Amy may not be terrible, you may just be terrible at playing it.

Well we can't all be Resident Evil and Silent Hill...

Anticipated downloadable survival horror title Amy came out last week on the Xbox marketplace and was almost instantly taken to task by reviewers (24% on gamerankings and a 34% metacritic at the time of this post) with terms like "broken, buggy, and unfinished" dominating reviews and message boards. With it's release on The Playstation Network this week, Amy's official Facebook page posted the follow response to the criticisms:

 "We believe this is part of the survival experience we tried to build as we wanted the game to be challenging.However, we actively listen to the community and comments and hence recommend the non-hard core gamers to launch the game in EASY mode (in the settings) for now.This will give them a much more pleasant and smoother experience, especially as the checkpoints are scarce."

I can respect the fact the developer (or whoever runs Amy's Facebook page) doesn't want to say that the game is bad, especially so soon after release. However, to put the blame on the people playing, not to mention paying for the game, is a poor way of addressing the issue. 

Something else that bugged me was this sentence: "Indeed, AMY has been #1 in the daily XBLA charts since its launch in all major territories and players have rated it between 3 and 4 out of 5 on XBLA and more than 4 on the PSN despite the controversy." I'm assuming the "controversy" they are speaking of is the majority of bad reviews and the fan reaction to this. Researching further I could only find one decent review from Austrian gaming site GamingXP (still a 76/100) and less than a handful of people on message boards saying they enjoy the game despite it's flaws. Look, not every game can be critically under-appreciated and yet find a strong fan base (i.e. Deadly Premonition). Sometimes a game is just bad.