Creating your own bases and changing the combat landscape is a great idea
My experience with Starhawk began with an intoxicating jet-bike ride through the space cowboy desert wasteland of a fringe world and ended with me hanging out in an online lobby and sharing complaints with Don Parsons, our head of PR.
The brilliant Firefly-esque slide guitar melody of that bike ride hit the pleasure centres of my brain alongside the garbled whine of the engine. Moments later, I lept off the bike and sent a bunker crashing down from orbit to fend off mutated humans. The next level of Starhawk’s single player had me piloting the walking robot-mech form of a Hawk, the game’s fighter jet, before a press of a button had me transforming into jet fighter mode and blasting off into an aerial space dogfight. The entire single player campaign was just as well put together and was full of these moments where everything felt right, despite the tame and predictable brother vs. evil brother plot. Unfortunately, the rest of the game falls apart.
Starhawk is developer Lightbox’s next step in the land and air multiplayer third person shooter concept that began as Warhawk, a game developed by several Lightbox employees back when they were a part of developer Incognito.
The intuitive flight controls make the most complex dogfights exhilarating and approachable
Don’t worry if that obligatory history lesson doesn’t sound familiar to you, as the single player component of Starhawk brings you up to speed well before the end of its conclusion. You’ll be introduced to the shooting right before you’re thrown into several situations where you have to use in game currency, called rift energy, to call down buildings from space and watch as they construct real-time in a matter of seconds. This leads to countless situations where you have to defend a point from an increasingly varied mix of infantry, ground vehicles, and fighter aircraft. By the end of the game, you’ll be manning the parapets of turret toting walls to gun down infantry right before you salvage them in a button’s press to jump into the seat of anti air turrets after they burn through the atmosphere – it’s an experience more exhilarating than many I’ve had and it makes for a crushing tragedy that this formula collapses in the realities of online multiplayer.
In the over 14 hours of time that I spent playing Starhawk online, the game modes of team deathmatch, capture the flag, and zones (a variation of capture-and-hold gametypes) devolved into some of the most unenjoyable multiplayer I’ve played in years. This is because of players exploiting the build and battle system as well as the incredible power of tanks and hawks. At the beginning of these game types, several players usually stay behind in the home base gathering rift energy automatically while their teammates run out and skirmish with those of a similar mind on the other side of the conflict. Within minutes, the players that stay behind gain access to the structures that construct hawks and tanks. Because players spawning into the game immediately have enough money to create a tank at one of these buildings, this leads to one side having an incredibly large swell of powerful vehicles and quickly overpowering the opposing side. Well before the end of the match, one side inevitably ends up bombing, shelling, and obliterating the other force’s last remaining area.
Spawn camping never ends up being this fun for either side
It’s almost impossible to combat this behaviour, too, as the defensive structures necessary to do so have a prohibitively high cost and even the readily available rocket launchers do little against vehicles that can kill several infantry players with a single shot.
In all of my time with the above modes of Starhawk’s online play, I only partook in a match that wasn’t a landslide loss or victory once, when a stale mate ended in several well fought skirmishes and changed the course of the match. Sure, it was still due to the overwhelming force of tanks and turrets occupying the one contested and vital area only accessible by air, but it was something.
The most fun to be had with Starhawk is arguably with the online deathmatch mode, which puts all players in hawk jet fighters and throws them into a massive dogfight. Even when you spawn into one of these games after connecting, you can already see spiralling contrails of exhaust behind countless players as they swirl around each other in banks and swooping loops to avoid laser and gunfire. It’s not all that hard to learn, either, as missiles are easily avoidable by holding the X button and using the thumbstick to swoop away in a lilting barrel roll or loop-de-loop. Adding to the depth is the ability brought over from Warhawk to drift, similiar to a car in a street race, in mid-air.
The brilliant air combat and the conceptual appeal of calling down structures from orbit all seem like they’d go incredibly well together, and the talent behind Warhawk’s development has such promise. It makes it one of my biggest disappointments of recent years, then, to say that Starhawk isn’t recommendable on anything other than the merits of its online dogfighting and single player components.
“I hope they patch it,” was said by many of the players I met online, even the ones who were winning. The hope for a patch is mirrored by my own thoughts, but it’s hardly something to recommend a game on.
Anyone looking for a good land and air third person shooter should stick to the still thriving Warhawk game, while anyone looking for the build and battle concept done right should stick to Section 8: Prejudice (don’t look at me like that, really, it’s good).
