Great Environment, Neat Story, Horrible AI
I like "X-Play" on G4. You might not, but I think the hosts' game reviews are usually fair..tough, but generally balanced. However, everyone slips from time to time. In this case, host Adam Sessler reviewed "You Are Empty" by saying it was "poopy." That was dumb...and, even more important, it's not a review.
I just finished "You Are Empty" recently (at this point, about 2 years after its release--I found it cheap, but new, covered in dust on a back shelf in a game store. I didn't buy it when it was new due to Sessler's "poopy" comment at the time, and then I subsequently forgot about it totally. Finding it again, with a price slashed in more than half, it was a no-brainer.)
My first impression of You Are Empty is that the game's environments--taking place in 1950s Stalinist-era Russia--can be absolutely breathtaking at times. The long-draw-distanced environments look like they were rendered by HL2's Source Engine at times. So, it's around that quality. There are moments late in the game when climbing around the rooftops of the unnamed mutant-infected city, looking down on the empty cobblestone city streets or across the slate rooftops of endless abandoned buildings, where you really are completely immersed and engaged. Very nice use of colors throughout the city as well. Some of the gray concrete Brutalist-style skyscrapers stretch omniously into the sky. That says something about whoever this small dev team had drawing the locales. I was more interested in sightseeing than playing the game at times.
As others have mentioned, another visually enticing aspect of the game are the artsy, Photoshoppy cutscenes, which are stylish, mostly-black-and-white affairs (that also incorporate actual newsreel footage from the 50s to the present), and help to push the relatively interesting and strange, though convoluted, Sci-Fi-Communist-Russian-Experiment-Gone-Awry story forward--with a really nice twisty ending.
Almost in complete contrast, the enemy AI, enemy animations, and enemy concepts are....severely lacking, dated, and limited. It's like the above-mentioned environments came from 2004/5, but the enemies fell out of a bargain-basement game circa 1998. The animations are stiff (enemies float over cars in their way); the AI tactics involve bum-rushing you (that's it--they come running at you, period, very old school, while you walk backwards and fire); there's no evidence that you are shooting them (no movement, no dodging, no evidence of damage, no change in behavior); and all similar enemies look identical to one another (very weak). The enemies fall into categories that I'm sure the game's writers thought were clever--but they are not. When it comes to the human enemies (all of whom have been infected with a government-sponsored secret mind-control experiment that has warped them), there's a firefighter dude (they all look the same), a steelworker dude (ditto), a silly nurse with a half-eaten face and perfect breasts (all of them look the same)...you get the picture...and you'll be attacked in waves of these identical opponents, all tripping over their twins to get to you first. This is the aspect of the game that falls way, way flat and becomes comcial (even though the game takes itself very seriously). And then there are the non-human enemies--giant broiler chickens (a Stalinist-insider joke), stitched-together dogs whose legs have been replaced with metal bars, etc.
Probably the two most irritating aspects of the game:
1. Don't use the Molotov cocktails. No matter where you put your reticule to throw, it will end up at your feet, killing you. Period. This one aspect of the game actually is broken, but it does not wreck the entire game by any means. You can easily beat the game without ever taking out a Molotov to use. No problem.
2. Your character does walk about very slowly for the most part. There is no "run" function in the game, which seems unheard of at this point in time. So everything seems to happen in slo-mo; once you become accustomed to the slower pace, it's okay. The slow movement is not necessarily a bad thing, since the environments are generally well rendered. But if you are 12 years old and need everything to zip by in a blur, move onto a different game, or get into the games' config files and change the walking speed.
Summary:
Overall, if you are one of those underdog gamers that likes spending time with lesser-known, generally undeveloped games made by small development teams--I firmly do believe (as long as you can get past the whole AI problem) this is a real gem of a game. A neat story, an interesting revisionist sci-fi historical period, cool cutscenes, sometimes beautiful environments--definitely worth the $9 I paid for it. But I wouldn't pay more.