Review: Amy (Xbox Live Arcade)

By Wayne Webb

With the recent success of the hit show the Walking Dead it seems that you can’t escape zombies these days. In Amy you are a woman who is travelling with a mute autistic-type child with a secret or two hidden away in her head. Cue a horrific train incident, a rampaging horde of the undead and an abandoned railway station and you are away on a nice scripted adventure about survival, protection and the mystery of Amy.

You move slowly and in the dark a lot, which is good for tension but bad for gameplay. You soon find your missing child and you have the option to hold her hand as you run along trying to find out what is going on and survive. I wondered why you have the handholding feature but before long you figure it out. Amy wanders off – a lot. Even if you tell her to stay or follow, half the time you are backtracking and finding the girl in rooms and corridors you have already puzzled out or cleared of the undead.

You pick up items, power ups and health (some kind of needle-based steroid you inject) and then try and puzzle your way through, occasionally running into reanimated infected corpses, and often a horde of them. One on one they are easily dealt with, in groups a little harder, though you can run a lot faster than them. The controls are easy enough, but there are some big problems with them. Aligning yourself for action on an item is tricky at times, and hampered by a poor camera control that is always pointing in the wrong direction. It’s disorienting and slows the pace and pleasure of playing the game.

Pros: Some excellent tension, good story line, zombies are cool.
Cons: Slow and tedious, Amy wanders off a lot, too dark in places, control issues abound.

2.5 Shacks Out Of 5

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