Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/09/16/you-are-empty-pc-review/
I’m just going to say this up front, ‘You Are Empty’ is a very “love it or hate it” game. If it doesn’t look or sound interesting to you, nothing about it is going to win you over. It it looks like it’s right up your alley, you’re probably going to get a lot out of it.
‘You are Empty’ was developed by Ukrainian developers ‘Mandel ArtPlains’ and ‘Digital Spay Studios’ and was published by ‘1C Company’ in 2006, with the English version published by ‘Atari’ in 2007.
You are Empty takes plane in an alternate universe Soviet Union in the year 1955, where Joseph Stalin still reigns. In an attempt to ensure the global victory of Communism, the government has constructed a massive psychic antenna to broadcast a reality-altering signal designed to transform the population of the Soviet Union into supermen. You play as a mid-rank military officer who is involved in an accident at his job and is knocked unconscious. You wake up later in a hospital and find yourself attack by mutants and people who have gone mad all while the world has fallen into ruin in. You now must survive by fighting your way through these hordes of monsters, all while stumbling into the mystery of what is going on.
A lot of the story is kind of vague. I know that a lot of it is going to be lost in translation since it’s a small studio that probably could afford a proper English translation and probably wasn’t made for anyone outside of Russia. There a clearly parts of the game that get across their intended effect, such as when you begin playing the game, if you look out the window, you can see one of the monsters attacking a person in the building across the street, and it’s moments like that that really add to the game.
But by the end of the game I got a pretty good picture of what was going on even if it was out there. There are notes scattered throughout the game that do explain parts of the plot, so you probably should watch out for those.
Jumping right into the game, the gameplay feels weird. I don’t know how to explain the characters movement other than it feels like the character is constantly trying to walk through water. And there is no run key either, which means that if you’re backtracking to pick up some health or ammo, it can end up being a bit of a chore simply because of how slop you are. If the apocalypse was actually happening, you would think that it would be such an emergeny that it would make the character want to speed himself up a bit.
I’m pretty sure that the bad character movement is tied to the framerate, because the moment that I changed the refresh rate of my graphics card from 60hz to 144hz, all of a sudden my character moved much more smoothly. When the framerate occasionally dipped, the dodgy movement returned. So that’s another thing to keep in mind.
Also, I put the game on easy because I was constantly worried that the game would end up crashing at the best of times an I didn’t want to be constantly set back. Thankfully, the game does come with an autosave system and it never crashed on me once. Also, probably due to the game either not having the budget or time to get beta testers, there is a difficulty spike that comes out of nowhere and the game becomes hard all of a sudden.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get into the game.
‘You are Empty’ comes with an oppressive atmosphere that I’m pretty sure is ingrained into anything set in Russia or comes out of Russia. It feels like a mix of Silent Hill and Half-Life. It even has the “sexy” nurses from Silent Hill 2. I know that since Half-Life 2 is set in an Eastern European country with Cyrillic writing and a lot of those locations can look the same, but I’m not just talking about the locations, I’m also talking about the art style of the Half-Life games too, not only the stuff that made it into the Half-Life games, but a lot of the concept art too. It’s like the team saw what Valve was doing and took inspiration from it. A lot of it fits the game well and has it’s own distinct spin on it, so I didn’t really mind.
Considering that 2006 was when a lot of graphically impressive games were coming out, like Gears of War, Black, Resistance: Fall of Man, and Just Cause, but the game really stands on it’s own by having an oppressive atmosphere. I know that it can look dull at times and doesn’t appeal to everyone, but the people who like their depressing looking media are probably going to get something out of this game. And even though it might grey, at least it wasn’t one of those annoying games who thinks that slapping a filter onto it to make it look grey despite the fact that it looks awful, and it’s actually part of the art style.
On a technical front, the game is surprisingly graphically impressive, but not for the way you think. The game doesn’t actually have proper lighting or shader effects, instead getting it’s look through great texture work to give off the impression of lighting, with all of the shadows being part of the textures. So despite the fact it wasn’t cutting edge and probably had a small team behind it, it shows what creativity can do when you’re a small limited team and you have to work around your limitations.
