AMY is a survival horror game set in a future not too distant from our own. You are a caretaker of a “verbally challenged” girl named Amy. All seems well until a explosion causes the zombie apocalypse. You wake up to find that you are infected with the zombie virus and that being near Amy somehow seems to heal you of the sickness. Thus begins your journey into the wildly mixed bag that is AMY.
On the surface AMY at least looks like an amazing game. Being that this game is only down-loadable it looks remarkably well. It seems as though great care was taken in making sure the games atmosphere is carried well throughout. The world a is decently well realized future of our own and everything you see will make you feel like this world could actually exist. The enemies themselves only have a few forms but they all look scary enough. Basically what I am saying is that the look of this game is really great and might trick you into thinking that the rest of the game is of the same quality.
Let me make this clear before I go on into the sadness of this game. I enjoyed AMY, despite my better judgment, I had a fair time with the game. With that being said, this game is a broken mess. While I can see what Vector Cell was trying to accomplish it is all pulled off so poorly that the entire experience is wrecked.
Let us start at some of the basic things and work our way up. The camera is broken in so many ways but the major one being that it can stop your movement entirely. If you try to walk towards the screen headlong Lana will slow to a crawl. Turn the camera behind her and walk in the same direction and she will bolt wherever you point her. In combat the camera will sometimes fight you just to look at the enemy that is beating on you. On rare occasions the camera will even just spaz out which will almost always end in death. This is one of many aspects of the game that open up the rabbit hole that is AMY.
Combat is just a utter ridiculous notion. You are only ever given a choice between two weapons, a stick or a crowbar. The stick does almost no damage to an enemy while the crowbar will take out almost anything with one hit. Guess which one you find all over the place and which one is arbitrarily limited. If you guess the stick was all over the place you were wrong. While the crowbar is only given at certain sections the sticks are often placed in locations integral to solving a puzzle. While I do not normally mind going out of my way for a puzzle piece, it is a stick, they should not be hard to find. When you finally do find a stick in some abandoned back hallway you can expect the first zombie you see will kill you anyway. There are very few exceptions to this rule but on rare occasion you can survive a confrontation, usually to only die in another.
Combat would not be a difficult prospect if it were not so broken. You have three options while fighting baddies: swing, dodge, or turn around and face a wall while he shoves a fist into your skull. Most fights are spent with the latter being Lana’s chosen method of self defense. Every time you are struck your character does an about face and her tank-like controls make it nearly impossible to turn back around. So to avoid that situation you should dodge right? Wrong, dead wrong. Dodging has almost no effect most of the time as you can still get hit while performing a perfectly timed dodge. I am well aware that this is not a God of War and I would not, and do not, expect a moment of invincibility during a sidestep. What I do expect is that an enemy who clearly missed me by a good foot should actually miss me. Sadly AMY did not meet this expectation either and I would almost always be frantically smashing the attack button in every combat scenario just in hopes of killing them before they killed me.
When you are not fighting enemies with magic stretch arms you are fighting the game for control of it. Lana sort of controls like a tank, if that tank was actually a broken transformer and also blackout drunk. I found myself regularly walking in an odd direction either from the cameras inability to move of from her refusing to turn around without first taking two steps forward. Actions also seem to take forever or be completely non responsive. To use a syringe that is supposed to heal you you must press down and X. Now somewhere in the manual it states the “proper” way to do this action but it is totally wrong. There were an unacceptable amount of times that I was being chased and needed to use a syringe and just ended up jamming on the down and X button without the slightest response from Lana. I am all for a horror game where you are weak and easy to kill but Lana seemed to be wishing for death by her inaction in these situations.
Since you are infected with the zombie virus you can stay away from Amy for a time and blend in with the zombies. Later in the game this becomes necessary to complete the tasks at hand. I will praise the game for having a really cool concept like this in the design, but sadly it is also broken. The little light on your back tells you your infection level, kinda. There are supposed to be three modes on infection that depict your proximity to death. Green is healthy, yellow is infected to where zombies might not attack you, and red means you need to start getting to Amy quickly. At least that is how it is supposed to work, what really happens is your light turns yellow and then a minute later you die. One of the effects of becoming a zombie is a fuzzy tunnel vision effect that completely obscures any color on the screen making your backlight useless. Also when you are walking past zombies you have to walk slowly as to not get recognized. When you are badly infected this takes care of itself but in the interim there is no way to tell how fast you might go, possibly running and grabbing their attention. If you hold the stick too far at a certain time you walk too fast, hold it too slow at a certain time and you die from infection. Great idea but there is now way to really know what time is good or not and since death is such a pain in this game it can really crush the experience.