Pros:
Cons:
2/5
I bet you've never seen an image of armed dudes running around explosions. You're welcome.
Developer CCP has begun accepting registrations for the beta of their upcoming free to play Playstation 3 shooter, Dust 514.
You can register here.
Dust 514 is supposed to let console players fight one another on planets in deep space at the same time that PC players fight, mine, and go about their merry spacey way in EVE Online.
Yes, EVE Online is the crazy persistent online space MMO. How crazy? Well, the game involves player-run corporations with their own deep space mining operations. It’s also worth mentioning that there are some players who are space pirates; oh, and that a group of players began organizing themselves in April 2012 to crash the in-game economy by attacking the economical nerve centre of the galaxy.
The beta will already be under way this week for “select players” of EVE Online and attendees of March 2012′s EVE Fanfest in Iceland, according to developer CCP.
Check back on Vagary.TV on the week of June 3, 2012, when we’ll have more on Dust 514 when we see it at E3.
Quick Attacks are Vagary.TV’s way of giving you, the reader, a glimpse at a game we are playing. This could be a game we are reviewing in full or just something we picked up for a few days to kill some time but, either way, it will highlight thoughts and impressions from the first hour or two of gameplay.
In this Quick Attack, we take a look at Awesomenauts for Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.
The visual fidelity doesn't match up to the art design, but the music is bumpin'
By the end of World Gone Sour you will have fought a tennis shoe, thrown your allies into deep fryers for points, and watched Method Man rap about Sour Patch Kids and the dangers they pose when left uneaten.
Developed by Beefy Media and Playbrains, World Gone Sour seems like it’d just be a phoned-in game built to advertise candy. Booting up the game brings this into question, as you see Sour Patch Kids scampering across the dimly lit start screen playing with each other one minute and brutally murdering one another the next. It doesn’t take all of the four or five hours of the game to finally realize that World Gone Sour is actually a competent platformer with all the clever art design of a twisted version of Toy Story.
The story, introduced by the first of many well animated cutscenes, follows the tale of a Sour Patch Kid who was dropped in a movie theatre. Candies go insane when they aren’t eaten, apparently, and the nooks and crannies of the everyday human worlds you explore are made sinister by all of the traps and hazards added into the environment by the Sour Patch Kids and other members of the candy community that have gone insane. Usually it’s quite obvious, like yo-yos that crush you or evil pieces of bubble gum that use bottle caps for helmets; sometimes it’s more subtle, like seeing evil Sour Patch Kids torturing their brethren with pencils or trying to saw apart the ledges you use for platforms.
The boss battles are creative and never work to sour the experience. Sorry.
The hazards, be they deep fryers and spilled soda in a concession stand or table saws in a shed, are smartly designed with the progression of your abilities in mind. Safety pins stuck in gum serve as grapple points you can swing from, while popsicle stick barriers are only breakable with a ground pound. The enemies follow suit as well, with the nefarious blobs of bubble gum adopting spiked helmets that you have to knock off by throwing other Sour Patch Kids like bowling balls.
That brings me to my next point, you’ll see a lot of sour patch kids die by the end of this game. Heck, there’s a trophy/achievement tied to sacrificing 1000 of the little Sour Patch Kid candies that rally to your side when you rescue them. The game encourages you to do so, as you get bonus points at the end of each level for having your hapless buddies meet their ends by being melted, crushed, flung into orbit, burned, impaled, chopped up – you get the idea; it’s a bit like playing the Grape Escape board game from the ’90s where it was an every grape for itself run to the finish past saws and rolling pins.
A game about candy may seem like it’s geared towards children, but the T for teen rating ends up feeling partly in tune with the difficulty and not just the comically morbid ends of animate candy people. This difficulty comes from a couple tricky platforming sequences, especially if you want to go for all of the collectibles. The bad part comes from jumping physics that, although competent, never feel quite up to the precision of Mario Bros or the floaty forgiving leaps of Super Meat Boy. Also, the wall jumping feels like it works most of the time, rather than whenever you think it should; there were many times when my co-op buddy and I would leap towards a wall, only to have one of us slide uselessly into a pit of spikes. The game hands out extra lives generously, but this doesn’t make the occasionally finicky precision negligible.
Co-op lets you ham it up with a friend for sizzling excitement. Sound pun to you?
The sound design, like the atmosphere and art design, is effective. The grunts, gasps, and squeaks of the Sour Patch Kids play colorfully overtop the growls of enemy bosses and the searing death rattles that all of the hazards draw out of their victims. The music helps too, with every world having its own catchy meld of hip hop beats and elevator music. No, really, it works. It makes it more of a shame that my [mostly] co-op playthrough saw a few glitches where the music and sound effects cut out for a few seconds.
