You Are Empty review (PC)

A tedious pace is an even bigger problem than photocopied creatures. Although both Serious Sam and Painkiller featured the same sort of surreal spooks, they also had a crazy tempo that kept you running and gunning for your life pretty much all the time. A game such as Serious Sam wasn't great because it made you shoot hillbillies with jack-o'-lanterns for heads; it was great because you were shooting dozens of them at the same time. However, here you just trudge along. You can't run at all, and the walking pace is absurdly slow for such an old-fashioned shooter. Not that you need to pick up your feet very often. Attacks generally feature no more than a handful of enemies, all typically moving as slow as you, which gives you lots of time to shoot, backpedal, and reload.

Worse yet, there is no weight to combat, which makes it hard to tell when you're hitting a baddie or when it's hitting you. None of your weapons have any oomph. The Mauser pistol might as well be a pellet gun, and even the shotgun and rail gun have the kick of a pea shooter. Bullets don't slam into enemies as much as they sink into them. Damage that you sustain is equally insubstantial. Mighty blows from the likes of axes and bullets from enemy pistols don't even appear to slow you down, so you need to keep a close eye on your health meter to see if you're actually being hurt during battles. And just to make everything a bit vaguer, enemies can hit you with melee attacks even though you're well out of range. You might be a dozen feet or more away from a miner swinging his pick, yet he can still sometimes smack you in the head with it.

Want more? Okay, but considering that you've already wasted too much of your life reading about You Are Empty, we'll keep this short. Levels are loaded with insipid key hunts and lever pulls. Visuals are all murky grays and blacks, which fits the urban wasteland theme but makes it hard to pick out details such as the aforementioned keys and levers you need to find to open doors. Many textures are totally corrupted, which gives a checkerboard appearance to the sky, many walls, and some doors. Character animations are so awkward and jerky that you find yourself looking for wires. Much of the music isn't half bad if you like B-side Euro techno, although the tunes are nearly ruined by the absurd ugghs and ooghs uttered by the mutants. There is no multiplayer. And finally, the nihilistic name of the game is never explained.

Now move on with your life and try to pretend that games like You Are Empty don't exist.