Amy is not the only way to heal yourself while playing. The aforementioned syringes give you another two minutes or so but there are alps occasionally dead soldiers with masks that will cure the infection as well. When used properly they can make quite the tense experience as your only real safety from yourself is a defenseless little girl that you sometimes have to leave far away. What will really kill these sections is all of the dead ends and infested corridors you can wind up in that will make getting back to a mask impossible. There is the option of running but that will almost always attract the attention of an undead which will certainly mean death. What this means is that you will be forced to go out of your way, die, and then restart that section just to learn the map. Not exactly the most appealing form of gameplay imaginable.
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Death in this game is, an event, to put words to it. Checkpoints can be anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes away from one another. So when you die you might have just lost a good chunk of your valuable real life to a dumb glitch. Having far checkpoints, while a definite issue, would not be so bad if you could not die at the drop of a hat. Even worse than that is that in the second to last level you do not even have to be killed to be forced back to a checkpoint. If one enemy even spots you a “You have been spotted!” logo flashes on the screen and it is back to square one. What is worse than anything else about death is being forced to do all the puzzle segments again and occasionally being forced to watch a cutscene over and over. I feared death very badly in this game, not because I was afraid or horrified but because I did not want to redo the last half hour of work. The checkpoint system would be totally acceptable, or at least more forgiven, if all the other aspects of survival were not totally broken.
Story is yet another issue that just saddens me more in AMY. That is to say, with the first cutscene you think this might actually be a coherent story that is semi explained throughout. It does not. Everything falls apart within ten minutes after you are given control. People are talked about, places discussed, and none of it is given any context at all. Add to that the pre-mission scenes are poorly done comic book style videos that look like they would have been easily done in engine in real time. Why they chose to explain what little story they give you in such a non frightening way is beyond me. Plus by the time the game is over you get some wonky scene about your new connection to Amy and some character you saw once decides to show up to lend you a hand and then, scene.
It seems like the story had room for so much more in it. In fact the whole entire game is like that, very unfinished. Amy has two powers that she can use to help you in your quest but her “power wheel” clearly has spaces for many more powers. In the second level a monster shows up that does not fit the mold for anything else you see in the game and is never explained. The end credits show both a location you never visit and a monster you never see. When you take all this together with the utter broken gameplay it becomes very evident that AMY was not complete. I am not sure why this game was released in an obviously unfinished form but everything suffers for it. There are sound bugs, glitchy animations, frame rate issues, dialog that never comes through, unresponsive controls, clipping problems, and ultimately a lack of polish that dulls all of the rough diamonds in this game.
Those diamonds are there and they do shine slightly despite AMY’s best efforts to cover them up. The first two levels lay the groundwork for the rules in the game while the latter four really turn some of those concepts on their head. Moving stealthy around the zombies while highly infected to block their sight and distract them is a great idea. Having a combat section where Amy uses her powers to assist Lana’s progression was also a interesting concept. Rules are combined and switched up in such a way that the game can go from really tense to really brainy. The puzzle like parts of AMY are often the greatest parts to the game and show where this game really could have been a big hit. There are even a few points where the story picks up and becomes interesting, but not often.
These parts of the game are fantastic in comparison to the drudgery that is the rest of the game. I love innovation and was especially excited to see it in the survival horror genre. AMY had so much promise and so many great ideas that just did not pan out. The story leaves off in such a way that AMY 2 is a possibility and I have really high hopes for that game. Maybe Vector Cell will learn from the mistakes they made in this game and create a really great horror game. All the groundwork is here in AMY it just all needs a huge amount of refinement.
All said, I can not suggest AMY to everyone. While playing I ranged from pleasantly delighted to filled with the rage of the sun. You may enjoy the game yourself but I estimate a huge majority of people will not. Fun runs in short supply in AMY and you can expect to spout off a few utterances your grandmother would not enjoy hearing. I did enjoy most of my time with AMY but it is difficult to tell if that was actual fun or the game breaking my spirit to a point where I enjoyed it. The best way I can describe AMY is that it is a bag of garbage stuffed with nickels. There is a bit of worth in there but is it worth digging through the terrible sadness in there to pull it out? Probably not but you might enjoy it if you try.