The sound cutting out only happened two or three times, but the long load times were always a bit out of place. There were times when I was sitting around for 30-45 seconds wondering whether the game had crashed or if the bouncing-Sour Patch Kid loading screen animation was just taking a break.
Technical grievances aside, I was pleasantly surprised with World Gone Sour and I recommend it to anyone looking for a competent platformer with a sadistically comical atmosphere. Also, the end credits are tied in with a music video that has Method Man rapping about candy.
Pros
Cons
4/5
Note: The Playstation Network version of World Gone Sour was used for the review and was provided by the publisher. The game is also available on PC and Xbox Live Marketplace
Gore, cursing, and torture are juxtaposed by an adorable and sympathetic character
I’ve never felt so helpless and uncomfortable after hitting the start button in a puzzle-action game that I thought would bank on the cutesy wiles of its alien protagonist.
Seconds after I hit the button to start the game, I was given the first person perspective of an alien who barely survived a crash on earth. Scientists approach me hesitantly, with groans of pain gurgling forth as my eyes struggle to stay open. I pass out shortly afterwards, with intermittent spots of awareness as I’m wheeled into a science facility. I’m operated and experimented on, with pained groans croaking over top the sounds of the intrigued scientists and their scalpels.
When you escape from another humiliating experiment shortly afterward, the satisfaction of regaining your powers and teleporting into the soon-to-explode body of your first scientist couldn’t be more satisfying.
Warp, the first game from Canadian developer Trapdoor, sets the premise for the game’s puzzles and combat with moments like those mentioned above.
While trapped in the large underwater science facility, your goal of escape has you working together with a fellow alien captor against an unnamed and malicious military commander intent on killing you with security bots, guards, and a few other surprises.
The puzzles, whether environmental or combat related, quickly ramp up in difficulty
All of the above mentioned hazards, which quickly increase in variety and presence, kill you in one hit, so being a fast learner comes in handy. The game also gives you many instances where killing your assailants and former surgeons is entirely optional, allowing you to sneak past them entirely.
Unfortunately, the large amount of deaths that happen in Warp from carelessness or the innocent learning process of figuring out the mechanics lead to a lot of loading screens. These loading screens, which took about five to eight seconds each on the Playstation 3 version of the game, become incredibly annoying. This is a huge shame, as the checkpointing system in Warp is executed so intelligently, with each respawn area placed just before and after the increasingly difficult puzzles and combat scenarios.
Rather than wordlessly tacking on new enemies and obstacles, Warp keeps things logical; security camera footage of your exploits, along with intercom conversations and cutscenes, show the humans in the facility trying to research new technology to adapt to your increasing array of abilities. It’s all well done, with gruesome footage of your kills and some humorous, curse-filled chatter between the employees in the facility juxtaposing with your cute alien avatar and his mostly-innocent quest of self defense.
Your abilities, also gained through some intelligent narrative moments and often at the expense of less fortunate experimental subjects, help you smartly adapt to your increasingly well equipped foes. Your basic and firstly given ability to teleport short distances is complemented with abilities like the phantom, which lets you use a specter of yourself to distract enemies and trick them into shooting each other or exposing their weak-points.
Unfortunately, the controls lack the precision to keep up with the often-unforgiving puzzles and combat/stealh scenarios, which leads to deaths (and loading screens) that feel undeserved and unnecessary. The directional pad and thumbstick are both used for movement, but the eight way direction on the pad is completely imprecise and the thumbstick doesn’t allow you to react quite as quickly as you’d like to.
Those control issues, compounded by rare stutters in frame rate and consistently lengthy load times, mar what is otherwise an overall worthwhile package. Several challenge rooms are included that give you an easy way to practice your abilities to perfection, and the rewards are kept meaningful as they help you upgrade your powers. I won’t spoil the ending, but the emotional impact and satisfying conclusion make all of those awful death-load-screens seem like less of a fault.
Note: The Playstation 3 version of Warp, available on the Playstation Network, was played for review. The game is also available on PC and on the Xbox Live Marketplace.
Pros:
Cons
4/5
From the moment we first met, my buddy and I were friends for our entire three hour lives
Spoiler Warning: This article and the accompanying audio interview both reveal major plot points and story elements. If you haven’t played Journey, I strongly recommend you hold off on giving this feature a look until you’ve completed the game. Feel free to read the spoiler free interview with Journey’s creative director, Jenova Chen.
