The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is the new video game starring Vin Diesel. Its release, as you may already have guessed, has been carefully timed to coincide with the new movie starring Vin Diesel, which is also called The Chronicles of Riddick, leaving out the colon and the tag line.

The movie is the first in history, incidentally, to feature Mr. Diesel alongside Dame Judi Dench. Other films have boasted of unlikelier pairings, true, but they were appealing and people liked them as movies. Poor Riddick does not have this advantage. Word is, it sucks badly. It has drawn many, many column-inches of critical bile. It has even been outperformed at the box office by Garfield: The Movie. The lesson here is that Diesel + Dench is not the winning combination cat + lasagna is.

There is a twist coming, and it will surprise and please you. But first, some background. Bad movies are exceedingly common. So are bad movies with bad video game tie-ins. So, even, are good movies with bad video game tie-ins. But (here is the twist) the new Riddick for Xbox is something rare and wonderful. It is the brilliant, soaring, super wicked excellent video game tie-in to a steaming rotter of a film. It is great in precisely the way its movie partner is not. Judi Dench does not appear in Escape from Butcher Bay, so maybe the movie was all her fault and Mr. Diesel just needed a little space to work his magic.

The game tells the story of Richard B. Riddick, who is the toughest tough guy in the galaxy or maybe even the universe. Space, say. One day he is hauled off to Butcher Bay, which is the toughest space prison in space. Butcher Bay is crawling with very bad people. Some of them are inmates and some are guards. All are vile and spiteful, quick to anger and slow to forgive. Riddick fits in nicely.

We are in charge of Riddick, so naturally we want to escape. We are not at all sure just what he has done to warrant imprisonment, but neither are we terribly concerned about it. As you know, video games are long on action and short on exposition. In any case, we do not like Butcher Bay and we are getting out by any means necessary. The process will be long and bloody, but we are tough and hardened, so we do not mind.

We begin, just as we are getting off the prisoner-transport ship, by breaking the neck of the officer in charge. That will teach him to turn his back on us. Next, we descend through a maze of tunnels and ventilation shafts and stacked crates, pausing occasionally to break more necks. The game is partly about sneaking around stealthily and hiding in the corners, trying not to be seen, and it is partly about being Vin Diesel, ass kicking bad guy. So as we wander through the corridors and across the prison yard and looking for a way out, we experiment with different ways of playing. Sometimes we stomp right in and let our keepers know they are about to taste our fury. Sometimes we crouch down low and stay out of the light.

The guards are smart; if they notice us they will call in backup and hunt us to distraction or possibly death. If we manage to kill a few of them off, we must carefully hide their bodies in dark corners, lest they be discovered and the alarm sounded once more. We find card-keys and wrenches and, occasionally, guns. We can't wait to see what's around the corner. We feel like we did as children playing The Murder Game in a darkened church basement, running around in a fog of happy trepidation.

Along the way, we collect packs of smokes. These are mostly here to irritate parents.