There is also some actually pretty decent level design. While the whole game is pretty linear, it doesn’t feel like the game is guiding you through some pre-determined hallway. You actually feel like you’re going through an actual location. There was only one time where I had trouble knowing where to go because the door I had to go through blended into the rest of the environment and it didn’t look different to any other door that I couldn’t access.
The game’s soundtrack also adds to the whole depressing atmosphere of the game, with a mix of IDM for it’s soundtrack that range from droning ambiance to industrial to dance, and even some classical Russian music mixed in.
The English acting though, that’s another story. I have no idea what the Russian acting was like since I didn’t listen to it, but I’m pretty sure that the way that the English acting turned out was completely by accident. From what I can tell, every single character in the English dub is done by one man, and he doesn’t even try to put on an accent let alone hide his British accent, and it really clashes with both the tone that the game is going for and the location of the game. The notes are also narrated in English too. There was even one time where he is narrating a propaganda film and it sound like he remembers that he has to have an accent half way through. The guy is clearly trying his best with what he’s been dealt.
But the worst dub, and by worst, I mean most offensive, is a flamboyant stage actor who opens a door for you, talks to you for about 30 seconds, was completely unnecessary to the plot, and immediately gets killed after he’s finished his dialogue.
On top of that, the lip sync doesn’t match what the characters are saying, and I’m willing to bet that counts for the Russian dub too despite never even hearing it, because the character movements, both actions and lip movements, are over exaggerated, adding onto the weirdness, and this is the one thing that I’m not sure was intentional or not. To watch and listen to these characters is an experience all in of it’s own. There was one character who I’m pretty sure was speaking frenetically since their performance is way off.
But the weakest part of the game is the gameplay. It’s not bad by any means, it’s just a bit awkward in places. For example, your health points only go up to 99. I don’t know if it was an engine limitation, an intentional design choice, or by that point in the development the team couldn’t change it to 100 so they were stuck with it and released it like that.
The enemies all fit the aesthetic perfectly, even if they’re heavily Silent Hill inspired. You have the previously mentioned “sexy” nurse zombies, crazed patients in straight jackets, firefighters, various zombies who range from people in military uniforms to farmers (I think), mutants, and the average people who are just trying to survive and see you as a threat. One of the enemies looks like the homeless version of Mr. Bean. It’s a weird bunch, but none of it felt out of place. Then you have the more creative enemies, like the guy who has a rotor on his back that lets him fly and the giant mutant chickens that appear out of nowhere. Yeah, it’s that type of weird.
The worst enemy in the game is the one with the flamethrower, and thank god there was only one of them. He does a lot damage really quickly. But thankfully pretty much all of the enemies have the same guns as you, so any time you’re in company with someone or something with a gun, it actually feels like a fair fight.
Thankfully there is some enemy infighting, so there are times where you can save on ammo by simply waiting for enemies to kill each other and you can pick off the ones that are left due to their depleted health.
You should also watch out for some of the cars that are scattered around some areas because they aren’t just scenery that you can hide behind. Not only do they react to being shot, but after enough hits they can explode, and can hurt you. They can hurt the enemies too, so there could end up being some situations where you might want to use the cars to your advantage.
There were also a few times where I jumped down to a lower point and I got injured despite the fact that the fall shouldn’t or even wouldn’t injure you, or at least as not as badly as the game would lead you to believe, so you might want to watch out for a few jumps that look like you can make it.
The weapon selection is a mix of guns that you would see in most First Person Shooters an a few more unique ones. You have your melee weapon, which is the wrench, your standard pistol, sub machine gun, bolt action rifle, double barrel shotgun, Flamethrower, and grenade and molotov-cocktails. Nothing that you haven’t seen before and all work pretty well. The more unique ones include the Nailgun, and the Electrogun, which is just OK.
But for some reason there are two weapon slots assigned to the exact same rifle, the only difference being that one has a scope and one doesn’t. And it’s not like the scope is useful as all, since a lot of the other guns are also effective at exactly the same range, an it takes so long to get in and out of using the scope that the enemy can either run up to you or take you by surprise, seriously injuring you or even killing you in the time you stop using the scope.
Apparently the “medicine” you pick up during the game is 95% medical grade alcohol, so throughout the game I was wondering if the whole game was happening of it was just the main character was hallucinating from chugging 190 proof alcohol.
