YMMV / Escape from Butcher Bay

• Awesome Music: The games have largely ambient, atmospheric music, but some standout pieces include "Prison Break" and "Drone Mile".
• Breather Level: The final, Triple Max segment is much shorter and easier than the long, often-grueling Double Max segment.
• Catharsis Factor: After seeing Abbott being an asshole and treating prisoners like crap, getting to shoot him when you encounter him in his apartment is pretty fulfilling. He does survive, unfortunately. However you get to fight with him later on in Tower 17, which is also quite satisfying.
• Game-Breaker: To compensate for the fact that you don't have any other projectile weapons, the taser gun you get for the duration of the mining area will render anything it hits incapable of movement for several seconds, ready to be boot-stomped into the afterlife. In the original 2004 release, it can even stun the exoskeleton guards for a few seconds. This is somewhat subverted however, since the taser gun does come in handy if you need more darkness to sneak around enemies by shooting at lights.
  • There's also the Minigun, which carries infinite ammo.
• Nightmare Fuel: After falling into the Pit, you first have to find a way with only a few minutes of battery left in your torch, and a little later you have another task to do there with just a dozen flares at disposal. All this while natural light sources are almost nil (you don't have the Eyeshine yet), and with constant assaults by small packs of Dwellers - men thrown down there and devolved into a feral state by madness and exposure to toxic waste. The alien beasts you encounter later can be unsettling, but never like that thankfully short level.
  • Heck, a brief moment right before falling into said Pit, when a guard fires upon Riddick with a shotgun and narrowly misses him, he suddenly turns into an audibly seething and instinctual rage that comes just short of screaming before he tackles and splatters the guy from the drop. Even the cool one-liner doesn't detract from seeing Riddick briefly flip the hell out.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Butcher Bay is generally considered one of the finest games to come up at the time, and many went as far as saying that it was better than the movie it was supposed to tie in.
• Polished Port: The second PC version has updated visuals, gameplay improvements, and the added content of the first PC version. On top of that, it comes free with it's sequel.
• Sequel in Another Medium: Or prequel, in this case, since both this game and its sequel take place before the events of Pitch Black.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While the HD remaster of this game included in Assault on Dark Athena is mostly the same, there were a lot of minor but bizarre and unnecessary changes that left some fans disappointed.
  • For starters, you can no longer jump while in stealth mode, and if you try, it will take you out of stealth mode.
  • In the original game, you could knock enemies out by melee attacking them with a gun. However this no longer works in the remaster, meaning that if you melee attack an enemy with your gun, it wont knock them out and instead mildly hurt them.
  • There was also a zoom-in mechanic that helps you see enemies from a distance. This was also removed in the HD remaster and was replaced with an aiming mechanic instead.
  • In the PC version of the HD remaster, for some strange reason they decided to remove the quick save feature that was in the PC port of the original game, which really came in handy for players who wanted to save the game in a certain part of the level.
  • In the sewer level where Riddick must fight through swarms of zombies, there is a part where he must find a broken valve and attach it back to where it was in order to open a gate and further progress. This was also changed in the HD remaster where the Valve is no longer broken off or missing and is already in place.
  • The taser gun no longer works against Riot Suit guards in the HD remaster, even though it does in the original game.
  • In the level where Riddick finds a riot suit, you could melee attack enemies which was deadly enough to send them flying a distance away. Unfortunately in the HD remaster, melee attacking enemies in the suit is no longer as effective, meaning it now takes a few hits to kill an enemy if you choose to melee it, making it less satisfying.
  • In the final level where Riddick must fight off Hoxie's two armored guards, they had force field shields in the original game, making them quite tough, while in the HD remake they decided to remove the force fields from them, making them easier to kill but also less challenging.