For me, the release of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay on the Xbox was something of a surprise hit. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, but didn’t find it to be a particularly blockbuster or amazing flick – perhaps due to my lack of familiarity with the universe. Several months and a quick re-watching of “Pitch Black” later blessed me with the urge to pick up Starbreeze’s allegedly kick-ass new Xbox title based on the Riddick universe, which I thoroughly enjoyed the hell out of, but a few nagging control issues (switching between weapons was particularly clumsy) made me eager for a PC version. Fortunately, my anticipation has been rewarded with this newly released port of TCoR, which not only met, but exceeded my somewhat jaded expectations of what could have otherwise been a typical and perfectly average conversion.

For a quick review, TCoR takes place before the first movie in the series (Pitch Black) and, as the name suggests, details Riddick’s adventures in “Butcher Bay”, one of the most secure and hard-ass prisons in the galaxy, which naturally happens to house some of the most unpleasant people in the existence. While it’s not described specifically how Riddick gets captured on the transport at the beginning of the game, it does offer a whole bunch of insight into the Riddick universe and offered a fresh angle on the plot of the series in such a way that, despite not being an extreme fan of both released movies, made me want to go back and watch them again now that I had a better understanding of everything.

The game opens up with Riddick being transported to Butcher Bay in a beat-up transport ship. After a brief (but informative) tutorial segment, the ship lands and the player is given a cool little first-person tour of the facility’s upper areas before delivered to his own personal slam. From here, things take a slightly different twist than the typical FPS title. This is a triple-max prison with Riddick as the star guest, meaning that he’s not simply given a gun and set loose. All I started out with was my basic fists, with the first goal being to ask around and try to find a way out, and my attempts to beat the crap out of the other prisoners resulted in the automated turrets zapping me with tazer rounds until I fell unconscious and woke up back in my cell. As I said, this is a game about much more than just pure, non-stop combat, and the game goes to great lengths early on to express this. The first parts involve just doing little jobs for the other prisoners to earn cash and other favors (optional, of course – Riddick isn’t exactly a saint, and players can always turn somebody down if they don’t feel like doing fetch-quests), but things quickly evolve to stealth combat, with the player sneaking around trying to either avoid or assassinate guards without setting off the alarm.

Combat is one thing that works exceptionally well in Riddick, thanks in part to an incredibly helpful, yet totally unobtrusive interface, and also thanks to an intuitive control scheme that may seem slightly confusing at first, but immediately becomes something slick and easy to manipulate once the basics are realized – plus, it helps that the controls were ported over from the Xbox version astonishingly well. For starters, Riddick’s “stealth mode” (which is basically an exaggerated crouch-toggle) causes the player to drop down low and his field of vision to extend a little. While in this mode, the hue of the player’s view will change color depending on if he’s wide open in bright light or in the shadows and well-hidden, and is a surprisingly effective way at gauging how much of a chance the player has of a guard seeing him. Then the time comes to actually kill the abusive, trigger-happy guard in question, which can be done in a number of sadistic ways. The most obvious approach is to run up behind up and, with your fists selected, use the alt-attack button to get him in a chokehold, and from there either noisily snap his neck (quick, but will instantly alert all nearby guards), or quietly throttle him until he goes down, then quickly hide the body before somebody finds it. A more direct approach would be to just run up to the poor bastard and start beating the crap out of him by jamming the attack button, but that can prove to be painful when attempted against armed guards. Fortunately, a more creative technique allows the player to use the guard’s own weapon against him with a carefully-timed attack (striking by getting up close and coaxing the guard into using a melee attack, then using his own gun to shoot him in the face), but this isn’t always the best option. Interestingly, the game also has a good explanation for why the player can’t always pick up the weapons of his fallen enemies – all guns in the facility are DNA-encoded and shock any unauthorized person who attempts to pick them up, forcing Riddick to use less conventional tools until he can get his pattern into the database.

From the above examples, it’s easy to see how Riddick elevates itself far above what could’ve been a generic first person shooter in terms of how it handles combat, but when all of this is combined with the conversation / pseudo-RPG system and the multiple ways of approaching a tactical problem, this game truly shines. The melee combat system actually involves a lot more than just wildly hitting the attack button, as tapping the various movement buttons while attacking will result in Riddick performing different attacks – done properly, a series of attacks can be pulled off that will brutally damage the target and not grant him the chance to counter. Lights can be shot out to plunge a room into darkness and unlock new, stealthy avenues, something I almost didn’t realize at first because I was still expecting the game to follow the route of most generic FPS titles. The game’s sense of immersion is also remarkably well-done because everything the player sees is from the physical eyes of Riddick’s “world model”, meaning it’s possible to always look down and see your own feet, arms, and torso just as they would appear if another player were looking at you (which won’t happen of course, because the game sadly lacks any multiplayer), with the camera switching to third person during certain moments like a ladder climb or an object being manipulated. One thing that really added to my sense of immersion, however, is the fact that there is no crosshair whatsoever – the player is totally dependant on his weapon’s tiny little laser sight for aiming, and can only see how much ammo he has left by looking at the display on his weapon model. The HUD is almost totally nonexistent, with health and weapon selection indicators only appearing when called up. It’s amazing how well this works for the game, especially when most other titles tend to clutter the screen with a bundle of information (which certainly isn’t always a bad thing, but as Riddick clearly shows, can sometimes not be necessary).

