NRG Pick Of The Week: Riddick Dark Athena

Categories: 360, Games, Microsoft, PC, PS3, Sony | no responses

I was a little torn this week. From what I have seen of Flock, I really wanted to make it my pick of the week. I think it came down to the demo. I loved the Riddick demo & Flock hasn’t put one out (well, they did, but it was only on PC). If I had played a Flock demo, this post may have been much different.

Ok, so this is Richard Riddick’s first jaunt on this generation of consoles. We last saw him in Escape From Butcher Bay as an Xbox exclusive. (For the first year. A Windows version was released a year later.) It did really well both commercially & critically, winning several awards including ‘Game of the Year’ from Gamespot. Considering it was released toward the end of that console cycle, the hype came & went pretty quick as all focus was shifting to the Xbox 360.

Initially Dark Athena was announced as a remake of Escape From Butcher Bay with some bonus added content. But, as development proceeded, the added content got to be so big that it turned into a game itself. Now we have Dark Athena, a Riddick game with the Escape From Butcher Bay remake as the added content. I played through the demo & loved every second of it. It still feels like the Riddick we know from his first game (including Vin Diesel providing the voice of our anti-hero), but better. Obviously we have the requisite better graphics, but the demo showed a nifty new toy that I hope they use a bit more throughout the game. I don’t want to spoil anything, but he steps into this pod like device where he can virtually control a drone character. The character can shoot other drones & since it isn’t alive, it is fully expendable. In the case of the demo, Riddick needs to get a drone into the next area that is blocked by a fan. I took one drone & basically walked him into the fan, jamming it. Then I hopped into another pod, took control of another drone & walked him through to the next area.

Just from my taste of the demo, I would buy this game on launch if I had the money. Alas, I will have to wait. But for those of you who are not under such financial hardships or are in the market for a cool FPS (with some stealth elements), Dark Athena would be my recommendation to you. Look for it to hit store shelves this Tuesday for $60 on the Xbox 360, PS3 & PC.