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Story based "Adult" First Person Shooter **Not for children** Butcher Bay happens to fit the niche nicely. After Half-Life 2 there was only really the Call of Duty: United Offensive as a good first person shooter (Doom 3 being an older game now and Far Cry also... you should play all of these if you have not). Riddick comes off the back of a very bad sequel to the surprise hit Pitch Black. Here we actually play a game that should maybe have been the sequel. It is certainly heaps better. The premise is very good. You are Riddick in a maximum security prison somewhere on a planet with inmates voiced by leading actors and facial expressions that are nearly as good as HL2. The atmosphere of the prison is A+ as you go about the place taking on various missions in the cells (fighting, buying drugs, snubbing out bosses, causing a riot, doing jobs for people) so that you can... escape Butcher Bay. The menu is astonishing at first as it opens up like a cube and the buttons move around, however owners of ATI RADEON cards may experience some shading difficultly and a few glitches in the cut sequences and models now and again (there a number of shading options to help improve this). Riddick is mostly about stealth moves, like grabbing people from behind and either slicing them or breaking their neck. You can get into hand-to-hand combat where the enemies face actually bruises and bleeds. Clubs and knives have a similar effect. The story breaks nicely at the end of each level where you meet your foes. Riddick banters off some classic one-liners and there is quite a bit of swearing. You can talk to some of the characters and choose your answers. Once the prison riot starts, you are given weapons to escape the prison and the real rush begins (Doom 3 type fast and furious blasting). Enemy AI is quite good and the game plays very smoothly from start to finish. For all intensive purposes, the game play is very much like DEUS EX but the graphics are a way better. It is surprising how long this game is, given that it just seems like a movie tie-in package. It is not. This is a FULLY FLEDGED first person shooter all the way. I had difficulty running this on a 256mb card, 3ghz P4 and 1gig of ram on full screen resolution and had to take the graphics down a bit. It seems like this game is more for the 512mb series on the way. Anything less than a 128mb card may not do the game justice. It seems that high-end graphics "adult" first person shooters are back again! Bottom line is to play it. Pros: - Great Story - Great Graphics - As good as any new 1st person shooter. - It is long. Cons: - Not enough stealth jump moves. - Enemy AI can sometimes get a little repetitive. - Needs a fast high spec machine to run properly. - Some glitches with ATI users.