User Reviews (1 - 6 of 6)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

AN ATMOSPHERIC GAME IN NEED OF BALANCING

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: November 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Eastern European gaming companies have came up with some great ideas in the last 5 years (STALKER and THE WITCHER pop to mind, to name just a couple). Unfortunately, although it tries hard, YOU ARE EMPTY is NOT one of the best examples.

This game's strengths are mainly the story and the settings. Soviet-era mentality had always been obsessed with mind-control sciences, and when something goes terribly wrong the world is turned into a zombie and cyber-entities cesspool.
The graphics are nice (comparable, at least, to those of HL2 - a 3-year old game mind you), the surfaces are gorgeous and have been done painstakingly in polygons (not bump mapping!) - and the game engine, although previously untested, hardly ever glitches! Now THAT is solid kung-fu programming!
The scenery, with all the Soviet propaganda posters and the beautifully done cut-scenes, is gorgeous; whereas, the sounds and music have been tastefully chosen, with radio loop-announcements cutting through the cold Russian wind making the power-lines whistle: this is a game that is really easy to get immersed into!
Interestingly, YOU ARE EMPTY runs for well over 16 hours(!): this is how long FPS games used to last - and not the miserly 3-4 hours the latest over-hyped releases do...

On the down side, the weapons may be realistic yet could not be more generic and unimaginative; movement is slower than flowing syrup, something especially nerve-raking when enemies have the tendency to jump you from all directions; and the damage (both sustained and inflicted) is hardly balanced: it is preferable to get hit by a grenade than to jump a single floor, to absorb several bullets that get bitten by a single rat and to keep using your sidearm than a rifle, since they do about the same damage, appear to have the same range and the sidearm can hold more bullets...!

This is a game that had been available for more than a year in Europe before finding distribution in the US - and, undoubtedly, this is not helping its chances to impress. We should count our blessings though: the European release also featured ...STARFORCE.

This is a solid first effort by DIGITAL SPRAY, a newly founded group, that although fails to stand out in this pre-Christmas crowd, lays stable groundwork for its future developments. Let's only hope they do not get outright absorbed into a gaming mega-corporation...

All in all: a creative and atmospheric game that is worth a budget admission price.

You Are Empty

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Game is a standard shoot and kill...No really challenge...Graphics are ok...Maybe could be used as a stress reliever

Fun with a unfinished ending

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: April 06, 2008
Author: Amazon User

A good amount of gameplay here. Graphics range from clean and creative to a bit washed-out and 2003ish. Mostly on the good side, though. Music is atmospheric and carries the mood of the game well. The game itself is simplistic in it's approach with a dab every now and again of a creative puzzle. You run. You gun. You find the switch. You find (only a few... thank god) keys. You ride a few vehicles. You never drive them. You only ride them. You watch some very surrealistic cut scenes that make virtually no sense until the end of the game. Quite artsy on the cutscenes. They are a creative blend of real-time video, and graphics combined. With a touch of 'squiggly animation' over the real-time video. Kind of feels like an 80's retro AHA video. The video for the song 'Take on me'. The vocal acting is mostly good with a few quite humorous attempts at a 'serious' tone from some pretty bad actors. But, that's pretty common in a shooter, isn't it? Just a few game restarting bugs. Which, frankly, surprised me. I had been prepared to expect far more problems. I experienced very few. The gameplay is essentially linear. You do have a few choices now and again at your approach to a situation. However, one nagging problem really irked me. I reached the end of a level (a quite good one, at that) and i couldn't figure out how to go on. I spent the better part of an hour trying to determine what the heck had happenned. I finally decided to retrace my steps. After quite a while i figured out that one of the 'bad guys' was still alive. And, hiding behind a wall where i could not see him or shoot him. I finally restarted the level, made sure he was also dead, and then quite easily figured out how to end the level. So, you MUST kill all of the baddies or you cannot finish the level. And, last irritating point. At a crucial time in the game you are told you have a serious choice to make. It has the potential to be a powerful turning point in the whole game and could've added an element of human choice that really would've given this game something new and creative to stand on. Except that after you're told to make the choice, your on-screen personna makes the choice for you. Unfair. I would've chosen the opposite. I felt a bit robbed of an awesome experience there. Making a choice that could've made the game more of a personnal experience. Oh, well. The game had a nice ending overall. Though it seems that, towards the end, the developers forgot to fill in some blanks. Leaving the ending a little sparce on real puzzles and fighting. I have had many more endings that were far worse than this. But, the game starts off so strong it's kind of a shame that the ending was not more memorable. But, they did not forget to provide MANY environments all the way up until the end. Not to mention MANY weapons along the way. And, even a few quite surprising, and frightening, characters to jump out and scare the living daylights out of you.
A lot of the characters act a bit like the Serious Sam baddies. They see you from a distance and come running straight for you. Yet there are some that hide and duck behind barriers so the AI is not totally moronic. A lot of this game takes place indoors in enclosed spaces like DOOM 3 did. But, it does have some spacious outdoor environments like DOOM 3 didn't.
This game, at it's best, reminds one of a cross between the first Half Life and Return to Castle Wolfenstein combined. But, at it's worst, is a bit more like the long forgotten PC flop, Mortyr. The graphics are sometimes spectacular. And at times you have little more than that to go on. But, in other glimpses of greatness, there is more to this game than meets the eye. In closing, once i finished this game, i have decided that i WILL play this again. I feel this deserves one more chance to impress me even more than it did the first time. This is not by any means a bad game. It's just one game in a HUGE pile of other games very much like it. And, in my opinion, it doesn't deserve to be on the bottom of the pile. Even in it's (It seems...) unfinished state. Buy it when it's under 25 bucks. ADDED INFO ::: Please note that once this review was submitted i saw that the 'fun' star rating was at '1'. I tried to change it, but i couldn't. Really, it's a '4' just like my overall rating.

You are Empty really is empty for me...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: January 18, 2008
Author: Amazon User

"You are Empty" is really empty for me. I paid the big bucks for it but it will not run on my system, and I have a monster system with dual-core, 6600-GT, 4gig memory, 2 terabytes of storage, dual widescreen flatscreen monitors, and every bell and whistle that I could stuff into a full tower. It seems to have a problem with my Asus motherboard and we can't quite pin it down. And I'm a retired Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, and I can't even get this piece of trash to run on my system. I've talked to the Atari folk but that was a waste of hours and hours of telephone time. I feel as if I was ripped off on this one and just shoved $30 down the drain.

Not too good

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 10, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game has lots of problems. First of all it doesn't explain very well what's going on - note I don't have the manual because I bought it as a download (legal as the site I downloaded from was promoted on the official site for the game.) Things move very slowly - and a lot of the game is finding your way around rather than action - which is boring. The graphics also don't render very well - you can see right through the floor many places. The cutscenes also make no sense. A good idea and some fun, but they should have spent more time making sure things work right and on the translation for the US market.

AN EXCEPTIONAL GAME!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Someone has said that electronic gaming is the new art form. In my

opinion, "You Are Empty" epitomizes this ideal.

Mostly panned or damned with faint praise by its' critics, this is

nevertheless an exceptional gaming experience, reminiscent of several

top-drawer games such as Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R. and Iron Storm.

A unique single-player FPS game for grown-ups that takes place in an

atmospheric, post-apocalyptic Russia [by Russian developers], it

has great graphics, exciting game-play and truly terrifying

mutant enemy AI not seen elsewhere. Maps are large and detailed.

Negatives are a lack of a run, lean or prone mode, hence the 4 stars.

All-in-all though, this is an excellent game that you'll play again

and again!

Review Page: 1 

Actions