I>the chronicles of riddick is based on the recent movie of the same name.The movie was the prequel to Pitch Black which was released in India in 2001.Vin Diesel was in the lead role as the bad guy who eventually turned out to be the savior of all the victims in the movie.

The game starts with Riddick being dropped off at Butcher Bay, a notorious ultra-high security prison. The game?s visuals have been enhanced from its Xbox version to be proportionally outstanding for the PC version. Its controls have been optimised to make it easy to be picked up by anyone who has played a PC first-person shooter lately. It features a new and exciting gameplay sequence that has been seamlessly integrated into the middle of the story and it boasts an unlockable ?commentary? mode, which annotates the entire game with extensive DVD-style audio commentary from the Stockholm-based Starbreeze Studios.

He graphics have been given the royal treatment with great additions to visual shading. Riddick already looked good on the Xbox, but the clarity of higher resolution brings a crisper experience to gamers. Character models are good, though stiffly animated at times, but the textures are wonderful. The problem comes with characters generating strange shadows, as was the case in the Xbox version. You can see shadows missing or drawn incorrectly.

Part from such small but noticeable blips the game is grand in design and detail. Sound is of the same quality. The voice acting is wonderful. I was very moved seeing the first cutscene which featured the voice of Vin Diesel ? simply amazing. He gives the voice of Riddick. Butcher Bay combines elements of the FPS, adventure and action genres. The game is delivered as an adventure, rather than a run-and-gun FPS. There is also an element of jumping and climbing, often combined with the need for stealth. There is a thief/manhunt-style stealth system, which is fun. On top of it is a simple but effective skill-based fist-fighting mode.

Ou can also buy weapons from dealers, with money found lying around or earned by completing missions. The later part of the game can get a little tedious, and I got lost a few times. The in-game map is seldom helpful. Speaking of maps, loading times are not long, but frequent.

He game is steeped in atmosphere from the moment Riddick walks into the maximum security prison. It?s dark, not only metaphorically, but also physically, which aside from being moody, plays heavily into gameplay. Thus all in all it is till date perhaps the best game of 2005 (in India).You should go and buy one right away. Don?t forget to go through the minimum system requirements as it requires Windows XP service pack 1 and Win 2000 service pack 4 to run.

B>Minimum system requirements: Windows(R) 2000 (Service Pack 4) / Windows(R) XP (Service Pack 1), Pentium(R) 4 1.8 GHz or AMD equivalent, 256 MB RAM, 64 MB AGP OpenGL 1.5-compatible video card, supporting programmable shading. (ATI Radeon(R) 8500 or NVIDIA(R) GeForce(TM) 3 and above ? except GeForce(TM) 4 MX), DirectX(R) 9.0 or better, DirectX(R) 9-compatible sound card, 3.7 GB hard disc space (recommend 4.4 of uncompressed disc space), 16x CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, Microsoft(R) compatible mouse and keyboard.