Back in May 2009, PC Gamer magazine issue #200 ran a review of The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena that never made it onto the web. This week, senior editor Wes Fenlon dug it out of the archives and published it, written originally by Craig Pearson, and the timing feels right. The game is no longer available to buy new, developer Starbreeze has long since pivoted to become the Payday studio, and most players have completely forgotten this franchise existed.
That's a shame, because what Pearson describes in his original write-up is an FPS that was doing things in 2009 that most shooters still fumble today.
What made Dark Athena different from every other licensed shooter
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is actually two games in one package. The first half is a full remake of the 2004 melee-focused FPS Escape from Butcher Bay. The second, set aboard the mercenary ship Dark Athena, picks up directly after Riddick's escape and runs with the same formula.
Here's the thing: the melee system alone puts most contemporaries to shame. Four directional strikes mapped to WASD movement before each left-click attack, with right-click blocking, meant combat had actual timing and rhythm to it. Land a counter at the right moment and enemies die in genuinely horrible ways. Screwdrivers into armpits. Knives to eyeballs. Block a gun melee and Riddick performs what the review diplomatically calls a "skillful lobotomy." This was not a game pulling its punches.
The key here is that Riddick is framed as the monster, not the hero. You are the creature in the shadows, and the AI guards, while not exactly brilliant, react to you with something that reads like genuine fear. Lure them into darkness and they're yours. Blunder into the light and suddenly you're the one scrambling.
Escape from Butcher Bay originally launched in 2004 and is widely credited as one of the best licensed games ever made. Dark Athena bundled a full remake alongside its new campaign.
The Scar gun, shadow kills, and a checkpointing disaster
Dark Athena introduces some genuinely clever tools. The Scar gun, which fires remotely detonated sticky explosives, lets you pre-load five charges for boss fights. The tranquilliser gun can knock guards out cold or sever the control link on remote-operated drones, turning them back into autonomous, easily-confused units. The ship itself is built from fluorescent strips and hard shadows, which means the stealth layer never feels tacked on.
The environments get creative too. One standout level set around the ship's gravity core rewards clearing a room by watching the bodies get pulled into the core. That's the kind of environmental storytelling that costs nothing extra and lands every time.
What most players miss, though, is how sharply the game's quality drops in its second half. Once Dark Athena transitions from stealth-bludgeoner to traditional shooter, it starts placing you in the kind of shooting galleries you'd find in lesser games. Boss fights in particular collapse into numbered attack patterns with nothing interesting behind them.
The checkpointing is the review's sharpest criticism, and it holds up. No quicksave anywhere. The game saves when it decides to, and on more than one occasion Pearson found himself locked into a checkpoint with almost no health, restarting the same sequence repeatedly. For a game this good in its first half, that's a genuine design failure.
Why this franchise deserves better than obscurity
Fenlon's editorial note alongside the review makes a point worth sitting with. Starbreeze, the studio behind both Riddick games, is now almost exclusively associated with Payday. The licensing situation means neither game is available to buy new. Vin Diesel has repeatedly floated the idea of another Riddick film, but a new game from a studio that actually understood what made the character work? That conversation hasn't happened.
Fenlon draws a direct line from Escape from Butcher Bay to Batman: Arkham Asylum, arguing that Rocksteady's 2009 hit owes a debt to what Starbreeze did with licensed game design years earlier. The inventive level structure, the melee timing system, the way the environment shapes how you play rather than just where you go. Arkham got the credit. Riddick got forgotten.
The comparison to Alien: Isolation is also worth noting. Fenlon speculates about what a new Riddick game built around the Pitch Black setting could look like with modern AI for the creatures. Given how well Isolation handled predator AI in a similar premise, that's not a far-fetched pitch.
For now, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena remains a game you can only play if you already own it or find a used copy. If you do track it down, the first two-thirds justify every bit of the effort. You can find more retrospective coverage and latest reviews across the full catalog on our site, and if you want to dig into other classic FPS deep cuts, browse more guides for context on where these games fit in the genre's history.
