AMY is a recently published survival horror game for XBLA and PSN. Although it comes out on PSN next week basically anyone in gaming press (or gamers) have checked it out on 360 and have a lot of negative things to say about it.
Mostly, reviewers don't seem split at all. They know what they feel about the game and demonstrate it in the best way they know how - a horrendous score. Now, I've spent around 6 hours with the game so far and it is pretty bad. But is it the worst game ever? Is it worthy of scores of 0 to 3 (yes someone did rate it zero)? Now 1 and 2 seem basically like scores for something that is completely unplayable. AMY is definitely playable - how else would reviewers supposedly beat the game otherwise?
What the game does wrong is how strangely retro it is. It takes from the old school of survival horror design, which was never very popular. No one will ever be found applauding the control scheme and design choices of AMY nor would they be happy about Resident Evil's tank controls. It's so odd that the game is this awkwardly controlled. Did the team play any games in the past few years?
Still, the game works and you can get accustomed to the controls. I have a feeling that most people who put out scathing reviews only sampled the first few chapters. The first few are the most rage-inducing. Even I was seeing red when traversing the same sections of level over and over again due to stupid deaths and mistakes. Taking a full day away from the game though and coming back to it I can see that it is not a steaming pile of poo. It's not good, but it could have been worse. Vampire Rain, Onechanbara, and Siren are three games that come to mind that are in the horror genre and are worse. Yet nobody seems to bring them up. AMY is the "worst game ever!!!!!1!"; except it isn't.
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You know, this is why I like it when reviewers post how long they've spent with a game. Game Critics does that and though they don't always finish their games, at least they're straightforward about it. Brad Gallaway reviewed AMY for them, and though I completely respect him, he only spent 3 hours with the game, and said so in his review. Hearing you comment that it's the first couple chapters that were the most rage-inducing makes me wish that he'd spent more time with it.
I'm the kind of person who believes if someone has to tell you to "stick with it a little longer" for a game to "get better," then it probably isn't a good game. But that's only to a point... It's hard for me to say. I like to give games a decent chance, but I did not wait for the 20 hour mark in FFXIII for it to "get good." But in the case of AMY, shouldn't people at least give it, say, 5 hours? It's a tough call.
Also, I think one of the big reasons people were disappointed was that they lead themselves to believe (with some pushing from the developer) that AMY was going to be special and different, so when it didn't deliver, they were particularly disappointed.
Anyways, looking forward to checking out your full review!
Wow, this sure is a game that excited people at first only to seemingly let them down in the end, eh?
As for the number attached to most of its horrible reviews: I'm of two minds of it, really. Like you said, a 0 means the game is completely unplayable, so the review text had better reflect that, if you ask me. That said, I do think people shouldn't be afraid to give a game a 1, 2 or 3 if it really is completely terrible on a number of fronts. I personally think too many reviewers have gotten used to using a 5 (out of 10) to say a game is terrible, but if that's really the case shouldn't they be using, say, a 1-5 scale or something? Otherwise, what's the point of having access to 1-4 (out of 10) if you're never, ever going to use those numbers?
Anyway, I, too, look forward to your full review of this one. There's no way I'm going to waste my money on it at this point, but I'm still curious as to what you think of it in the end.
Anne - I love when reviewers state the time they put into a game! It's also helpful if they mention how much game time you should expect to get from it. I can understand that reviewers don't have time to beat each and every game that comes across their table, but it's a good idea to at least get 3/4th through. For me I personally am lucky to have short enough games to play to beat them before writing :).
Oh yeah, totally hate it when people tell me "play until X then it gets good!". We only have so much time in our days. Besides, with so many great games in our backlogs why should we waste 10, 20, or more hours in a game we're not enjoying only to see it finally become good? Why couldn't the developers just find a way to spice up the beginning or cut it shorter?
Mmmmhm everyone was ready for AMY to be completely awesome. I address that let down factor in my review a little bit, even!
Bryan - Yup, people are really sad/mad about it lol.
I also think it's a good idea for reviewers to use the full spectrum of scores from 1 to 10 if they are using the 10 score instead of 5. But I don't like how a lot of reviewrs will put everything at 7-10, where 7 is basically any average game ever just so they don't anger the PR teams... But then when something is kind of bad they flip out and go ONE OUT OF TEN!!!! It seems silly when they never use any other numbers in between and there are much worse games that come out than this one. What would they get, -4?
AMY is nice survival horror game to play. I never play this game but to heard many good view about this game i really want to play this game.
r4 for ds
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