The 2004 Universal Studios sci-fi movie The Chronicles of Riddick was, well, not good. Not good at all. The film, starring Vin Diesel, was a sequel to a much smaller scale (and much better) sci-fi film called Pitch Black. The sequel, however, was a failed attempt to turn the franchise, and Diesel's character of Riddick, into a huge Star Wars-like epic. The end result was a movie that took itself far too seriously and fell apart.

However developer Starbreeze Studios and publisher Vivendi Games crafted a sold first person action game based on the Riddick character. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (which actually takes place prior to the events of Pitch Black) was one of the best looking games for its day and its combo of first person shooter combat with some melee gameplay was very satisfying. It remains one of the best movie-to-game translations ever made.
A couple of years later, Vivendi Games revealed that Starbreeze was working on a remake of Escape from Butcher Bay with revamped graphics, a new single player campaign and the addition of multiplayer for the first time. However very little was revealed about this remake from the publisher after its announcement. With Vivendi Games' merge with Activision to form Activision Blizzard last year it seemed like the game had been forgotten.

Thankfully that turned out not to be true as Atari announced late in 2008 that it had picked up the publishing rights to the remake, now titled The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Atari recently sent over a partial PC build of the game's single player portion to Big Download so we could put it through its paces.