I don’t think that it’s too far fetched to say that the survival horror genre is close to (if not) dead. We’ve not seen a great traditional game since RE5 and it seems that when a game takes the leap it always fails. Amy is no exception.
Amy may be the worst game I’ve ever played on XBLA. It’s poorly put together on every level. The save system is broken, the environments are poorly chosen and the biggest problem about the game is simply playing it. From the time the first cinematic starts and its jumpy un-synced dialog pours across your screen with the poor voice acting and story beginning that is barley interesting. You start off as Lana, who is trying to rescue an Autistic, mute girl that you will eventually learn to hate more than the B movie “monsters” that you are supposed to be killing. As you begin in a train station that has been taken over by the monsters you find what seems to be your first ally who could not be more annoying. As you search for Amy who has become separated from you at the beginning of the game you realize that you may have just wasted $10.
To begin with the controls and camera work are horrendous and never get any better. The controls are sloppy and unresponsive and you find that later in the game that due to how unresponsive they are, the already hard game just gets harder for no reason. Every environment in the game is overly dark and almost impossible to see in. I realize that in a horror game it’s important to set the tone, but setting the tone and making it impossible to see are two completely different things. Enemies are poorly placed and just goes to show you that the dark settings are not only useless, but also unnecessary. The enemies are standing out in the clear open most of the time and if the weapon you’re swinging does not go through the enemies heads and you make contact a couple of hits will take them down. If you lose health you must depend on hypodermic needles you find throughout the levels, but don’t fret about trying to maintain your supply. If you manage to keep what you have and make it further in the game, and you happen to die which will happen a lot by the way, you lose all of your needles due to the unfair save system.
You quickly find out that the biggest issue in the game is the title character Amy. She will follow no command; nor will she stay with you at any given time. Luckily the developers give you the option to hold RB and hold Amy’s hand. Or you can tap RB to call for Amy to come to you. This would be a great help in the game if it actually worked. You end up having to go through the game holding RB the whole time, because if you don’t Amy tends to just do what she pleases, causing you to always have to rescue her. Even if you call her to you, half the time she refuses to listen. In several ways, due to having to protect Amy, this causes Amy to be more of an enemy than anything you may have to fight or run from in the entire game. Speaking of Amy, she is a prime example of bad character choice in a game full of bad characters. Truth be told, she is the creepiest thing in the game. For a character that you’re supposed to be caring about and trying to protect you find yourself hating her more and more as the game goes on.
After all is said and done, Amy should be used as an example for other developers of what not to do when making a game. When you play Amy, you can see what developer VectorCell was trying to accomplish, but at some point things just went wrong. Even though the game is only 800 MS points in a day when the Marketplace is flooded with games that cost 1200, Amy still does not garner the lowly $10 asking price. From the moment you load up the game you realize just how bad this game is and why it shouldn’t be played. My opinion on Amy would be don’t play it or the demo and if you do, only do it to see just how bad the game is. I think it’s easy to label Amy as one of the worst games that has ever been released on XBLA.
