You Are Empty

Hey, remember when Quake and Duke Nukem were considered the cutting edge of gaming? Then say hello to You Are Empty, a first-person shooter that's about ten years behind the times.

I won't mince words here: You Are Empty is a bad game. The graphics look hideously outdated, the gameplay is ridiculously stiff, and the storyline is skeletal and confusing (although the cool cutscenes with their hand-sketched vibe are one of the few things this game does right).

I've seen fan-made mods with better production values than YAE. But for all its faults, I couldn't help but like it a little because it reminded me of my long gone youth, when I was staying up late to play games on my state of the art PC with an Intel 386SX processor, 2 megabytes (yes, I said megabytes) of RAM and a 40 meg hard drive.

Truth be told, had You Are Empty come out in that era, we would all have fond memories of playing it. But the calendar now reads 2007 and our expectations have risen far beyond YAE's grasp. The game starts out as...you know what? I can't even begin to explain the plot to you. The game does a rather poor job of setting things up. I think you're some sort of security guard or something. Anyway, you wake up in a mental hospital and find yourself surrounded by crazy, twisted nurses and patients who are all out to kill you. You make an escape and start journeying through towns that are all populated by more crazy, twisted people.

You are armed with the usual complement of FPS weaponry--a wrench to start, pistols and shotguns and such later on--and you run around various levels, shooting enemies and climbing ladders until you reach the end. Unfortunately, the graphics just aren't up to snuff, the character models, aside from being horrendous, repeat often and your character moves with all the zip of a drugged elephant.

I shouldn't be too harsh, as I'm sure the developers put in lots of long hours to finish this game. Heck, they even developed their own custom engine! But it'd be irresponsible of me if I didn't expose the game for its faults, of which there are many. Hopefully, this doesn't deter the team responsible from rolling up their sleeves and making another go of it but next time, I hope they license a newer engine and put more energy into developing the story and gameplay.

PROS: Has a nostalgic feel to it. It made me long for the days of DOS commands and config.sys tomfoolery.
CONS: Nostalgia can't make me forget this game's faults.

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