Ok, I've started playing through the Dark Athena version of Butcher Bay. It looks pretty nice, though it's got tons of post-processing (motion blur when you look around, bloom) which, judging by comparison videos, make it look worse than the 2004 version - really smudgy. I'm going to try to turn them off. I also had to turn anti-aliasing way down to stop the game running like crap, but I'm hoping if I take the post-processing off I can turn the AA back up.
Apart from that, pretty slick presentation. The tutorial involves snapping your merc captor's neck then escaping down a convenient vent. It turns out to be Riddick dreaming while still cuffed up in the merc's ship, which was pretty funny. Then you get an on-rails walk into the prison, which is really nice and has a very similar feel to Arkham Asylum's intro a few years later. After some rather pointless super-linear RPG stuff and some very irritating melee combat, both of which admittedly help the prison feel of the game, I'm now sneaking about shooting guards. It's generally pretty fun and the atmosphere is great. Feels really grubby, and has lots of ace character actors like Michael Rooker and Joaquim De Almeida alongside name voice actors like John Di Maggio, and of course actors from the second movie including Diesel.
I've got it on easy so I'm managing to get through the rather unrefined melee combat and stealth. However, I'm currently stuck in a locked room with a guard in a mech suit. Don't seem to be able to shoot him, can't find any clever way out. The elevator button doesn't seem to do anything, which I suspect may be a bug, so I'm going to consult a walkthrough.
EDIT: apparently the mech suit has a weak spot on it's back, which you need to shoot from the safety of some high crates. I'd already tried out these methods with no success; I guess it's one of those puzzles that are okay until they're unfairly combined with combat.
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Got past that guy, what bullshit that was. The crates aren't safe, there's nothing to tell you his back is his weak spot and it takes ages to get a good shot on him anyway.
This game is a mix of impressive polish and attention to detail, and lots of fiddly mechanics and oversights:
The shooting often feels a bit vague and unresponsive, but it can be fun.
Now I've got my eyes shined so I can see in the dark, the stealthy bits are pleasingly binary - turn off a light switch, make sure your visibility has flipped to 0, take off your goggles and break some guards' necks.
Due to the auto-save system (apparently quick-saves got removed for this version for some stupid reason), it's possible to dead-end yourself in a few places.
The atmosphere is great, full of lovely visual and audio design, and the UI is really clever, your health points doubling up as your visibility meter and colour tints giving you extra feedback.
It's varied, but this also includes trying its hand at DooM3 style mutant sections where you have to swap between flares and a shotgun, and the UI controls for that are far too fiddly for it to work.
I like the missions that lead you through the FPS sections, they give it a sense of propulsion.
However, I'm now in another RPG bit which would be fine if it didn't mostly consist of backtracking, characters who react to stuff you haven't done yet, and a sudden dump of missions with directions that are all far too vague (who the fuck are the blueskins?) or seemingly incorrect (the PPPs, whoever they are, aren't in rec area A like two separate missions insist). I do apparently have the option to fight my way up instead but, as every fight is a combination of long walks through the map to set them up and then some melee combat, I might check a walk-through to try and RPG my way out.
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Fuck this game. After getting through the RPG bit I had a melee boss battle (which was made especially frustrating by the borked block move), then a great long stealth section that was basically impossible to do without getting seen that I had to do on two bars of health because of the autosave system. Then the level looped round and I couldn't figure out where to go. I could have trekked through the whole thing again if that didn't involve going through another impossible stealth section which I managed on full health but is impossible on one bar.
Basically: really nice atmosphere, but a load of really frustrating mechanics and not much to recommend it otherwise.
Rating: Red.
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