Usually when an actor decides he wants to broaden his horizons and tackle something that doesn't involve working in front of the camera, he'll write a screenplay, direct a movie or start a mediocre rock band. (Dogstar, anyone? No? Didn't think so. Sorry, Keanu.)
Self-professed video game freak Vin Diesel is a little different. The bald and bulging-pec'd star of flicks like The Fast and the Furious and XXX - two movies which were essentially live-action games themselves - opened up his own video game production company, Tigon Studios, with an aim to improve the quality of interactive entertainment.
A lofty goal, and one that certainly wasn't realized with the company's first co-production, a craptastic XXX game for the Game Boy Advance. But this time around, Ma and Pa Diesel's famous son has partnered with Vivendi Universal Games and Sweden's Starbreeze Studios to create The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. And wouldn't you know, it's a gritty, hair-raising, take-no-prisoners action game, and one of the Xbox's best exclusive titles to date.
Set before the time of 2000's sci-fi cult hit Pitch Black and its just-released big-budget sequel The Chronicles of Riddick, Escape from Butcher Bay delves into the origins of Diesel's Richard B. Riddick character (and those freaky nightvision eyes of his), as he's tossed into the meanest, scariest and most escape-proof prison in the galaxy, a place where dropping the soap in the shower is the least of your worries. If they even have soap in the showers.
Though it's essentially a first-person shooter, Escape From Butcher Bay blends in elements of stealth gameplay, some simple puzzle-solving, a dash of adventure game-style character interaction and even hand-to-hand combat from a first-person perspective, similar to what was recently seen in Namco's Breakdown.
The weird thing is, it all works amazingly well as a whole. Weirder still, an incredible amount of effort has gone into the story, atmosphere and mission design, making the experience feel very immersive and organic rather than like a patched-together series of levels. Kind of like ... a movie!
The visuals are also some of the best seen in an Xbox game - not surprising, considering Starbreeze Studios did the graphically dazzling Xbox game Enclave - and the audio is spot-on as well. Diesel does the voice of Riddick, naturally, and is joined by pros like Cole Hauser (reprising his Pitch Black role of Riddick nemesis Johns), Hellboy's Ron Perlman and rapper Xzibit.
Although the game is fairly linear, it presents the illusion of giving you the freedom - as much freedom as you can have in a prison, anyway - to tackle obstacles as you see fit. Riddick will sometimes be loaded up with a deadly array of firepower as he moves deeper into the bowels of Butcher Bay, while at other times he'll have nothing more than a shiv or homemade knuckleduster. But because the first-person melee combat is so well done, you never mind having to give foes an up-close-and-personal beatdown instead of pumping them full of lead from afar.
About the only knock you can make against Escape From Butcher Bay is that it's very short, and even methodical gamers will polish it off in well under 12 hours. (Mom and dad take note: it's also brutally violent and loaded with swearing. Not one for the kiddies, unless you're trying to raise future intergalactic serial killers.)
But a game that's consistently entertaining and exciting for 10 or 12 hours is better than a 30-hour epic loaded with uninspired-level design and a boring story. That's my opinion, anyway. Anyone who disagrees can talk to my shiv.
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BOTTOMLINE
Video game fan Vin Diesel wanted to help give movie-based games a better reputation, and he's done it with this surprisingly tight blend of action, exploration and story. It's just too bad it's over so quickly.
