AI

Having spruced everything else up, the AI has been polished some more, it takes advantage of cover a lot more…it can sneak around and it will often use teamwork tactics to flush you out. When in the dark it will activate a flashlight if that option is available, if not, then most of the time it will dig in and wait for you to make a mistake. In hand to hand combat you can be swarmed by several enemies at once and they won't wait for Riddick to make the first move, or attack one after the other. They also react to dead bodies and unconscious team mates.

Sound

The sound design has been redone, there's a lot more in the audio palette this time around and the various atmospheric and spot effects of both chapters are an excellent way of building the whole suspension of disbelief. Weapons have a nice aural quality to them and the hand to hand sounds solid.

Music

A great soundtrack accompanies the game and it has been extended to cover Dark Athena, this has its own themes and evokes the personality of the ship.

Voice and Dialogue

A trio of great writers including Flint Dille and John Zuur Platten have returned to the Riddick-verse and re-done the script, polished old dialogue and created more for Dark Athena and the extra parts of EFBB. The voice cast does an extremely good job with this solid script (tipping its hat to the Riddick movie more than once) and it was great to hear Lance Henrikson cast as one of the characters; he delivered his lines with panache and great timing. Vin of course plays Riddick well enough and the true star of the show is the Captain of the Dark Athena herself (Revas as performed by: Michelle Forbes), an excellent and hateful character. Hoxie returns with the voice of Dwight Schultz and Abbott is just as gritty as ever in Xzibit's mean and moody hands.

Multiplayer

The original was panned for not having multiplayer by many gamers, most press didn't care and I was one of them. Rather than feeling completely shoehorned in ala The Darkness, Riddick's multiplayer actually feels pretty Ok. It's not ground breaking and it might be a little too Quake or Unreal Tournament style for many gamers out there, lacking the quality of something like Call of Duty 4. There's the usual capture the flag style game, deathmatch, team deathmatch and some others that are the staple of the multiplayer arena. There's also Pitch Black mode than could have been a really good stealth based hunt for Riddick.

However it falls flat because it degenerates into a typical fps multiplayer experience and griefing pretty quickly. Kill Riddick, become Riddick... and so on.

The Underverse comes

If you missed Butcher Bay the first time around or you're a fan of the old game then this 360 outing is tremendous value for money. You get the Escape from Butcher Bay and Dark Athena chapters of Riddick's story, with the Dark Athena chapter weighing in for me at around the 10 or so hour mark. I can imagine both chapters taking a player around 12 hours each to finish if they're looking to play it sneakier than I did and find a lot of the bonus items. You get a solid but essentially lack-lustre multiplayer mode as well, all for the price of just one game.

One caveat I will give you, Riddick earns its rating and if you're not fond of swearing - then this game isn't the one for you.

I would like to see another Riddick game from Starbreeze for definite.