The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Hands On

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Proper guns are glimpsed in the game's brief dreamy prologue, and heavily hinted at for much of what follows, and, in a design u-turn from Butcher Bay, they're no longer DNA coded to their original owners, a mechanic which called for an irritating unlock ritual. It's an indicator of a new focus on more accessible action; another one, which is easier to evaluate, is the tweaks that have been made to the first game's hand-to-hand combat. Both punching and blocking have been notably tightened, and a range of suitably sadistic melee weapons (the most brilliantly unpleasant being the Ulaks: twin serrated scythes that create a decidedly unnerving squelch as they cut through someone else's skin and which I hope to never accidentally drop on my own foot) have improved what was slightly fudged with the first game.

Alongside the brawling, as with Butcher Bay, the game's environment encourages gruesome experimentation, whether it's hiding in a corner and breaking someone's spine as they stroll past, or even picking your moment and landing on them from above, like a shaven-headed Super Mario decked out in a sexy pair of cyber-goth swimming goggles.

Breaking up the combat is a fair degree of variety, even in the first few hours. Starbreeze knows this genre so well by now it can construct a set-piece from almost nothing: a climbing-frame room full of empty crates and some patrolling guards, or a locked-door puzzle involving a Drone and the game's first weapon - a rather sharp hairpin. Equally, the series' habit of switching to third-person whenever you scramble up a ladder or climb onto a crate, makes it a nurturing environment for surprisingly involved platforming sections, including one sweaty crawl up an almost sheer wall, avoiding a roving searchlight.

Diesel's shaven head presumably took millions off the budget, with no advanced hair shader technology to bother with. Ports of Golden Balls are likely to benefit too.

Elsewhere, even Butcher Bay's RPG elements have had a reworking, benefiting from clearer objectives and the deviously compact design of the maps, which shortcuts backtracking. They also serve to show off the pretty dazzling character models and animation. The textures may be less detailed than Crysis, a game in which everybody appeared to have their ravaged, dirty-pored skin cloned from a single reference photo of Bill Murray, but the performances are far more actorly - subtle facial movements add a peculiar force to the dialogue, and there's a notable absence of the near-omnipresent shrugging that passes for physical performances in many games.

Besides all this are the tweaks you might expect: better lighting, better textures, a streamlining of the first game's weapon-selection system, and a more refined use of Riddick's night vision, which sees it playing a subtle part in many of the game's puzzles as well as helping you to spot Drones lurking in the darkness. All of these upgrades have apparently found their way across the disk to Butcher Bay, too, suggesting that there will be more than enough reason to break out of its prison once more.

Dark Athena appears to be eighty per cent corridor, ten per cent airvent, and ten per cent broken-necked crew.

Multiplayer details are still scarce, but Starbreeze is apparently stung by the criticisms of The Darkness's online modes, which means it's either going to make Riddick's even worse out of spite, or is currently toiling extra hard at it in the hope of winning back your love. Either way, traditional deathmatches will be joined by at least one new game type, said to be inspired by Pitch Black (hopefully not to the extent that it will be slightly cheap-looking and stuffed full of people who used to be in Neighbours). We'll have online impressions for you in the coming weeks.

However that turns out, Dark Athena itself is shaping up to be one of the first big games this year that you might want to start getting excited about. It may be more crates, more spaceships, and more breathy snapping of necks, but the moment you first see that predatory shadow inching along a wall and realise that it's you, and that you're about to do someone a rather nasty injury, and that you're really, really looking forward to it, memories of other games and other kills will likely fade into the darkness.