Amy XBLA Impressions

Let's start with what makes up this downloadable game..

-Zombies 

-Melee combat 

-Awful voice acting 

-Typical zombie storyline 

-Poor controls 

-Stiff animations

-Lots of dark areas 

-Annoyingly little girl that you have to escort

Sounds like a blast yeah? Well it is...just kidding it's not. This game came out on XBLA and PSN today, both with trials/demos and I played through the fairly lengthy demo. It will also come out on PC eventually as well, Steam according to the website. You know it's bad when the first thing you see is a cutscene that is skipping because of framerate issues. This game is all about a little girl, Amy, that has some kind of special powers, seemingly, and a zombie outbreak that conveniently erupts in the city you are just arriving at. In this city the virus is spreading at an alarming rate to everything, plants, animals, people but Amy. You control her caregiver named Lana and she is susceptible to the virus and Amy protects her from the virus somehow. Throughout the game Lana becomes more and more infected from the virus, changing her look eventually.

The game requires you to use Amy pretty often. You send her through crawl spaces to open a door for you or have her hack into security systems, I have no idea why the little girl can hack into a security system but she does it, and many other "cooperative" actions. Your supposed to keep her with you and safe from the infected people. Keeping her safe feels like an enormous pain in the ass. When you are with the one other friendly NPC in the beginning of the game and he says run, you run and figure that the little girl will at least slightly keep up. Instead of keeping up she gets stuck on some boxes and eaten by zombies, it also didn't help that she runs at maybe half of the speed of everyone else. It will instantly remind you of awful escort scenarios from other games. Fighting infected also is an unpleasant experience. You have the option to swing your weapon, a melee weapon, or dodge. The weapon doesn't always connect, like you would think, and sometimes enemies inexplicably die in one hit while others require three or more hits. Infected also tend to continuously smack you if you do not dodge. It is also very helpful that some areas are overly dark, even with the gamma turned all the way up. ALSO, it helps that the camera is stuck in a fixed position. I appreciate that the games tell you that if you are hit you will heal slowly over time and that you should only take the immunization shots if you need immediate healing, except that you do not heal over time. 

I have played this game so you do not have to, do not do it! I don't care if you like zombies, this game does not fuel that niche. It's been a long time since I've played a game that is this bad. I wanted to like it, I tried to like, but it rubbed me every wrong way. The graphics are the only thing that I can't completely slam, some textures and areas do look fairly decent for a downloadable game, yet at the same time the majority of the game has the look of a PS2 game. If you really want to check it out then head on over the PSN store or XBLA marketplace and check out the demo, eventually Steam should have the game plus a demo as well. Thanks for reading and please don't play this game. 

Main Page: http://www.amy-thegame.com/chargement.html

-Written by Sean Cargle