‘You Are Empty’ seemed to have received a mostly poor reception when it was first released, at least overseas. GameSpot gave it a 1.5, which is a score associated with the word ‘Abysmal’, straight up calling it a rip-off of other shooters as Doom, Serious Sam, and Painkiller. I don’t know if I would either call this game abysmal, or a rip-off of any of the games that the review mentioned, since this game is more slow paced and focuses more on atmosphere and story than those games. It would compare it more to Silent Hill and Half-Life, which I’ve previously mentioned in this review.
Other reviews also seem to compare it games like Doom, Serious Sam, and Painkiller too, with GameSpy calling it a “mindless kill-festival”. It’s gameplay might be basic, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Common complaints include the fact that the game is ugly and runs like shit. This game came out the same year as the infamous 2006 Sonic game, was released. I know that they’re not exactly comparable, but I can guarantee that ‘You Are Empty’ got closer to what it intended than what ‘Sonic the Hedgehog got to’.
And I know that I’m playing this 15 years after it’s release with a patched version, but I still wouldn’t call it bad by any stretch. Maybe ‘rough around the edges’, but certainly not as terrible as it’s reputation will lead you to believe. It’s certainly not a game for everyone, and it definitely has problems, but it’s an enjoyable experience.
To top it all off, this game is pretty hard to find. And even if you do find it, it has some pretty intrusive DRM, preventing it from being played on more modern systems and is hard to remove. But like I mentioned earlier, thankfully someone has uploaded the game without the DRM and patched applied to it to make it more stable as well as making it easy to get up and running.
Apparently there is even a remake happening, but I’m skeptical about it though, but I have no idea if it is even ever going to come out. It would be neat to see a version of the game that is more stable and works on more modern systems. Plus it could add in the alternate ending that was cut from the final game or even some of the content that are still in the files of the game, such as enemies, weapons, and even whole levels, but never made it into the final release of the game.
‘You Are Empty’ is quite a unique experience that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else, so if it the concept looks appealing to you and you don’t mind a game that’s rough around the edges, I would highly recommend giving it a try.
I’m just going to say this up front, ‘You Are Empty’ is a very “love it or hate it” game. If it doesn’t look or sound interesting to you, nothing about it is going to win you over. It it looks like it’s right up your alley, you’re probably going to get a lot out of it.
‘You are Empty’ was developed by Ukrainian developers ‘Mandel ArtPlains’ and ‘Digital Spay Studios’ and was published by ‘1C Company’ in 2006, with the English version published by ‘Atari’ in 2007.
You are Empty takes plane in an alternate universe Soviet Union in the year 1955, where Joseph Stalin still reigns. In an attempt to ensure the global victory of Communism, the government has constructed a massive psychic antenna to broadcast a reality-altering signal designed to transform the population of the Soviet Union into supermen. You play as a mid-rank military officer who is involved in an accident at his job and is knocked unconscious. You wake up later in a hospital and find yourself attack by mutants and people who have gone mad all while the world has fallen into ruin in. You now must survive by fighting your way through these hordes of monsters, all while stumbling into the mystery of what is going on.
A lot of the story is kind of vague. I know that a lot of it is going to be lost in translation since it’s a small studio that probably could afford a proper English translation and probably wasn’t made for anyone outside of Russia. There a clearly parts of the game that get across their intended effect, such as when you begin playing the game, if you look out the window, you can see one of the monsters attacking a person in the building across the street, and it’s moments like that that really add to the game.
But by the end of the game I got a pretty good picture of what was going on even if it was out there. There are notes scattered throughout the game that do explain parts of the plot, so you probably should watch out for those.
Jumping right into the game, the gameplay feels weird. I don’t know how to explain the characters movement other than it feels like the character is constantly trying to walk through water. And there is no run key either, which means that if you’re backtracking to pick up some health or ammo, it can end up being a bit of a chore simply because of how slop you are. If the apocalypse was actually happening, you would think that it would be such an emergeny that it would make the character want to speed himself up a bit.
I’m pretty sure that the bad character movement is tied to the framerate, because the moment that I changed the refresh rate of my graphics card from 60hz to 144hz, all of a sudden my character moved much more smoothly. When the framerate occasionally dipped, the dodgy movement returned. So that’s another thing to keep in mind.