We begin life not knowing anything. We may or may or may not meet important people throughout our struggles and triumphs, and then we die. Those are the paraphrased words of developer Thatgamecompany’s creative director, Jenova Chen, when he was describing his game, Journey.
I played through the entire adventure of Journey in one sitting, alongside a complete stranger that I met early on in the game. I was only given the name of the person I was playing with at the end of our game together, so I thought it would be interesting to track that person down and talk about our oddly sentimental time together. There are many major reveals of plot and gameplay moments so, if you haven’t already played and finished the game, I insist that you do so before listening to this interview. For everyone else, please enjoy.
Jenova Chen, co-founder of Thatgamecompany, is the creative director of Journey
Game designer Jenova Chen grabbed my attention in a crowded teleconference when I heard him characterize the game Journey as a metaphor for life; you begin without knowing anything, you may or may not meet people to help you along your way, and then we all eventually die.
Journey, the third game from developer Thatgamecompany, has players wake up in a desert as a cloth garbed humanoid. As you wander through the dune speckled desert, sand cascading around your feet, you discover ancient ruins, puzzles, and occasionally other human-controlled wanderers who are playing while connected online. You and the other player can go your separate ways or play the game together. There is a catch, however; you and the other player are unable to communicate using anything other than a simple one-tone chime and are both left unnamed.
“Showing players’ names is too much information,” said Chen. Giving an example, he said “JenovaChen1981 is too much information that is not related to the game itself,” saying that it shows other players that he is an Asian man in his twenties, rather than just a human being. Chen said that player names and any form of communication take you, the player, away from the game experience and the intended emotional impact of Journey. “These are all distractions from what the game is truly about,” he said, adding that the multiplayer aspect of Journey is about the emotional connection between human beings.
I asked Chen why, throughout Journey and previous games he’s worked on like Flower, is there always such a value placed on mystery and absence of information. “There is so much information in our lives that it makes us feel that we know everything,” he said. “When we know everything it makes us feel less in awe.” Chen said that the emotion in an adventure game like Journey should be discovery. “We would rather let you play and discover, yourself.”
Chen responded to potential doubts among players hesitant to play through Journey’s approximately three to four hour long story. “People who say our game is too short – honestly, I don’t care,” he said. Grinding experience, returning quests, and repeating puzzles are game design tricks that Chen says are used to increase the length of games. “If our goal is to communicate a strong feeling…I feel we are responsible to communicate that as effectively as possible. If we start to let people level up, do the same puzzle three or four times – the only reason we’d do that is to extend the experience and I just can’t do that.”
“The problem with a game that’s longer than three hours is that there’s a bathroom break,” Chen continued. A film school alumni, he said that the reason films conform to the duration of a few hours is that it creates a better environment for an uninterrupted experience.
"Just putting people through challenges is not enough"
I remember listening to a podcast back when Journey was announced and hearing the hosts talk about the game and jokingly ask “so where’s the rocket launcher?” Journey developer Thatgamecompany’s catalog of games up until this writing have all involved experiences devoid of shooting. “When is the skill of a headshot going to help you in real life?” Chen said, evoking a chuckle from the moderator of the teleconference. Chen talked about how some adults gravitate towards the social aspects of golf and poker, which he says are skills that are useful in daily life. He said, “what kind of games are worthwhile for an adult to play? It has to introduce some kind of new perspective. It has to move them in some way.”
“Just putting people [players] through challenges is not enough,” said Chen. “I’d rather see someone go through an emotional roller coaster ride. That way, the connection [to the experience] would be even stronger.”
Jenova Chen’s words about Journey’s depicted metaphor of life resonated with me. I’ve personally felt that life involves a bunch of kids playing at grown ups as they age – each of them trying to find out what it is they want out of life before they run out of time. When Journey launches on the Playstation Network in North America on March 13, I suppose I’ll get to see if Journey is as much a reflection on life as Chen feels it is.
Be sure to check out the full review for Journey, as well as our exclusive on what it’s like to be a co-op buddy in the game.
Aside from some awful graphical glitches, Shank 2 is great to look at
Note: The Playstation 3 version was played for review. Shank 2 is also available on Xbox Live Marketplace and on PC.
