I just finished The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, it’s a good game… It has decent a narrative and beautifully designed maps (aside from absolutely every texture being shiny) but it was close, so close, to being one of the best stealth fps games I’ve played…and then they added GUNS. In the beginning of the game you’re only option for ranged weapons was to drag a drone corpse around with you and fire its augmented gun. It only had one clip and was bolted to the drone. This concept was genius! It forced you out of cover to recover a body and then you were pinned to that point to fire, I had no problem with this mechanic and quite liked it. But the second they put a real, tangible gun in your hands, everything changed.

After that the design team must of decided, “OK, they have a gun now, so lets just wrap up the last 80% of the game with gun-based combat.” All of a sudden, dark corners are gone, replaced with well-lit hallways. I didn’t use Eye-Shine (which is spot-on with the movies by the way) the whole second half because everything was too bright! Open rooms with plenty of things to duck behind have disappeared completely. and now the tactics are black and white. in one room you immediately have to approach with guns, while in another you have no choice but to duck into the shadows and hide.

There are a few shining moments in the game, the stealth mechanic is amazing, and if they had focused on that more it could have been a worthy homage to stealth games like Thief or Splinter Cell. There are several hand-to-hand boss and mini-boss fights that are very satisfying, I just struggle understand why the developers thought that equipped guns were necessary at all. Quite possibly the best part of the game is when you lose all your weapons again, While I’m guessing this was supposed to make you feel “punished” and “lost” I was overjoyed! I felt like I had been rewarded!For another hour or so I got to feel the excitement of leaping out of the shadows and slicing thugs to kingdom-come.

In the second half of the game you obtain something called a SCAR gun. It is a very interesting mine launcher that allows for strategies to be laid out before or during battle, and it was certainly well used throughout the last half of the game, but it alone wasn’t enough and they once again brought back space-rifles and shotguns. In the movies, Riddick never wielded a gun, that was part of what made him so badass!

I’m not saying that TCoR:AoDA (wow…) wasn’t good, it was very good, but it didn’t put me in a position where I felt like I was in the shoes of the legendary Furyan, Richard B. Riddick.