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.The Wargamer

It seems like every time a review for a film-based game is printed, they start off by pointing out that movie videogames are supposed to be terrible, and to basically not expect much. This always makes me wonder, when did "licensed" become synonymous with "crap"? A lot of people still have fond memories of Aladdin on the Genesis, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES, but these same gamers glaze over when their view comes across Van Helsing or Shrek in today's game stores.

And who can blame them? Licensed games, at their best, have become the type of thing studios do to earn a reputation for themselves in the industry before moving on to make "real" games. They're usually shoveled out the door to capitalize on the (presumed) recent success of the movie they're based off of, not to make any kind of lasting impact in the world of interactive entertainment.

Still, there was a time when having a well-known character in your game didn't mean it was half-assed cash-in, and to this day we still get the occasional licensed game that gets it right and overcomes the stigma associated with licensed characters. Goldeneye is arguably more recognizable as a game than the movie it was spawned from, and while the Lord of the Rings games have little to do with the movie besides the cosmetic similarities, nobody's going to say that they aren't fun.

Then, every once in a great while, we get tossed a game like The Chronicles of Riddick, which is a videogame prequel to the 2000 movie sleeper hit Pitch Black. It came pretty much out of nowhere, much like the film, but it’s also one of the most surprisingly original and well-constructed game I’ve played in a while. In creating this game, the team at Starbreeze Studios (responsible for the pretty-but-flawed Enclave) have absolutely nailed what a movie-based game should be: Game first, movie second.

They’ve taken an existing intellectual property and used it to make a genuinely compelling videogame by taking all the elements from the films that could make the transition seamlessly (such as the character himself and the general universe) and re-establishing them in a world tailor-made for their own needs as game developers.

Richard B. Riddick is something of a badass. You can say what you want about Vin Diesel, but his portrayal of Riddick is spot on, both in the films and now here. As the game starts, we're given next to no background information, just the fact that a heavily-bound Riddick is en route to a maximum security "slam" where he'll be sold by a bounter hunter named Johns to the slam's owner, Hoxie. You get the impression early on that Johns and Riddick have had more than a few run-ins with each other, and the almost playful dialogue between the two makes several references to things that have already happened. As a result, you almost feel bad when you snap Johns' neck five seconds after landing.

In a recurring style used in the game, the player is usually tossed into the proceedings and expected to hammer out a course of action as the events present themselves. There are guide rails as to what to do, but they're invisible unless you run into them, and they disappear as the game wears on. This has the downside of being confusing at times, and it's possible to do the "wrong" thing and not discover it until hours down the road, but the benefit is that this feels like a film instead of a game. At the onset, Johns takes Riddick and two other prisoners to the entrance of Butcher Bay, and turns his back to chastise one of the other captives. As you stand around, the third prisoner whispers "Riddick! Johns has his back turned to you. Attack him!" This is as explicit as instructions ever get in the game. More often than not, Riddick, and by extension the player, is the one who make the decisions that affect the flow of the game. Who you kill, who you help, and how you go about it are largely left up to the player, giving the game an extremely free feel that's missing from most mission or level based action titles.

While the events in the game are actually quite linear, the road to get there is broad and allows for lots of interpretation. At it's heart, this game is a first-person shooter, and on the Normal difficulty setting, it can be played like one with no repercussions. There is also an interesting stealth kill system, and the levels were designed with stealth in mind, so more cautious players can opt for that approach (which becomes necessary when you try to tackle the game on Hard).

Controlling Riddick is a pretty simple affair. Veterans of any other Xbox first-person shooter will be able to pick up and play with little to no difficulty. Controls are generally very responsive, if a little floaty feeling. They're not exactly Ninja Gaiden quick, but they feel clean and are quick enough that you never feel cheated by the responsiveness when you get shot down.

Things get more complex when it comes to climbing and fighting. Climbing is easy to do, and the game will shift to a third-person perspective whenever Riddick climbs a ladder, a box, or shimmies up and over a fence. Generally, climbing around is used to reach hidden areas or find alternate paths to a specific location and is more stealth oriented, so those just going for a clear aren't going to need it much if they'd rather just blast away.

Fighting is both mandatory in the game and done very well. When unarmed, the left trigger becomes a block button and the right trigger pairs with the left thumbstick to throw punches. For example, pressing left on the thumbstick while pulling the right trigger will execute a hook. Up is an elbow to the face, and back is a mean uppercut. This system even allows for rudimentary combos to keep opponents off their feet, turning it into what feels like a very simple boxing game. Shivs and other melee weapons are handled the same way.