Developer Klei Entertainment knows that a difficult game should be fine tuned to a point where players can survive by skill and wit alone. 2010′s downloadable game, Shank, got this right; high level play would have you juggling multiple enemies with huge combos – all a whirl of shanks, chainsaw, and bullets – while dodging enemy attacks and lunging through the air with all the savage splendor of a Rambo movie. Shank 2 unfortunately can’t live up to the well tuned combat of its predecessor, despite a handful of clever new ideas.
So much of that shortcoming is because of very strange design choices. While the first Shank let you switch your secondary weapons on the fly, Shank 2 confusingly buries this option in a menu, which really breaks the quick pacing that the game maintains so well; it also makes it a lot harder to have any great feeling of familiarity with the weapons by the time the single player story ends after a handful of fast paced hours.
Much of Shank 2′s combat is about managing crowds of different enemy types with a mixture of weapons and grappling moves. Unfortunately, there’s a persistent oddity where not every enemy within range of your strikes gets hit; they’re supposed to, but they don’t. After taking out several crowds of enemies and wondering why I was taking damage from foes that were supposed to be stuck in stun animations, I ended up defaulting to hit and run tactics throughout the whole game to avoid taking damage.
Counter attacks are brutal and incredibly satisfying
It’s a shame that the only foolproof way to ace Shank 2′s combat is to skirt around it, especially when it’s obvious that Klei Entertainment wanted to make a lot of changes to the combat that, combined with its great art style, is what has given the series its name. The counter system has been revamped; rather than being a parry move performed after a block, grabbing an enemy when you see the exclamation mark above his head creates a stylishly emphatic blur effect while Shank turns the enemy’s own weapon against them. Sometimes a counter will be a simple break of an enemy’s arm, but most of the time Shank, the character, will brutalize the enemy into a bloody pulp – one counter has Shank taking the baseball bat out of an enemy’s hands, jamming it in their mouth, and then kicking it into the back of their skull with his boot. It’s incredibly satisfying, and this system and all of the minor tweaks continue into the new multiplayer cooperative mode.
Survival, playable with one to two players online or offline, lets you pick from over a dozen unlockable characters, all with unique stats, in order to survive waves of enemies. Money earned from kills can be used to buy weapons and obstacles that, added with the traps found within each level, are absolutely necessary to defend the “supply points” in every stage. The waves become incredibly hard and working together with a friend to activate traps and split up the hordes of enemies is essential. Unfortunately, the inconsistent hit detection with group combat becomes a big problem when every bit of health counts, and this was especially true when I encountered a bug where I couldn’t revive my partner.
Aside from a game-breaking glitch, co-op is a blast
The bosses and the narrative in the single player campaign aren’t as interesting as the combat, platforming scenarios, and surprise gameplay twists. Because of this, co-op ends up being the more memorable part of the overall package and shares many of the mutual frustrations and satisfying moments of the single player combat.
The hand drawn art style, animations, and cutscenes all paint the action of the game in a beautiful and uncluttered style, which is key in a difficult game that demands so much of its players. However, I did encounter one glitch during a chase scene where, despite reloading the checkpoint five times, the front half off the screen wouldn’t load in any textures. This led to an odd sequence where I was running away from a giant boulder into a completely black part of the screen, left to puzzle out traps and spikes through trial and error until I got through it.
Judged on its own merits or against those of its fantastic predecessor, Shank 2 is oddly hard to recommend in the face of all of its problems. That’s a real shame when so much of what Klei Entertainment has done with the visuals and combat is a creative step from the previous Shank game. If the problems are fixed with a downloadable patch, this game will be easy to recommend. Until then, it’s a try-before-you-buy at best.
Pros
Announced at E3? Probably not. Also, this terrible name won't be used.
Don’t listen to all of the rumors about the next generation of Microsoft and Sony home consoles being announced at E3 2012.
Cedrick Delmax, director of marketing for Microsoft France, said in an interview with Le Point that “Xbox 360′s cycle is not at all finished. The proof is that we don’t see the logic in cutting the price this year.” Referencing the presence of the Nintendo Wii U at E3 2011 and 2012, he added that “we [Microsoft] are not here to counter Nintendo and they’re not here to fight the other manufacturers.”
Delmax also said that Microsoft isn’t concerned with Sony’s supposed decision not to showcase the next Playstation console this year.
Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony, has already said that there are no “plans” to announce another Playstation at E3 of this year. In another interview with Le Point, Philippe Cardon, president of Sony France, said that Sony was the last to release a console in the current generation and “will probably be the last to announce something.”
