Dodging zombies with dodgy controls in Amy

Damn it 'Amy'! What the hell was that? No, don't give me that crap. You implied that you were 'Ico' but with zombies. Maybe you are. Maybe you aren't. But I can tell you right now what you aren't. What you aren't is a good game. Some good ideas maybe. A tense atmosphere, sure. But good lord did you manage to screw up pretty much everything else. OK, I think I'm good. Just felt the need to really open up on recent Playstation Network (PSN) and X-Box Live Arcade (XBLA) release 'Amy'. Which is a shame really as the early press that I saw for the game was in fact comparing it favorably to PS2 classic 'Ico' (recently re-released in HD for the PS3) in that you where tasked with escorting a companion through a treacherous environment while protecting said companion from monsters. In that sense 'Amy' is very similar to 'Ico'. In the sense of actually being a good game not so much. It has too many secondary issues that distract from the excellent atmosphere that it creates to actually be good. What it can be is a good lesson.

The first lesson that 'Amy' teaches comes almost immediately after the game starts and that it that one should know ones limits. In that if one is say a small independent developer then maybe one shouldn't shoot for the moon with regards to creating AAA level cinematic scenes and having said scenes fully voiced as the end result is anything but AAA. The opening cinematic stutters like Colin Firth in 'The King's Speech' and unlike Firth as he takes speech therapy it never really corrects its graphical issues as the game progresses. Going back to movies for a second if one where to check out IMDB.com one would see that it is becoming more and more common for high profile actors to lend their voices and/or likenesses to video games. Why? Well they tend to be high profile actors because, you know, they're actually good at what they do and that tends to translate well to voice work. It's pretty clear that 'Amy' isn't working with the kind of budget that can afford it the luxury of that kind of voice talent making the constant calling out to its titular character by her protector all the more painful to listen to.

Lesson numero dos of the day is to have a save system that matches your game. In a perfect world the game would allow you to save your progress at any point but we don't appear to be living in that world so we've got to deal with the hand we've been dealt. 'Amy' uses a checkpoint system for its saving in that the game goes “Yup, you've made it this far and I'll remember to start you off back here if when you die”. The problem with that here is that the checkpoints are incredibly far apart and that combined with the fact that the game is supposed to be scary makes the whole house of cards tumble down. Seeing some sort of abomination tear down a door and come barreling towards you is only scary the first five or six times you see it. However after aforementioned abomination has murderized you and reset your progress to half an hour of obnoxious puzzles ago it tends to lose its impact. The game would need to either have checkpoints that save more often so that the player isn't stuck repeating the same crap over and over again OR have some degree of randomization with regards to encounters (maybe the abomination doesn’t jump out this time or maybe it comes out of a different door). This isn't even the biggest issue. Your progress isn't truly saved until you reach the end of a chapter (first chapter ~1 hour on easy mode). If you quit in the middle of the chapter (say after dying too many times) then when you start back up (assuming you actually come back to the game) you're going to be doing so at the beginning of the chapter. Not cool.

Another issue that plagues 'Amy' like well the plague thingy in the game that appears to be turning people into zombies is its controls. The button layout/control scheme is a little weird but I suspect that had I spent longer with the game that I might have gotten used to it. Maybe. OK, not likely. Hold a button to run? OK, I guess I can work with that. Hold a button to run and then press another button to sprint? Why? Games (well most games) have for the last several years managed to make movement work with only the left analog stick. Press forward to walk. Press all the way forward to run. Now I'm sure that if I'd stuck with the game longer that I'd have found some (likely obnoxious) situation where sprinting was required for survival. This seems especially likely given as how the game mentions that endurance is limited. That said it really seems like this is making something that should be simple (movement) needlessly complex. It also doesn't help that through the magic of a crappy camera that the character steers like a shopping cart with a broken wheel.

The last and most gamebreaking issue for me with 'Amy' was the combat. You start off with a bit of lumber with which to smack the zombies around a bit and I didn't stick around long enough to find out if you ever upgrade beyond that. Assuming you actually play this game the first thing you'll notice when approached by the undead is that the collision detection is terrible. That is you swing your weapon at the enemy and it looks like it should have hit them but no hit registers. Even worse is when your weapon flat out passes through the zombie without registering a hit. This is compounded by a dodge function that doesn't appear to dodge anything. So interesting enough I actually started playing this game twice. The first (futile) attempt was on medium difficulty with that experiment lasting around ten minutes. The second try was on easy and lasted through the first chapter. It was during that first try that I seriously questioned the competence of 'Amy's' developers as while I was wailing away at a zombie with my bit of stick that it broke leaving me without a weapon. I had picked up several other bits of stick while wandering around and though I didn't live long enough to find out if they'd respawned I'd hazard a guess that they didn't. Now I have no issue with a game having a weapon system that allows for items to deteriorate and/or break. What I do have an issue with is a game having such a system but not telling me about it in addition to not letting me (as best as I could tell) carry additional weapons. Needless to say I was a tad pissed off about that.

Overall 'Amy' strikes me as a game that's bad for two reasons. Both of which are correctable to a degree. If you look back over this article you'll see complaints that could be solved with more time and/or money and complaints that are purely based on poor design decisions. For an independent title like 'Amy' it really only makes sense to criticize (as I have) the former when it's very clear that the game is being overly ambitious whereas the latter is fair game for titles of any genre or budget. Bad design is bad design and unfortunately overall it's this aspect of 'Amy' that compromises the experience more so than issues that could be corrected by throwing more money at the problem. All of that out of the way I would very much like to force Electronic Arts (Dead Space) and Capcom (Resident Evil) to play through this game. The purpose for that being to remind them that a survival horror game is supposed to be tense and scary and not a poorly implemented third person shooter with messed up looking enemies as in terms of pacing and atmosphere 'Amy' (badly) eclipses anything either of those companies have made in the survival horror genre. See you all next week.