Chronicles of Riddick (XBOX)

[arogan]

50% completed

- Very nice graphics, great atmosphere, normal maps, nice lighting, some aliasing issues, framerate good most of the time. Looks almost as good as fry cry interior levels.
- good story and great voice acting so far. I loved pitch black. Here you get to experience how he escapes from butcher bay prison.
- best opening to a video game since half life
- controls are pretty good. nothing too frustrating. I think sensitivity needs to be tuned down while zoomed but that's about my only complaint.
- very good stealth action with more action than most. When crawling and sneaking you actually move pretty fast instead of crawling on your lips like in other games. Stealthy and quick....that's Riddick!
- combat is a lot of fun. many ways to take them on. take out the lights like splinter cell or just hose them down.
- pretty good melee combat. much better than dead to rights.
- very little jumping puzzles and they are easy. it switches to 3rd person for these anyways
- save points have been pretty frequent so far.


Well worth the purchase price!

[firstadopter]

How are the first person controls? Since I have a pretty hefty PC, I never tried FPS on consoles before (thinking at mouse keyboard would be so much better.)

But with the great reviews Riddick is getting and my Xbox on its way, I am kind of interested.

[arogan]

Yeah mouse + keyboard will always be better BUT so far Halo on xbox has about the best gamepad control setup I've seen for a console fps. Riddick is very close. The only real issue I have is when zoomed the sensitvity is way too high.

If this is your first console fps then it will take time to get use to it but Riddick controls about as well as it can with a gamepad.

Typical console tricks used to help compensate for lack of mouse/keyboard

- aiming cone so you don't have to be exactly dead on to get a hit.
- cone of sensitivity. This is cool in that the sensitivity automatically goes down as you enter a cone around a target so you get a sense of increased precision. As you leave the cone your sensitivity returns to normal. This way you can quickly look around but still get precision aiming when needed. Halo uses this programming technique to great effect!
- dumb down the ai.
- give you separate x/y axis sensitvity adjustments, acceleration adjustments.

Then there are games like counter-strike that just feels completely different to me on xbox vs the pc that I will probably never get use to using a control pad.