The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay
Ah, video games with movie tie-ins. Gamers just love these award winners. What could be better than a video game that lets you relive your movie going experience with all the action and adventure, only with you at the helm? In most cases, sitting naked on a disgruntled porcupine can be more fun.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay places you as Richard B. Riddick, appropriately voiced by Vin Diesel, a future criminal wanted for countless, apparently horrific crimes. You begin the game as a prisoner, being delivered to a triple security prison known as
Gameplay
Primarily, CoR:EFBB is a first person shooter. Maps consist of the endless halls and rooms one would expect from a Doom or Quake of the past. Stealth elements are added, but very few missions actually have need of them. It was satisfying to walk up behind an unsuspecting inmate, grab him from behind and thrust a shiv (that’s a prison made knife) into his neck. Neck breaking and spine snaps could all be performed as well, but it seemed like a developer’s afterthought, feeding off the success of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.
Two pieces of gameplay set this title apart however. The first is hand to hand combat. Although you’ll collect different flavors of firearms throughout your escape, the story often finds all kinds of excuses to take away whatever weapons you had. This leaves you with just your fists. An entire section of the story puts you in a fight club of sorts to determine prison yard supremacy. The moves are limited to punching or slashing if you have a shiv, but the fights are smooth and intuitive. Using up, left, right, and down motion along with simple button combinations gives the player some fairly decent fist fighting moments that I haven’ seen since Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.
Secondly is the ‘eye shine’ attributed to the character. In the movie Pitch Black, we find that Diesel’s anti-hero character has the ability to see in the dark. His eyes seem to have an inner glow and we see through his eyes. About halfway through the game, we are granted that ability, despite an explanation in the game OR either movie. The shine becomes a necessary tool to navigate certain mine tunnels and shafts in order to escape. Confusing though was that the eye-shine supposedly gives you an advantage over your enemies in the dark, but shooting out the lights rarely ever helped to gain a one-up on enemies.
I had a few other problems, with the camera and the physics, which can be typical with FPS’s. Looking down at your feet while walking reveals a surprising ability to float which, call me crazy, doesn’t quite fit. After wailing on a fellow inmate with my fists, a well placed hit slammed him into the wall above a prison toilet. He slid down the wall okay, but I guess rigor mortis sets in pretty quick in the future, as his appendages jutted out to their extremities, his legs straight up in the air like being held by wire. A game like this isn’t supposed to make you laugh, but it did so more than once.
Sound
I was fairly impressed with the music and sound effects. After seeing the film, I realize they were simply pulled from the soundtrack, but the music lends itself very well to the action on the screen. Voice acting was excellent, barring one problem. Several professional voice talents were brought in, not only from the previous movie (Cole Hauser), but additional celebrities (rapper Xzibit, Ron Perlman) but industry standards such as John DiMaggio (Bender from Futurama). Characters were believable and the rage or insanity behind their voices was well played. That is, except for Riddick himself. Diesel sounded as if he had just woken up from short night’s sleep before recording his lines. They were slow, monotone and instantly took me out of the otherwise cinematic gameplay. He expressed more emotion as the robot from The Iron Giant then he did for this game. Same goes for the movie, but that’s a different review. Sounds were on par with this type of game. Echoes and footsteps are in the right places and gunfire was realistic. Subtle effects, such as when Riddick turns on his eyes or the inmates fiddling with their shivs and what not, were a nice touch but weren’t used in the surround channels.
Visuals
The official Xbox magazine proclaimed this as the best looking Xbox game ever. I tend to disagree. Although the graphics were surprisingly detailed for a film based game, there were too many problems with the images and animation to score it very high in the ‘pretty’ category. Plenty of shadows help to conceal your presence when necessary and the ambient lighting was very good looking, especially when it was reflected off the surfaces that weren’t splattered in blood or rust. When using Riddick’s eye-shine, everything changes to brighten the scene, even to the blinding point. Needless to say, don’t hit eye-shine mode while looking directly at the light. Objects gain a purple haze that helps them stand out in the darkest areas. A semi zooming effect was used as well to enhance the look.
In addition, the rendering of Vin Diesel in this virtual environment was SPOT on. Artists very obviously put more effort in Riddick’s resemblance to the actor than to anything else in the game. Is this a bad thing? Well, it wouldn’t be except that we rarely get to see his face, save for the cut scenes, and therein lays the problem. Most of the cut scenes are absolutely horrible. There are a few FMV scenes of ships landing and such, but most of the story is told via cut scenes rendered using the game engine. Games like Half Life and Knights of the
Adding to that are lip syncs that take a step back a few years. The lips look like they try to match the speech but fail miserably. It’s not that they look like wooden puppets because their bodies move realistically, attributed to the extensive motion capture. It could almost be said that they purposefully blurred the scenes so audiences wouldn’t notice how bad the lip sync was.
Conclusion
When all is said and done, Escape From Butcher Bay is not a bad game, but it isn’t the be-all end-all title a lot of magazines have already tried to make it out as. I found the game to be cinematic, with a decent, although somewhat predictable story line. The game supports Xbox Live, but only for chat and message purposes. You won’t be dukeing it out with friends or playing co-op to escape The Bay. Probably the biggest complaint I have is that the game was incredibly short. I’m an avid, though average skilled player, and I was able to complete it front to back in 10 hours. It isn’t necessary to complete every mission given to you in order to get to the end, but I was able to finish 90 percent of them and still have it back to the rental store days before it was due.
CoR really is like playing a movie and has the star power to rank highly, especially among the crap that studios usually push out to gamers in time for the partnered film. Don’t misunderstand though; this isn’t groundbreaking in any way. It just combines some nice gameplay elements for an entertaining, though brief and flawed shooter. Instead of Richard Riddick, try Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. It tends to do everything better, it just lacks the celebrity muscle, and really, is that so bad?
