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May 6, 2007

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (PC)

This game kicks ass.

I am not much of a gamer, and I never really looked at first-person shooters as single player games and usually just played them in a multiplayer setting. This game however, is totally changing my view on that. I have not completed this game, I have only put in a few hours into it, but am enjoying it enough to write about it now! Here are some reasons why this game rocks:

Vin Diesel is a badass. This guy is seriously my hero, he’s basically a huge geek but he’s also totally hardcore. He does voice acting for this game, since well you play Riddick, who is portrayed by Vin Diesel himself! His voice, it’s so perfect, and the dialog is just so hardcore. Every line Vin Diesel says is laced with total bad ass; “Pain and me go a long way back.” is just one of the many bad ass lines you will hear throughout the game.

It is very easy to learn. The “tutorial” portion of the game is about 10 minutes, and is actually well thought out and fun. The controls are very simplistic, but at the same time offer a lot of flexibility. A large majority of your actions are done via the “E” button. With this button alone you can climb, open doors, pick up and move bodies, interact, and so on. I like how they did that!

It looks pretty, in a gritty kind of way. Nice graphics are always fun to have, and this game delivers. It just looks great, and there’s a lot of small minor details put into the visuals that just make me smile, or cringe in disgust. Apart from being visually appealing, the game sounds great too. It has voice acting, and as stated above Vin Diesel is a primary role. Apart from the voice acting, there is a lot of great background noise. I loved hearing some prisoner scream for mercy as I walked by his cell for example.

It keeps me interested. One of the main problems with many games is they make you do something boring for a period of time, this results in me losing interest. In Chronicles of Riddick, you are always on edge. There is a large variety of side quests that you can do while achieving your main goal, and there is never any lull time. Even when crawling through tunnels, I’ve come to expect something to leap out at me, or have a guard shoot from below. Apart from all the action, you have a variety of weapons and techniques. There is a lot of interaction with various characters, they all have something different to say, and you can find a lot of small little quirks by just exploring, this isn’t something I normally would expect from a first-person shooter.

Simply put, it is very polished. That’s about the jist of it, it seems like a very polished game. Unfortunately, I am told it is fairly short, and it looks like I am about halfway through only several hours in. This isn’t a huge issue, as I really found this game enjoyable and it literally made me smile while playing.

There is a lot more to this game I have yet to check out, but I can definitely put this one down as an enjoyable experience in what has mostly been a lot of let-downs in the world of first person shooters.

The Chronicles of Riddick @ Gamespot