I was super pumped about Amy - it had an interesting look and concept behind it. Surivial horror that's more about surviving than killing hordes of zombies? Count me in. I loved the Silent Hill series and this game me similar feelings to those titles; a creepy atmosphere, a real sense of dread and a strong feeling of being alone (well nearly). The game also has an autistic girl who has strange powers - you have to work together to solve puzzles, hide and struggle on. The problem is it's a piece of dog shit. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.

The game came out - I purchased it and downloaded it straight away. Unfortunately I couldn't play it because I was still in the middle of my work rotation (two 12 hour days followed by two 12 hour nights) - it had to wait. The waiting killed me. I haven't enjoyed survival horror since Silent Hill left Konami - maybe I'm just too picky. Here's basically what went down:

Turning the console on I had an agonising wait while a small patch downloaded and installed. LET ME PLAY ALREADY! I jumped into the game and watched the opening cutscene and saw some washed out ugly design (in a potentially good way) akin to the genre, excellent! The main character Lana was in a train with Amy, things were looking great and there was even lag! Wait lag? There's lag in the cutscene? Why is there lag? The 40" TV spasmed as if in pain from having to attempt to broadcast the game to me - the picture was sorely in need of some V-sync and was gashing lines across the middle. The picture kept lagging every 30 seconds or so (the sound didn't) - why was this happening? I'm on a PlayStation 3 - it has 7 cores. What's going on here? Subtitles were up by default along with the voices - but they were horribly timed. One set vanished from the screen while the characters kept talking for some time - was it the lag or are they actually timed that badly? I wasn't sure.

Thinking I could perhaps look past the graphics I saw Amy suddenly drawing a picture in some kind of trauma...come on that's totally Silent Hill. Thinking I could maybe again look past this as a failed appreciative nod to the series the train crashed...and when Lana came too Amy was gone. Again, the Silent Hill-ness of it was getting to me...I kept up though as I hadn't started playing as such yet. Looking around the train was like getting up in the middle of the night in someone else's house when the lights don't work - I could see almost nothing and had no idea where to go. Lots of glass etc had been broken from the crash - as expected. But there was one shelf that had slid forward and the glass was entirely intact - why? Why wasn't it smashed? I had no time to investigate - I had to find Amy! There were posters in the train for a recent book release (not a real book) and...something else but it was impossible to tell because the resolution on the posters looked like they belonged on a PlayStation - totally unreadable. I attempted to exit the train when...I couldn't! Apparently Lana decided she needed something to protect herself with - any form of immersion I was pretending to have vanished. I returned to the train and was again blind. Running around pushing X I eventually found...I don't actually care - some form of weapon. This time I could leave the train - and found a couple of zombies along the trip away from it. The first zombie I felled, the second was much harder as Lana insisted on facing the wrong way and had to slowly turn around to fight.

I thought exiting the train would improve my vision - it did not. Again, I could barely see. I ran around largely blind and looking for Amy/something to make the game go forward but all I could find was a locked door and some fire pouring out from what I think was the train. Apparently standing right in the fire doesn't phase Lana, she must have amazing skin to not be even slightly concerned. I think I ran around pushing X for about 5 minutes or more, picking up various health items and not actually getting anywhere. Most of those minutes were me literally running back and forth. I continued on blindly, and tearing my hair out, I finally found a gamma option in the settings menu which was not brought to my attention by the game at all. Turning it up to maximum was amazingly good and bad. Good because I could see where I was going, bad because I could see the lag and terrible refresh rate. I found some strange man who agreed to help me find the little girl - good I guess. He ran after me annoyingly calling Amy out every 5 seconds with an infuriating accent. Turns out he had the way to unlock that locked door - good some progress. Turns out that way was a DNA scanner which I had to scan the lock with, then find the appropriate dead body on my radar to take a DNA sample from to progress.

I ran for about 10 meters and turned my console off. Why should I find the person to take DNA from? Why should I find Amy? I had no desire to continue - the jarring lag and refresh rate alone nearly made this a game-breaker let alone all the other problems. I'll admit I only played around 30 minutes of the game, so in case my ranting and bitter writing about this title is not conclusive enough, let's hear from some game critics on the matter:

To call Amy's gameplay unintuitive and unresponsive puts things too lightly. To call Amy's gameplay complete and utter garbage is far more accurate. The game tells you to do a bunch of different things, but the controls only work sometimes. Want to pick up that item on the ground? You better be positioned in a pixel-perfect fashion. Want to hit that enemy? You better cross your fingers and hope the game's collision detection works. Want to dodge an enemy attack? Might as well roll the dice. The most important thing about any game ever made is how it plays, and in this regard, Amy is an outright abomination.1

IGN: 2.0 ("Painful") / 10

The unoriginal gameplay and shameful spook attempts would be forgivable if not for one simple fact -- AMY is one of the worst games ever made. There is not one gimmick, not one mechanic, not one technical element of AMY that isn't wrong in some way. Even the opening cinematic is choppy, stuttering, poorly animated and badly acted, setting a tone of awfulness that refuses to change.2

Jim Sterling, Destructoid: 1.5 ("Epic fail") / 10

There’s something about AMY; it really freaking blows. In fact, it’s effectively comparable to a colonblow because you’ll likely shit your drawers after realizing you paid $9.99 for a game less responsive than AOL dial-up. Only when everything is still and no one’s lip syncing is this downloadable title barely pretty. Dear VectorCell, I see your “Survival Horror” game and raise you a fuck equivalent to zero; anything beyond the sucktitude present in this game is hereby null and void.3

Amanda K, Blistered Thumbs: 2.0 ("Garbage!") / 10

Apparently, the folks that made this game also managed to get “dark atmosphere” confused with “dark graphics”. The look is so murky and muddy that even with the gamma correction cranked up it’s hard to see anything. Not that you’d really want to get an eyeful of the game’s crude textures and horrifying character models, but still. It’s at least nice to be able to see where you’re going.4

Michael Barnes, Gameshark: F