Games based on movies aren’t exactly rare these days, but great games based on movies are practically unheard of, like the jackalope, or a prostitute without a venereal disease. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is one of these rare creations. Its mixture of impressive visuals, light questing, an interesting story and brutal melee combat make this one of the best games on the Xbox platform, and surprisingly one of the best PC games released in years. This is a review of the PC version of the game, which has some notable additions over its Xbox counterpart.

Escape from Butcher Bay places players behind the eyes of Riddick, a notoriously bad man played by hack movie star Vin Diesel. A prequel to the first movie in the franchise, Pitch Black, the opening of the game has Riddick being delivered to the prison of Butcher Bay, a triple-max facility on a barren desert planet in the far future. Riddick’s ultimate goal throughout the game is obviously to escape from Butcher Bay, which everyone seems to think is impossible. Of course, they’ve never had to incarcerate Riddick before. As Riddick, players take the notorious criminal to through three separate levels of the prison, each supposedly more difficult to escape than the last. Throughout the course of the game the player will consistently screw with the prison’s corrupt staff, foil incredible security systems, and brutally kill anyone that gets in his way. What’s amusing about all of this is that the inmates of Butcher Bay have no idea who they’re dealing with, and while they initially come off as extremely aggressive and arrogant to Riddick, they quickly lose their attitude after you brutally kill a few people for looking at you funny.

While the majority of gameplay is typical FPS fodder, Riddick has a wicked melee combat aspect that works almost if not just as well as in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, with attacks based on direction and timing followed up with brutal finishing moves. Combined with a heavy amount of stealth gameplay, the game makes it far more entertaining to take out enemies by silently cutting their throats from behind, or smashing in the back of their knees with bits of rebar. At about the half-way point through the game, Riddick will receive his signature “shined” eyes, which allow him to see in pitch-black darkness.

Graphically, Escape from Butcher Bay looks fantastic, especially for a game that’s several years old. The PC version of the game is noticeably more attractive, featuring higher-resolution options, improved texture fidelity, and overall smoother performance than the console version. This quality also carries over to the sound implementation of the game, as it includes impressive voice acting, fantastic sound design and a surprisingly epic musical score. Additionally the PC version of the game ships with more content, in the form of a commentary mode with an incredible amount of developer dialogue to listen to, as well as extended gameplay sequences that didn’t ship with the Xbox version.

Trying to find something negative to talk about this game is surprisingly difficult. It could be said that the lack of any multiplayer mode whatsoever is a downside that could have been avoided, but the game doesn’t need multiplayer content at all. It’s an impressively made game based on a movie franchise that will take anyone about 12 hours to beat. It’s, loads of fun and just long enough to be satisfying without wearing out its welcome. Escape from Butcher Bay is one of the best games on any platform released in the last few years. Play it.