It’s important not to misinterpret the elusiveness of the responses from both console manufacturers. That caginess is likely to serve to cover the tracks of each company with respect to how their competitors and shareholders are closely monitering them. Delmax said it best when he pointed out that Xbox 360s are still selling. Playstation 3 units are still selling as well, so any announcement of a future console will undercut current sales for both consoles.
The abysmal software sales of Wii titles, combined with the continued decline of Wii sales after it hit its stride, certainly add to the reasons for Sony and Microsoft not to be intimidated. Add that to the fact that a lot of the announced titles for the Wii U are multiplatform titles available on existing consoles and you should feel happy with the console you already own for a good while longer.
You first
Note: The Playstation Network version was played for review. Amy is also available on Xbox Live Marketplace and, as of this writing, is scheduled for release on PC.
The crisp clip-clop of my character’s high heels were now a distant sound. Shambling through a crumbling subway station, my vision blurred and wavered blood red as the murmers of a mad voice whispered into my headphones. My skin was turning pale, eyes shot yellow, and the zombie-inflicted wound on my wrist was festering. I needed to get to Amy. Being near her kept me from fully turning into one of them.
I find Amy, the six year old with special powers who I’m charged with protecting, huddling in a locker. I comfort her as the infection from the sickly air evaporates off of my character with a hiss. Then, a monster bashes through a nearby door, the frame rate plummets, and I realize the textures on its face haven’t loaded in. It looks like I’m being attacked by a giant ogre with a shriveled apricot for a head, and now I’m just laughing.
My eight hour experience with Amy was just like that. Moments of tension and sparse touches of cleverly executed design were buried under technical problems and a messy narrative.
The game is set in the near future and you play as Lana, a woman who is the caretaker of a young girl who has special powers. A zombie virus mysteriously erupts at the start of the game and Lana barely escapes from a run in with one of the undead. Now wounded, you have to stave off the infection long with syringes and Amy’s powers so that you can get her to safety.
There’s a bond between you and Amy, as neither of you can survive for long without each other. Amy, being the subject of unexplained experiments by the game’s professorial antagonist, heals you and can use her telekinetic powers to solve puzzles. Being a small child, she can also fit through small gaps that you can’t. Lana is the only one that can use weapons, climb ladders, and shimmy along edges.
The infection also plays an interesting part in the game’s increasingly devious puzzles, as you can deliberately let the virus manifest in yourself long enough to disguise yourself as a zombie and sneak by; well, hopefully before you become fully infected and die, that is.
Syringes of the cure are the only way to survive when away from Amy
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t provide a clear indication of how infected you are. The light on Lana’s back shows how strong the virus is in the game’s environment, but only the subtle changes in her skin tone and your increasingly blurred vision show how infected you are and it takes a couple of failed stealth sequences to get the hang of just how many seconds it takes before zombies don’t notice you shambling by.
When the situation gets rough, so does the combat; it’s all timing based, using just a dodge and attack buttons, but the timing for dodging attacks is a bit inconsistent. Sometimes I stepped clear of an enemy’s attack and still got hit. Other times, while at the same distance, I deftly avoided the attack of two enemies at once and Lana went into a ducking animation. If the direction you face is even slightly off, the game bugs out and you and the enemy end up awkwardly circling around each other, flailing wildly, until one of you gets hit and dies.
Thankfully, the stealth sequences work just fine and have some good tension thanks to some crisp sound design.
Unfortunately, the voice acting of the game is awful. The main character is voiced by two different actors and it definitely shows; there are times when Lana will go from sounding American to European all in the same conversation. NPCs have stilted and forced dialogue if they talk at all, while the few story related characters have voicework that ranges from decent to comically amateur.
Seeing someone sneak around in high heels and a skirt makes me glad I'm a dude
When the handholding mechanic isn’t causing Amy’s hand to come loose when she brushes up against the environment, and when any of the above technical and narrative missteps aren’t getting in your way, there are some interesting moments in the game. One of the best sequences had me isolated from Amy while I frantically sneaked and fought my way through an infection-ridden subway station, stopping near dead soldiers to use their gas masks to stave off the infection; I felt tense and vulnerable the whole time, and it’s sad that those glimmers of brilliance are buried in such a mess of narrative and technical sloppiness.
The end cutscenes of Amy, coupled with a contrived story ending, allude to a lot of enemies and environments that didn’t make it into the game, but a lack of variety or challenge isn’t the game’s problem.The developer would have something worthy of the modest $9.99 US price if they took proper care of their existing ideas within the six chapters of the game. Sadly, Amy can’t be recommended on anything other than a discounted purchase .
Pros:
Cons:
2/5
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