But let’s get down to the real point of this article: For existing fans of the game who have already played it to death on Xbox, is there any real point to picking it up again on PC, especially with the extra Developer’s Cut features? To answer that question, I’ll list a few of novel features I ran into over the course of the game. Of most obvious interest to me were the promised new areas to visit, which there was only one that I really noticed. One much-hyped new feature to the PC version is the ability to hijack one of the “Riot Guard” units that pester the player so much throughout the game, and it’s this little moment of chaos that the new segment revolves around. The Riot Guard handles much like being on foot (with the exception that you’re sacrificing stealth and subtlety for a pair of incredibly huge rotary cannons), so it’s really easy to grasp, yet immensely satisfying to use. Simply mowing down guards could get a little monotonous after awhile though, so the team has spruced up the segment with a number of new robotic enemies and some puzzles that require the player to temporarily dismount his armor to open doors and advance to the next area. The segment was definitely a nice addition, but it was still no match for the “Heavy Guard” part near the end (which is one of my favorite sequences in recent FPS gaming history and, thankfully, is beautifully preserved in the PC version).

Aside from that, TCoR on the PC plays almost exactly like the Xbox version, but there are a few more unlockables available (in the form of cigarette packs found hidden in various areas) that offer some really great insight into the development of the game. Most amazing, however, is the developer commentary feature, which is unlocked after the game is beaten for the first time and, when accessed, litters each level with little icons that can be manipulated to give a little verbal info from the developers on their thoughts and opinions on how that specific part of the game was created. This feature alone is something I found incredibly insightful and cool, and I really wish more games would implement it just to give us hardcore gamers a better look at how these amazing games we play regularly are created. I’ve also already mentioned how tight the controls are and how all of the gameplay elements seem to have been beautifully transitioned over (as well as the little glimpses of new content here and there), so TCoR definitely looks to be the pinnacle of what a solid console-to-PC port. Hell, they even added a quicksave function, something that instantly wins the port huge brownie points in my book (in your face, Halo PC!)

But what of the graphics engine? Of all games ported from console to PC, this seems to be the one thing most developers have a hard time nailing down. Either a game suffers from horrendous graphical problems, poor framerates and overall graphical quality, or a mix of both, with constant reminders that scream “I was a console title, built around a system that has barely any RAM and an ancient graphics processor!” Much to my relief however, TCoR doesn’t suffer immensely from this typical console port curse and actually ran very well on my XP2500+ / 1GB RAM / R9600 Pro setup – although I had to drop the resolution down a notch to ensure consistently smooth speeds. The coloring, texture detail, and overall level design are incredible to look at, and pixel shaders and bump mapping are used greatly to show off all kinds of sweet-looking special effects. The shadows are also impressive, though some players may decide to turn off Riddick’s own shadow due to it not blending too well with the rest of the environment. The graphical settings are quite reconfigurable, and the game ran very stable for me for the most part, but regretfully I still ran into an irritating issue. Occasionally when a narrative cutscene would play, I encountered a problem where the game’s camera refused to fade the scene back in, and I was left staring at blackness while the segment played with everyone talking behind the murky darkness. Repeatedly playing the cutscene and fiddling with my graphical settings seemed to have no effect at all, and it was only through repeated attempts that I finally got the thing to play correctly, but I was never able to understand exactly what was causing this. One final thing some people might take issue with is that the character models, while well-animated and detailed, have an exaggerated “made of plastic” kind of feel to them that a few may find distracting, and the effect of blood splats appearing on the models can sometimes look a little odd and too “watery” as a result, but these are mainly nitpicky comments, and I had no problem ignoring those two facts to fully enjoy the game. Other than those issues, TCoR makes a very impressive graphical showing on the PC, and players should be able to get into the game confident that their system will run it well (provided it falls within the required specs, of course).

Another technical problem I encountered involved TCoR’s sound system, which caused some strange bursts of static or other weird playback problems to occur while I was playing. Tweaking the hardware acceleration settings seem to fix this for the most part, but I think the core of the problem may have just been that my Soundblaster Live! is finally starting to show its age. Otherwise, TCoR’s audio is astonishingly well done. Whether you love or hate Vin Diesel as an actor, one certainly can’t argue that his voice presentation in this game is nothing less than excellent, and he perfectly carries out the lines Riddick murmurs in the witty, yet dark sense of emotion that we’ve come to expect from the character. The supporting actors also do their job nicely, and while the repeating taunts of the guards during combat can sometimes get a little tiresome or annoying, at least they don’t sound bad. And I have to say that the music in the game is nothing less than perfection and fits the atmosphere of the game beautifully, with a grand mix of ambience and action themes to give the experience that bit of extra rounding out. Finally, the game (just like the Xbox version) has full support for subtitles, so there’s no worry about missing any lines of dialogue.

In the end, my experience with the PC version of The Chronicles of Riddick has taught me two things. One, Starbreeze Studios has certainly made a kick-ass game, and two, that they’re actually capable of churning out a decent PC port of a console title, something only a few other companies (major ones, at that) can stake claim to. While I’m disappointed that no multiplayer support was added (with the stealth-oriented gameplay and variety of tactical options, I would’ve loved to see some kind of co-op support sneak its way in somehow), this game is still an incredibly solid contender in today’s market of FPS titles, amazingly even capable of holding its own against Half-Life 2 and Halo 2. Considering how the developers could’ve just wasted their efforts on a totally generic FPS title based directly on the movie, the fact that they chose to make this revolutionary, refreshing title instead is both astonishing and delightful news. FPS fans would be stupid to overlook this game just because it isn’t one of the big-hitters – this game snuck onto the Xbox amidst huge amounts of praise, and is deserving of no less on the PC, regardless of if you love or hate the movie series, or are even aware of its existence, and the added commentary mode and pre-alpha footage even provides an excuse to run through it a second time. Provided you have no problem affording the 4GB footprint, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is definitely worth taking for a spin.