Also, I put the game on easy because I was constantly worried that the game would end up crashing at the best of times an I didn’t want to be constantly set back. Thankfully, the game does come with an autosave system and it never crashed on me once. Also, probably due to the game either not having the budget or time to get beta testers, there is a difficulty spike that comes out of nowhere and the game becomes hard all of a sudden.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get into the game.
‘You are Empty’ comes with an oppressive atmosphere that I’m pretty sure is ingrained into anything set in Russia or comes out of Russia. It feels like a mix of Silent Hill and Half-Life. It even has the “sexy” nurses from Silent Hill 2. I know that since Half-Life 2 is set in an Eastern European country with Cyrillic writing and a lot of those locations can look the same, but I’m not just talking about the locations, I’m also talking about the art style of the Half-Life games too, not only the stuff that made it into the Half-Life games, but a lot of the concept art too. It’s like the team saw what Valve was doing and took inspiration from it. A lot of it fits the game well and has it’s own distinct spin on it, so I didn’t really mind.
Considering that 2006 was when a lot of graphically impressive games were coming out, like Gears of War, Black, Resistance: Fall of Man, and Just Cause, but the game really stands on it’s own by having an oppressive atmosphere. I know that it can look dull at times and doesn’t appeal to everyone, but the people who like their depressing looking media are probably going to get something out of this game. And even though it might grey, at least it wasn’t one of those annoying games who thinks that slapping a filter onto it to make it look grey despite the fact that it looks awful, and it’s actually part of the art style.
On a technical front, the game is surprisingly graphically impressive, but not for the way you think. The game doesn’t actually have proper lighting or shader effects, instead getting it’s look through great texture work to give off the impression of lighting, with all of the shadows being part of the textures. So despite the fact it wasn’t cutting edge and probably had a small team behind it, it shows what creativity can do when you’re a small limited team and you have to work around your limitations.
There is also some actually pretty decent level design. While the whole game is pretty linear, it doesn’t feel like the game is guiding you through some pre-determined hallway. You actually feel like you’re going through an actual location. There was only one time where I had trouble knowing where to go because the door I had to go through blended into the rest of the environment and it didn’t look different to any other door that I couldn’t access.
The game’s soundtrack also adds to the whole depressing atmosphere of the game, with a mix of IDM for it’s soundtrack that range from droning ambiance to industrial to dance, and even some classical Russian music mixed in.
The English acting though, that’s another story. I have no idea what the Russian acting was like since I didn’t listen to it, but I’m pretty sure that the way that the English acting turned out was completely by accident. From what I can tell, every single character in the English dub is done by one man, and he doesn’t even try to put on an accent let alone hide his British accent, and it really clashes with both the tone that the game is going for and the location of the game. The notes are also narrated in English too. There was even one time where he is narrating a propaganda film and it sound like he remembers that he has to have an accent half way through. The guy is clearly trying his best with what he’s been dealt.
But the worst dub, and by worst, I mean most offensive, is a flamboyant stage actor who opens a door for you, talks to you for about 30 seconds, was completely unnecessary to the plot, and immediately gets killed after he’s finished his dialogue.
On top of that, the lip sync doesn’t match what the characters are saying, and I’m willing to bet that counts for the Russian dub too despite never even hearing it, because the character movements, both actions and lip movements, are over exaggerated, adding onto the weirdness, and this is the one thing that I’m not sure was intentional or not. To watch and listen to these characters is an experience all in of it’s own. There was one character who I’m pretty sure was speaking frenetically since their performance is way off.
But the weakest part of the game is the gameplay. It’s not bad by any means, it’s just a bit awkward in places. For example, your health points only go up to 99. I don’t know if it was an engine limitation, an intentional design choice, or by that point in the development the team couldn’t change it to 100 so they were stuck with it and released it like that.
The enemies all fit the aesthetic perfectly, even if they’re heavily Silent Hill inspired. You have the previously mentioned “sexy” nurse zombies, crazed patients in straight jackets, firefighters, various zombies who range from people in military uniforms to farmers (I think), mutants, and the average people who are just trying to survive and see you as a threat. One of the enemies looks like the homeless version of Mr. Bean. It’s a weird bunch, but none of it felt out of place. Then you have the more creative enemies, like the guy who has a rotor on his back that lets him fly and the giant mutant chickens that appear out of nowhere. Yeah, it’s that type of weird.
