Havok physics game like Half-Life 2, Max Payne 2, or Painkiller, then you expect more. Chronicles of Riddick lacks that level of immersion. That doesn’t make it “bad”, but it keeps it from being outstanding. The fact that the game only retails for 30 bucks is a big plus. For that, you get an entertaining but short campaign, and then a lot of extras. Gamespot has already praised this game’s commentary mode, but it bears repeating. The commentary mode is almost worth the price by itself, because it adds replayability to what is basically a 10-hour linear game. This feature allows you to play through the game again, while listening to literally hours and hours of interesting developer commentary. No detail is neglected, and the talk is surprisingly candid. The developers point out the techniques that they use to draw you into the game, and they also point out areas that they don’t feel turned out very well. This is simply the coolest unlockable feature of any game I have ever played. As I said before, Chronicles of Riddick is worth a lot more than the sum of its parts. If you like Vin Diesel, or you are looking for a unique action/adventure game, then this game is easy to recommend. However, I would only recommend that you give it a spin after last year’s other great PC action titles. Riddick may be superb compared to other movie-licensed games, but it’s not superb compared to the PC’s best titles.
