Riddick Doesn’t Suck!

…well, the movie might. But the game sure as hell doesn’t!

Just before Halo 2 was released, I picked up The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay at Rogers for $25. I was pretty stoked, since I wanted to get the game anyways, and was willing to pay full price – but $25! Come on! Anyways, I didn’t even touch it until about 2 weeks ago. And from the moment I fired it up, I was hooked!

You play as Riddick, Vin Diesel’s character. Yeah I know, Vin Diesel sucks. But believe it or not, he’s great in this game. The voice acting is actually really well done. So, you’re Riddick, super tough guy-bad ass criminal dude that lands himself in Butcher Bay. A wicked high security prison, yadda-yadda. This game is incredibly diverse. It has elements of classic FPS, strategy, stealth and even puzzle. You go from bargaining with inmates to pit fighting, until you work your way up to the top of the ladder. A riot breaks out, you get to kill some guards. Then some radness happens where some hippy-rasta man hooks you up with magic eyes. Now you can see in the dark, and things get interesting. You can shoot out or turn off the lights (shooting is more fun), leaving the guards stumbling around in the dark while you sneak up behind them and snap their necks. Great fun! My personal favourite close-combat move is when you grab a guard’s gun, point it at his chin and blow his damn head off. So good!

The ending (which I won’t tell you about here) is simply brilliant! In short, I had a crazy amount of fun with this game and look forward to playing it through again. Think I might grab the PC version that comes out this week (December 7th) and see how it compares to the Xbox version.