You Are Empty, a game by the Russians, depicting the Russians is one that appears good at first glance, but it takes only moments for the illusion to wear off. The game commences with a bizarre yet artistically depicted intro formed as a collage of stop motion videos and silhouettes depicting a soldier’s life in the post world war era of the Soviets. He’s off to work when he gets struck by a vehicle, only to wake up in what looks like a medical facility. He is attacked by patients in straightjackets and head clamps and nurses who have an acute resemblance to a Pamela Anderson zombie without makeup. Escaping from the hospital with a revolver which is found lying around along with a large spanner, he leaves the building only to be attached by a fireman with bloodshot eyes and an axe. Reaching an outer office building in this deserted medical campus he enters and office where he finds a note taking about a drug that was administered to the patients and this is where he is attacked by an old scientist wearing a gas mask. And this is how the game progresses, abstract videos that make no sense what so ever, throngs of brainless opponent clones launching themselves at the protagonist with no real purpose as he aimlessly trudges through level after level finding bits of paper supposedly revealing a story and meeting a couple of people sane enough to share intel with him. It doesn’t take long for someone to figure out the story which couldn’t have been more cliché. A Communist Russian empire in the early 50’s where a hospital’s denizens are subjected to a drug that makes them into superhuman soldiers, but of course something goes wrong (or had to) and before you know it, the hospital, then the whole town gets infested with the virus and Mr. Soldier here, the unintentional test subject has to get to the bottom of it before the virus activates in his blood stream, fighting off every Tom Dick and Harry that was playing their civic role in Soviet society before the catastrophe. Despite being bland in every way, the game doesn’t fall short of its target variety ranging from middle aged skinny farmers wives and the toothless elderly with double barrel shotguns, Russian ballerinas and air borne assault units with dual propeller blades whirring in the air and above all giant featherless raptor-chicken hybrids being bred as an experiment by Soviet scientists. Nevertheless, the swarms of enemy clones are only visually different and at the most either hack at you or have a firearm with no intelligence whatsoever. Even the weapons though nothing outrageous are amusing to play with. The Communists have left behind the usual pistols, shotguns and submachine guns to play with, apart form the awe inspiring hydraulic nail-gun and Molotov cocktails (petrol in empty beer bottles with burning rags at the end). The games visuals are 2 years old and probably because the developers didn’t meet the expected deadline, hence the game should run smoothly with crispy visuals on older rigs. The aesthetics of the game suit the premise i.e. a USSR industrial colony filled with mutated people, dull and boring to the core. From the hospital to the industrial zones, there isn’t much to gorge at because the soviets back in their golden days didn’t really have spectacular towns for their blue collar workforce. There is exceptional detail in the environments with plenty of socialist propaganda, operatic scores of Russian opera played here and there and posters in their native language symbolically exhibiting Stalin and the hammer and sickle. The graphics are quite static in nature with no dynamic lighting and shadows, animated environments or visual ambience that would depict the feel of a zombie infested neighborhood. It does however have a basic physics engine with rolling barrels and destructible furniture, but nothing like Half Life-2 or Penumbra where physics was put to practical use rather than a visual gimmick. The sound too is limited to grunts and cackles with the occasional voice over for some of the NPC’s. Music score isn’t too bad yet not worth mentioning either. A final verdict: You Are Empty is truly worth no more than the cost of a pirated PC DVD. A pastime when there is no good game to play all over and nothing better to do. It is uninteresting and brain dead in every aspect considering the standards set by some first person shooters with no real premise or purpose of existence unless if one considers the half baked story it claims to have.