The only nagging issue with the controls comes in the form of stealth kills. The system works by allowing Riddick to enter stealth mode by clicking down on the left thumbstick. When in stealth mode, the screen will tinge blue if he is hidden. To perform a stealth kill, sneak up behind your victim until you see Riddick's hands come forward in preparation, and pull the right trigger. Alternately, you can pull the left trigger to grab your victim and then rapidly press "X" to overcome their struggles and kill them quietly. This doesn't need to be used much in the actual game, but at least the option of a quiet kill is nice. The problem comes in when the game sometimes forgets that you're in stealth mode, making a stealth kill much harder to do than it should be. On a few occasions, I had to trail a guard for a good five seconds before Riddick would put up his hands, and most of the time when I finally did get him, the game would hiccup. The guard would keep walking, but Riddick would go through the neck-breaking animation anyway. Usually, the guard would take a few steps and then fall down with a broken neck, so this didn't hinder gameplay so much as just look kind of weird.

Not everything in the game is neck-snapping and gun-blasting, however. Despite his antics at the game onset, Riddick winds up in with the general prison population in due time. As you can imagine, the guards aren't exactly handing out assault rifles to the inmates, so don't expect to go in guns blazing. In fact, it's quite some time before you even get to touch a gun, since the assault rifles are DNA encoded. If a prisoner tries to grab one from, say, a guard they shivved in a dark corner somewhere, they get a nasty electric shock. This means that the beginning of the game is played in almost an RPG style while Riddick gets to know his surroundings. Prison rules are in effect, so even carrying a shiv out in the open can get you shot and killed.

This means a lot of walking around and talking to various other inmates to get the score on how to break out, and also a lot of fist fighting, which is one of the coolest parts about the entire game. Don't just walk around and start throwing punches though, or the guards will summarily beat the crap out of you and throw you back in your cell (if they don't kill you). But, since Butcher Bay isn't really a friendly place, it doesn't take long before you get your hands on some prison weapons and some prisoner faces to use them on. Gamers itchy to get to the killin' don't have to wait for long, since this story is anything but slow.

As Riddick goes through the several escape attempts that make up the game, he keeps getting locked in stronger and stronger levels of security, which he then tries to break out of. You start to wonder why Hoxie doesn't just kill Riddick outright instead of trying to keep him contained, particularly after all the damage he's caused by the end of the game, but when you see the solution they do have for prisoners as unruly and dangerous as Riddick, it turns out to be worth it. Without giving anything away, the final stages of the game are the coolest by far, and though they're brief, they're extremely satisfying, akin to running around in Metroid after you get the screw attack and just tearing everything apart.

The only things that mar the gameplay are a few bizarre level layouts, particularly in the mines, and sometimes murky mission objectives. Still, it's really nothing I can legitimately complain about, and these are issues that would go completely unnoticed in a game with less polish.

One thing worth mentioning is that a lot of other reviews have complained about the brief length of the game. I personally didn't find it to be a problem. Chronicle's pacing is good enough that it keeps things interesting by adding new mechanics, but knows when to wrap it up. This is also a game that can easily be played through more than once, and in an amusing nod to the anti-smoking censorship that's so prevalent in games and movies nowadays, the bonus hidden items are, in fact, cigarettes! The packs are scattered throughout the game, sometimes in logical places and sometimes not, and in addition to having amusing names and warning labels ("Warning: You'll die anyway") they open up quite a few extras, the most interesting of which are videos of the prototype version of the game in action. It's nothing mind blowing, but gives enough incentive to track down those smokes on subsequent runs through the game. Plus, subsequent playthroughs will let you show off some of the cooler graphical effects to you buddies. If ever there was a showcase game, this is it.

The graphics in Chronicles of Riddick are the game's strongest point, and also the most ballyhooed. This isn't to say that they don't deserve the distinction, however; they're absolutely phenomenal, both in the technical aspect, and in their incredibly meticulous implementation.

The buzz word that everyone's been throwing around in regard to this game is "Normal Mapping". Essentially, it means wrapping a low-polygon model with a texture that's light-sensitive. So, if the texture shows divots in the floor, those divots will each reflect light as if they were individually modeled. This is used everywhere in the game, and the results are amazing to watch. Character models in particular look literally photo realistic. This is notable because it serves to draw you even deeper into the world of the game. If Riddick had looked too different from his movie counterpart, there would have been a subtle but significant alteration in how the player perceives the game. Here, Riddick looks exactly like Vin Diesel, and it goes a long way towards lending credibility to the suspense of disbelief the game generates.

