When we entered Starbreeze’s San Francisco hotel room, we were like eager online daters finally meeting in person for the first time. We knew a lot about each other — we’ve flirted quasi-anonymously for years — but were only just now coming face-to-face. Yeah, we were a little nervous; would they live up to our expectations? They were no doubt wondering the same thing about us.

It turns out they were just as excited to see us as we were to see them. After being announced nearly two years ago, the Riddick remake went as dark as a cell in Butcher Bay. Rumors persisted. Was it canceled? No — it was being retooled with a full new campaign bolted onto it, along with a multiplayer mode. We were relieved and began courting them once more. But then they stopped calling us back again.

It turns out it wasn’t anything we did, or even anything they did. It was actually their parents who were the problem. Caught up in the Activision-Vivendi merger, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (the project’s new name) was left out in the cold, the locks to its house changed by its parents. The game wouldn’t be published by the new entity and was left homeless.

Atari took in Starbreeze’s baby, however, and our rendezvous was set. With the team as eager to show off Riddick as we were to see it, we got both the first hands-on and the only multiplayer details (see sidebar on page 63). So you could, in fact, say that we and Riddick are now exclusive.

PAST PERFECT

First, there’s the matter of our old flame, the original-Xbox classic Escape from Butcher Bay. “We wanted it to be backward-compatible,” says Tigon Studios head of game production Ian Stevens, with a tangible candor in his voice. “Dark Athena is a big reason why it’s not.”

That, and the fact that Starbreeze manipulated the original Xbox’s hardware in such spectacular fashion that it was not going to be an easy game to tame. It’s as if they’d practically made a 360 game on the first-generation machine. “Yeah,” Stevens laughed, “I guess you could put it that way.”

We admit that, going into our meeting with the developer, we feared Dark Athena would turn out to be a File > Save As port of Butcher Bay with higher-resolution visuals and little else. What a thrill to be proven wrong.

“We went and got the entire band back together,” Stevens explains. The same team within Starbreeze that worked on Butcher Bay was now on Athena, the original writers returned — and, of course, Vin Diesel came back for more voicework.

It shows.

Playing a section of the new Dark Athena campaign — in which you’re captured immediately after the events of the first game, and which Starbreeze estimates to be about as long as Butcher Bay (a remake of which is included with Dark Athena) — it was immediately apparent that this was no mere port. The engine had clearly undergone a lot of work since its use in The Darkness. All of the characters, weapons, and textures have been redone, Riddick’s see-in-the-dark “eye shine” effect is markedly better, and the game in general has a decidedly 360 look to it without the half-hearted normal-map coating slathered on a lot of ported-up first-generation 360 titles. Is it as visually arresting on the new Xbox as it was on the old one? No, but it looks laudably good in high-def. And coupled with the remake of Butcher Bay — complete with Achievements — as well as a robust multiplayer mode, Dark Athena stands tall as a value-crammed package.

“It feels like our own little Orange Box,” Stevens tells us with a smile.

"PLEASE TELL ME WE GET TO USE THOSE"

Those were our exact words when a short in-game cutscene played from our starting point near the beginning of the Dark Athena campaign. A drone walks down a hallway, holding a curved blade in each hand. It’s a remote-controlled, Borg-like soldier; a mercenary ship (the Dark Athena) abducts people from all over the galaxy, converts them into said “product,” and trades them. At this point, we took control of the scene, approached him from behind, and did a signature Riddick takedown: the necksnap. As the drone fell limply to the floor, we gathered the blades — called Ulaks — and admired how perfectly they seemed to mold around our clenched fists, almost like a set of brass knuckles fused with hunting knives.

It didn’t take long for us to try them out. Hiding in a dark corner using eye shine to see clearly in the inky shadows, we monitored the pattern of three drones patrolling a control room. Stealthing the first, we watched an all-new delightfully macabre cutscene play out: spinning the masked drone around, Riddick plunged one Ulak into the enemy’s chest, repeatedly, and then finished him off by driving the other metal mortality-taker through his eye socket. We took the third hostage, squeezing the trigger on the gun fused to his hand to spray bullets around the room before choking him out. Just three victims in and our anti-hero’s arms were already covered in blood.

Another drone in the next room didn’t fare any better, though he lasted a bit longer than the others. We biffed our backstab attempt, triggering a knife fight with our foe. After around 10 seconds of exchanging blows, we got the upper hand, slashing one Ulak across his throat and disemboweling him with the other one. Yes!

It got better. At the beginning of the next area, we were positioned in a ventilation duct above two conversing Athena crew members. Tempted by the on-screen prompt of a Y-button icon and the ambiguously worded text “Interrupt the Conversation,” we hit the button and watched Riddick drop from the ceiling in between the men, slicing them each from head to toe with the Ulaks as he fell.

BODY SNATCHER

A fi nal hands-on sequence found us in a room with a bunch of pods that resembled motorcycles without wheels. Straddling the one we wanted, an Athena crew member was too busy staring into the device’s VR display to notice us walk up to him. We took the chance to drive our Ulaks into his back, using them as meat hooks to lift the guy off. As we sat down, the HUD tinted red and we found ourselves in control of a drone! Marching him forward, we walked our disposable avatar into a giant spinning fan blade, the corporeal mass of flesh and bone successfully jamming the fan. We repeated this with a few more drones, using them to wipe out other drones until we’d found the switch needed to unlock Riddick’s next path.

GETTING THE DIGITS

A fi nal hands-on sequence found us in a room with a bunch of pods that resembled motorcycles without wheels. Straddling the one we wanted, an Athena crew member was too busy staring into the device’s VR display to notice us walk up to him. We took the chance to drive our Ulaks into his back, using them as meat hooks to lift the guy off. As we sat down, the HUD tinted red and we found ourselves in control of a drone! Marching him forward, we walked our disposable avatar into a giant spinning fan blade, the corporeal mass of flesh and bone successfully jamming the fan. We repeated this with a few more drones, using them to wipe out other drones until we’d found the switch needed to unlock Riddick’s next path.