21st Century Digital Boy

So I finally finished Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay last Friday. I can only echo the sentiments that so many others have already voiced - it’s a refreshing change from the rule in that it’s a movie tie-in game that’s actually pretty fucking good. On the other hand, it doesn’t really have much to do with any of the movies, but is rather just an episode in The Misadventures of Richard B. Riddick - then again, this holds true for the rest of the franchise as well. The actual plot of the game is rather short and thinly spread, and in retrospect most of the things that happen between the introductory parts and the endgame feel like filler material. Funny enough, they don’t do it while you’re playing, or at least not nearly as much.

What impressed me is that, according to the game’s (ridiculously long) credits, Vin Diesel took quite a bit of involvement with this game beyond the voice acting - including production and design involvement. My respect for the man, which was barely even existent at first (I used to make horrible jokes about how Vin Diesel and Van Damme having the same initials), grows with just about any new project of his.

Okay, let’s gut this sucker. EFBB is pretty much a standard modern FPS, but it has quite a few things of note. One - it looks pretty freaking good, even with the low-res textures on the Xbox. We’re talking “puts up quite an impressive fight against HL2 and Doom3″ good. Two - the stealth is good as well. There’s not overly much of it, but it feels natural, good and is quite a lot of fun. Props to the design team for making this work so well. Three, and most importantly, at least the first third of the game - while being just as linear as the whole rest of it - has quite a few adventure-y elements. Different factions to align yourself with, side quests to do when you’re bored with the main plot, the whole shebang. Again, while it’s not excessively much, it feels like it just belongs. Even more respect to the design team.

There’s a few bad sides too - mostly, as I said, the mediocre and thinly-spread plot with lots and lots of filler material. It’s a bit like Half-Life in that respect, trying to tell a story but apparently not quite knowing how to. It feels less forced than it did in HL though, and the disjointed feeling of the plot with not only itself but also the rest of the franchise is more of a general problem of the Riddick franchise than a flaw in the game. Remember that biomechanical beast in Dark Fury that served no purpose at all but was pretty kickass when it showed up? Butcher Bay is basically like that, only that in Dark Fury it didn’t take you a couple hours of gameplay until you got around to wondering what the fuck that was all about anyway.

Other than that, the selection of guns isn’t exactly huge, and the guns are more tools than toys. Remember Doom’s shotgun and chainsaw, or Turok’s tree-felling triple rocket launcher and Cerebral Bore? Those weapons are toys, ie. insane fun to plough your way through the enemies with. Riddick’s weapons are - sadly - a lot more utilitarian than that; on the other hand, this helps the non-shooty elements of the game come into focus better (and boosts sales in the simulationist part of the target audience). Also, the hand to hand combat has a few very good ideas, but doesn’t work as well as it probably could. It’s cool and pretty complex for an FPS, but somewhat hard to willingly control.

Next on my mental list, the endgame has a few pacing problems. Not of Arx Fatalis proportions, but quite noticable nonetheless. The last half hour of gameplay has a sort-of climax, but a short and not exactly satisfying one. And that climax is not the final boss fight, which makes the pacing near the end of the game seem even more hell yes this is awesome oh hey there what the fuck is going on here wait what it’s over already what happened where’s my epic asskicking. This is sort of amplified by the insanely long credits, which give you about three hours of time to reflect on the game - and of course particularly on the part you just played.

Finally, it’s sort of missing the oneliners and “that’s totally badass” moments that the movies had. The tea cup/can opener from Chronicles, the fire extinguishing system and knife-burying threat from Dark Fury, that kind of stuff. Aside from Riddick, there’s less than a handful of even remotely memorable characters, and even those are… well, they’re in there somewhere, at least.

Oh, and: there is a final cutscene after the credits. Which you will have to sit through if you want to see it. Have fun.

To summarise my main points about the game with a (slightly expanded and horribly “I need a girlfriend” nerdy) oneliner that came to my mind when talking about it on IRC: It’s a bit like sex, only every time you look at your partner it’s somebody else and you don’t quite come in the end.

Nevertheless - if you haven’t played Escape from Butcher Bay yet, you should probably give it a spin. A few parts of it don’t quite know how they should do what they’re doing, but once all punches are pulled it’s a pretty damn good game. And that’s what counts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 18:12 and is filed under gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.