Surgency Games

What fortune. What luck. This week, not one, but two Vin Diesel game vehicles had demos released on XBL: Wheelman and Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Even better is the amazing, near-perfect juxtaposition between these demos as tools to market their respective products.

Wheelman offers a very simple demo, with great direction and purpose, showcasing what I understand to be the majority of gameplay elements present in the final experience. On the other hand, Chronicles of Riddick is a terrible demo, offering little player direction, a confusing context for action and muddled objectives.

Here’s the rub. I plan on buying Chronicles of Riddick and never want to think about Wheelman ever again once I have finished writing this article.

The problems with the Wheelman demo stem from the game itself. The level design is shallow and allows for almost no player improvisation, a must-have layer of design in open-world games. The controls are far too basic for their own good and driving the car (an action I would assume to be at the forefront of the game) is boring. The cars you drive can’t be destroyed, regardless of how much damage enemies inflict upon them or how poorly you drive.  Neither story mission present in the demo has any sort of obvious failure state, which makes success much less interesting.

There are a number of features I find interesting: the ability to “melee” attack other cars with the right analogue stick, supermoves that offer a unique perspective on the BulletTime® cliché and the ability to jump between moving vehicles. All of these mechanics and features were well presented in the demo. Getting through the demo and understanding the game is very easy to do. If you like the demo, if you understand and appreciate what they are going for, I imagine you’d like the full game.

But Chronicles of Riddick… What a terrible demo. A single load screen shows you all of the controls and then suddenly you’re hiding in an air shaft, listening to a couple armed guards talk about their day. A button prompt appears, telling you to cut off their conversation. You do. A cutscene plays of Riddick dropping from the ceiling and killing both men. Then, immediately, a couple more guards attack you. Hope you remember what the load screen taught you to do! If you hesitate for more than a second, the guards will shoot you down and you’ll get to start the demo over.

After that, it doesn’t get better. Your goals are unclear and the context of the narrative is never discussed outside of a brief conversation between Riddick and a woman on a viewscreen that I must infer is the titular Dark Athena. At one point you’re locked in a room with nowhere to go. In the corner of the room, if you stand in the exact right spot, you can interact with the environment and continue forward. I lucked into this interaction. Hope you can to.

It doesn’t help that the demo is brutally difficult. You have very little health, no understanding of the (absolutely necessary) stealth mechanics and dozens upon dozens of enemies who all have near perfect aim from across rooms the size of basketball courts. I died six or seven times before quitting. I never finished the demo.

But here’s the deal. The demo looks great, controls well, and has some brutally fantastic combat animations. Also, I have a history with Chronicles of Riddick. I know the past precedent of the franchise and I know that Starbreeze knows how to make a great game. I know I will buy Riddick the day it comes out it. I know I will enjoy it because all of my issues with context and unclear goals in the demo will (hopefully) be resolved by playing the game from the start.