Anyway, this is a fairly nifty little movie game; a first person shooter starring Vin Diesel's bad-ass character from the sleeper hit Pitch Black, and the follow up big-budget bomb The Chronicles of Riddick. This game is set before the action of either movie, in case you're keeping track. The "Developer's Cut" thing, incidentally, means that this is the PC port of the original X-Box game. This version does have some new content that the platform version didn't, including a "developer's commentary" track (which the Duffer didn't play with).

As the game starts, Riddick, interplanetary bad mofo, has somehow got his silly self caught by a bounty hunter. Our (anti) hero is taken to Butcher Bay - a desolate, desert planet that's been turned into a space-prison and forced labor mining camp. Riddick immediately starts plotting his escape, killing anyone who gets in his way, cuz that's just how he rolls, dawg

(There's a tutorial level with a kind of neat twist, which I won't give away here. You'll get through it quick enough.)

This is definitely a game for adults only (chronological adults, anyway). There's no sex (thank goodness, since there don't actually seem to be any women on Butcher Bay … I mean, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for in my video game experience, personally), but there's a lot of very, very nasty words (used without much imagination, I must say … I'm afraid that the Shakespearian cadences of HBO's Deadwood have permanently raised my bar for vulgarity on the screen). Even more than that, the violence, while not incredibly graphic (though blood does splatter freely) is extremely callous. The victims are almost all human, not creatures, and most of them are reasonably innocent (if somewhat hard-assed) authority figures who are just trying to do their job. There is, basically, absolutely no moral justification for anything you do in this game whatsoever. None of this offends me at all, but I'd definitely feel like a heel if I was responsible for a 12-year-old playing this game.

The cinematic graphics for the game are outstanding, giving Riddick a shrewd yet feral look, like the world's smartest, smoothest orangutan. Likewise the voice acting stands out. Vin Diesel (who, his entire career notwithstanding, is actually a very competent actor) voices Riddick, and his terse, menacing rumble really brings the character alive. The supporting roles, though tiny, are also cast with first rate voice talent (Ron Perlman has, like, six or seven lines).

So the gameplay … this game is an inch deep and, well, not really all that wide either, but somehow on its own limited merits it worked for me. This is about as basic as FPS action gets. Riddick can move, he can sneak, he can jump (a little), and he can fight. There's one attack button (although you can get to some special moves by timing your attacks right, but this is actually pretty random, and not a major part of fight strategy). There's one button you can use to do other things - all other things, from climbing a ladder to using a keypad to talking with other characters.

Simple as it is, it all seemed to fit together pretty well for the Duffer, but I like this kind of game, where you can kind of cruise along on the eye candy, with just enough mental engagement to keep you from falling asleep on the keyboard. Harder-core types will probably find this game a snooze.

Also, the game is strictly one-player, one campaign, so there's no network capability and not a lot of replay value. The levels aren't huge (though they're laid out well), and the whole game probably won't take serious gamers more than 10 or 15 hours tops. Again, I liked it, but I'm not going to try to tell you this is a game with a lot of meat on it.

Instead, you get things like cigs. Whenever you find a cigarette pack in the game it unlocks some little extra - usually either concept art or a still from the Chronicles of Riddick movie. You can burn a number of brain cells trying to get every last pack of cigs in the game, if you dig that sort of thing.

Now, I need to make a sort-of apology. The Duffer really, really tries to get through an entire campaign before writing a review, but when I was about three-fourths of the way through Riddick I got on a phone call while I was loading my save, and I somehow ended up starting a new game, which in turn caused me to lose all my previous saves. Now, I can't really blame the designers for a brain phart on my part so massive as to cause me to not only hit the wrong button, but then hit another wrong button when told that hitting said button would nuke all my saves. On the other hand, I've got to wonder if it was really necessary for the game to nuke all saves when a new game was started under my name. I sort of suspect that this was a relic of the XBox version of the game that nobody ever thought about reworking. Anyway, I decided that even though not finishing this game was mostly my own stupid fault, the designers could share enough of the blame that I'd go ahead and file my review based on the parts I had played (especially since my so-called deadline on this review had long become a rather stale joke).

Bottom line, I liked it, but if you're looking for a game to blow your mind or take over your life for the next six months or so, than this is definitely not it. On the other hand, if you're a fan of Vin Diesel or the Riddick movies, or if you just have a few bucks to blow on a few nights of colorful, mindless and reasonably fun cinematic mayhem, then give this game a shot and get down with your bad self.