The worst enemy in the game is the one with the flamethrower, and thank god there was only one of them. He does a lot damage really quickly. But thankfully pretty much all of the enemies have the same guns as you, so any time you’re in company with someone or something with a gun, it actually feels like a fair fight.
Thankfully there is some enemy infighting, so there are times where you can save on ammo by simply waiting for enemies to kill each other and you can pick off the ones that are left due to their depleted health.
You should also watch out for some of the cars that are scattered around some areas because they aren’t just scenery that you can hide behind. Not only do they react to being shot, but after enough hits they can explode, and can hurt you. They can hurt the enemies too, so there could end up being some situations where you might want to use the cars to your advantage.
There were also a few times where I jumped down to a lower point and I got injured despite the fact that the fall shouldn’t or even wouldn’t injure you, or at least as not as badly as the game would lead you to believe, so you might want to watch out for a few jumps that look like you can make it.
The weapon selection is a mix of guns that you would see in most First Person Shooters an a few more unique ones. You have your melee weapon, which is the wrench, your standard pistol, sub machine gun, bolt action rifle, double barrel shotgun, Flamethrower, and grenade and molotov-cocktails. Nothing that you haven’t seen before and all work pretty well. The more unique ones include the Nailgun, and the Electrogun, which is just OK.
But for some reason there are two weapon slots assigned to the exact same rifle, the only difference being that one has a scope and one doesn’t. And it’s not like the scope is useful as all, since a lot of the other guns are also effective at exactly the same range, an it takes so long to get in and out of using the scope that the enemy can either run up to you or take you by surprise, seriously injuring you or even killing you in the time you stop using the scope.
Apparently the “medicine” you pick up during the game is 95% medical grade alcohol, so throughout the game I was wondering if the whole game was happening of it was just the main character was hallucinating from chugging 190 proof alcohol.
‘You Are Empty’ seemed to have received a mostly poor reception when it was first released, at least overseas. GameSpot gave it a 1.5, which is a score associated with the word ‘Abysmal’, straight up calling it a rip-off of other shooters as Doom, Serious Sam, and Painkiller. I don’t know if I would either call this game abysmal, or a rip-off of any of the games that the review mentioned, since this game is more slow paced and focuses more on atmosphere and story than those games. It would compare it more to Silent Hill and Half-Life, which I’ve previously mentioned in this review.
Other reviews also seem to compare it games like Doom, Serious Sam, and Painkiller too, with GameSpy calling it a “mindless kill-festival”. It’s gameplay might be basic, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Common complaints include the fact that the game is ugly and runs like shit. This game came out the same year as the infamous 2006 Sonic game, was released. I know that they’re not exactly comparable, but I can guarantee that ‘You Are Empty’ got closer to what it intended than what ‘Sonic the Hedgehog got to’.
And I know that I’m playing this 15 years after it’s release with a patched version, but I still wouldn’t call it bad by any stretch. Maybe ‘rough around the edges’, but certainly not as terrible as it’s reputation will lead you to believe. It’s certainly not a game for everyone, and it definitely has problems, but it’s an enjoyable experience.
To top it all off, this game is pretty hard to find. And even if you do find it, it has some pretty intrusive DRM, preventing it from being played on more modern systems and is hard to remove. But like I mentioned earlier, thankfully someone has uploaded the game without the DRM and patched applied to it to make it more stable as well as making it easy to get up and running.
Apparently there is even a remake happening, but I’m skeptical about it though, but I have no idea if it is even ever going to come out. It would be neat to see a version of the game that is more stable and works on more modern systems. Plus it could add in the alternate ending that was cut from the final game or even some of the content that are still in the files of the game, such as enemies, weapons, and even whole levels, but never made it into the final release of the game.
‘You Are Empty’ is quite a unique experience that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else, so if it the concept looks appealing to you and you don’t mind a game that’s rough around the edges, I would highly recommend giving it a try.
yolister
1 year ago