We've not had much out of Starbreeze Studios since the release of The Darkness back in June 2007, and that's a real shame. The Darkness may well have had its issues (like Jackie's complete inability to get around with anything other than a leaden shuffle) but it was a superb shooter, with plenty of original touches, a good storyline and one of the most astonishing game engines seen in that time period. It was the first Xbox 360 game I played that didn't look like an Xbox 360 game. It looked better, a generation beyond. In terms of lighting, post-processing effects, characters, motion blur... nothing could touch it, and even now in a market saturated with Unreal Engine 3 shooters, it has a look that is all its own.
The PlayStation 3 code on the other hand wasn't quite as decent. The same gameplay, the same geometry, but just about everything else was tangibly cut-down compared to the original. The first casualty was the resolution - down from native 720p to a teeth-clenchingly unimpressive 960x540. Anti-aliasing? Gone. Lighting effects? Pared down. Textures? Lower resolution, in many places. In short, an unimpressive port, but at least the coolness of the game remained intact and it remained an enjoyable adventure.
So here we are getting on for two years later with Starbreeze's latest effort: a retooling of its 2004 technology-defying Xbox release, The Chronicles of Riddick. The Darkness engine is back in full effect, powering an HD version of the original Escape From Butcher Bay, along with a brand new single-player campaign, Assault on Dark Athena. Online multiplayer modes are also bundled into the package.
First impressions confirm that The Darkness engine is still hugely impressive, even if it hasn't moved on that much since its HD debut back in 2007. But it was a piece of code ahead of its time, just like original Xbox version. Back in 2004, Riddick ran with a dynamic framebuffer, switching resolutions during gameplay to sustain frame-rate - four years on, WipEout HD does exactly the same to maintain its illusion of a full HD 1080p60 refresh rate.
What is clear, however, is that the 2004 vintage gameplay is Riddick's most limiting factor and that remains the case whether you're playing this game on PC, 360 or PS3. The fetch-quests, the sometimes-laborious and inconsistent platforming elements - it's here where even the best technology in the world can't cover up what feels like antique gameplay. Also irritating is the paring-down of adventure elements in Dark Athena, making it arguably inferior than its five-year-old sibling.
So what about the conversion then? Here's a video, and be sure to check out the triple-format screenshot comparison gallery.
Although massively improved since The Darkness on PS3, Starbreeze's engine still favours Xbox 360.
The good news is that Starbreeze has clearly made great efforts to improve its PlayStation 3 engine since The Darkness two years ago. The pretty savage cutbacks seen in its last game have given way to a new set of compromises that are nowhere near as impactful to the image quality, and bring performance much closer to the platform parity games publishers are increasingly demanding.
For a game that relies so much on its lighting, the good news is that Riddick is feature-complete on PS3. Anti-aliasing is in too, although once again it's the quincunx variation that matches the edge-smoothing of 360's more memory-intensive 4x multi-sampling AA, but comes at the cost of adding a blur to the entirety of the texture detail. In the case of Riddick, this is magnified somewhat by the reduced resolution and also the grain/noise filter.
Although significantly improved over The Darkness, resolution is still sub-HD: 1024x720 to be precise, giving 360 a clear 20 per cent boost in detail. Most sub-HD games tend to render the image at the lower resolution before magnifying the image up to 720p and adding additional elements like the HUD and on-screen text (thus keeping those finely detailed elements looking good and crisp). Riddick on the other hand simply uses the PS3's hardware scaler to enlarge the entire frame-buffer sideways - easily noticeable as the text is considerably chunkier and fatter than it is on 360.
Overall impressions are that the PS3 version passes muster, but it's significantly blurrier than the 360 build and there are other cutbacks too - the most notable being the paring down of transparent textures (for example, fences). Polygon tearing in the demo has been identified as a reason for preferring the look of the PS3 game, but the fact is it's in that version too - it's simply less noticeable owing to the resolution upscale and quincunx blurring. Also curious is that the 360 release comes with a range of video profiles that allow you to subtly change the look and post-processing of the game's visuals. These are absent in the PS3 code.
Performance in Riddick is approximate on both platforms, but 360 still commands a marginal advantage.
Frame-rate analysis shows little in the way of surprises. The video is a series of clips taken from the same areas in-game, pretty much the accepted standard for non-synthetic benchmarks on PC gaming sites (just not as pretty as ours). In an ideal world you'd be replicating gameplay 100 per cent, but this isn't possible, and even comparison of engine-driven cut-scenes is not ideal as an indicator of performance in-game.
As it is, both versions are v-locked and occasionally drop below the target 30fps, but by and large, they're like for like. Curiously, the engine seems to exhibit weaknesses applying motion blur and tone-mapping simultaneously - so while for the most part the 360 game runs at a solid 30fps, spinning about often incurs a frame-rate hit. For its part, the PS3 version is similarly affected but is prone to dropping a few more frames a bit more often. Noticeable? Yes. Impactful? No. Overall, this aspect of the game isn't an issue: the frame loss isn't hugely significant on either console, but more than that, Riddick isn't a twitch-shooter: it doesn't need lightning fast response anyway.
A Non-PC Appraisal
So, onto the PC version of the game, tested with a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, and our standard 8800GT graphics card (basically identical to the GBP 100 9800GT). By today's standards, it's a bit long in the tooth, but it has still managed to comfortably outquaff the consoles in demanding games like Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2. However, in this case, performance is disappointing at 720p. The set-up just about matches the Xbox 360 version of the game, but feels noticeably laggier and drops more frames. Realistically, you're looking at 720p resolution and no anti-aliasing to get something in the region of a playable 30fps experience with high-quality textures.
Tweakable options are limited - three levels of texture quality are on offer, while shadows and decals can be turned on and off, and anisotropic filtering can be adjusted, but that's about it. However, varying levels of anti-aliasing can be applied with a vast range of both horizontal and vertical sampling. Quite why so many different AA options are available compared to the lack of tweakables elsewhere is a bit of a mystery - we can only assume that Starbreeze doesn't want you messing about too much with its intricate visuals.
But the bottom line is pretty straightforward - performance here on the same PC is in the same ballpark as Crysis, but clearly there's a lot less going on. Checking in with our friends at Eurogamer Germany, they claimed decent performance with a 3.0GHz dual-core CPU and an ATI HD 4850 at 1680x1050 resolution, but saw large gains in refresh rate by turning off anti-aliasing.
Personally, I've been a champion for PC gaming as a means of getting measurably superior visuals at much smoother frame-rates, but to do so with Riddick appears to require a monstrous GPU. It's disappointing that a GBP 100 graphics card is being bested so easily by a complete console system that costs just GBP 30 more. Yes, performance radically improved when we bunged in the GBP 400 NVIDIA GTX295, but bearing in mind Riddick's console origins, we shouldn't need to be over-engineering on the PC that much. Basically, it's high-end or bust here.
The Final Analysis
Starbreeze has made a decent fist of this one on console. Xbox 360 still has the smoothest, best-looking version on console and in terms of performance, it's the cheapest way to enjoy a good-looking 720p experience. PlayStation 3 gets close - it's feature-complete (yes, it has Trophies to mirror Achievements), but it's let down a touch by the blurrier graphics. In most cases it manages to look approximate to the 360 game, but there are several shots where it can look pretty poor - the opening shot of Butcher Bay in particular stands out.
But the real disappointment here is the PC game. If our system can't sustain 30fps, the mind boggles at what would be required to get this running at 1080p60.