Arguably more important that the technical details, however, are how they're used. Luckily, Starbreeze has a damn talented art team, and their efforts do not go to waste here. Everything, and I mean everything, has the appearance of being hand-placed and tweaked to perfection. There are no less than five different models for shivs in the game, reflecting their handmade origins, and the same goes for any other weapons the prisoners have constructed for themselves. Guard uniforms, prisoner uniforms, hairstyles, graffiti, everything looks exactly like it should, and it all looks wonderful. This is best shown off in the Half-Life-esque opening sequence, where Riddick is being walked through the prison grounds to his cell.

The one hitch in the graphics is the fact that aliasing rears it's ugly head frequently, sometimes drastically. There's no slowdown to speak of, and honestly I'd much prefer jaggies to slowdown, but the effect is marked in some places, particularly during the cutscenes. This doesn't detract from the gameplay at all, and it's oddly rare while actually playing the game, so it's not something that that's going to hinder the graphics much in the overall scheme of things, but it's there. There's also the nitpicky detail of corpses that hover very slightly above the ground when killed, a side-effect of the otherwise very cool to watch ragdoll physics engine. You only really notice this if you're looking for it, though.

For all the little easily-ignored snags in the graphics, the sound is completely flawless no matter how hard you listen. This game has the kind of sound I dream about games having. For such an important game feature, audio is painfully overlooked by many developers, particularly in the area of action games, where it's most needed. The Chronicles of Riddick doesn't disappoint in the sound department, and it's a good thing, because the sound here rocks.

One of the two most important features in Chronicle's audio profile are the gunshot sounds. They single-handedly make every gun sound about ten times more powerful than they actually are. The assault rifle in particular spits out this really punchy BAM that kicks the subwoofer awake and really lets you know you're firing a rifle, not a BB Gun. If you wind up on the other end of the assault rifle (which will happen a lot), you'll appreciate the fact that all the bullets ricocheting all over the place register perfectly in 5.1 surround sound and ring out clear as a bell. Actually, you may not notice so much since you'll be running like hell, particularly when they start bringing out the Minigun, but the effect is really well done.

The only possible downside to this is that the gunfire is quite loud when compared to the rest of the in-game audio. If you have, say, a significant other or a roommate who's trying to sleep and turn the game up to hear the dialogue, make sure to turn it back down before getting into any firefights, or they're going to think World War III is starting in your living room.

The second important feature, and one that can make or break a game's sound quality, is the voice acting. Western voice acting in video games has gotten significantly better in recent years, there's no doubt about it, but The Chronicles of Riddick really takes it a dozen notches higher. I haven't heard English voice acting this good since Metal Gear Solid, and in many ways, Chronicles is actually better. Vin Diesel lends his I-gargle-glass-for-breakfast voice to the game, along with a cast comprised of some very talented voice actors, and they all turn in perfect performances. Everyone in the game, right down to the smallest bit character, has a completely natural voice that doesn't even hint of a line reading. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that a lot of lines were ad-libbed, particularly some of the exchanges between prisoners later in the game.

One final thing worth mentioning: This game does not shy away from profanity, something I'm actually pretty happy about. Call it Max Payne 1 Syndrome, but I'm always annoyed when I'm treated to a cut scene where you have a hardened criminal performing all kinds of verbal gymnastics to try to find new ways to say "fuck" without actually saying it. Profanity for no reason is childish, but if a game is obviously aimed at the 18-and-over crowd, at least let them drop in a blue word or two. In Chronicles, the dialogue is decidedly R-Rated without drawing undue attention to it, and that comes as a relief.

Overall: 9/10
The Chronicles of Riddick is a perfect example of a licensed game where everything is done right, and will hopefully inspire other studios to actually put out a quality product instead of degrading their source material with a shovelware title to cash in on a release date. More importantly than the license it came from, Chronicles stands on it's own as a quality videogame, which is what sets it apart from other film-based games and lets it claim it's rightful place alongside other A-list titles.

In retrospect of everything this game does well, and the obvious amount of effort that went into crafting it, the fact that it's a movie license is completely inconsequential to the game itself, and that's really the best compliment I can give it. I didn't buy this game because of the Riddick tie-in, and neither should you. You should buy it because it's a great game.

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