Amerzone was designed and produced by the same guys who made the popular Syberia games. Amerzone, though in a shared universe with Syberia, is a separate story about different characters.
On the iPad, panning tends to be clunky, but there is an inverse movement option. Most location nodes are featureless, and when moving to the next node, sometimes the game turns the view to a different direction without an accompanying animation to signal that this has happened. The movement animations that were provided often give little sense of what distance was travelled or what turns were made. This makes navigation difficult. A document map of a single area can be acquired, but this map does not mark current location, shows no landmarks, and gives no indication of where the game's location nodes are, making the map a useless Rorschach blotch.
There are several multi-page documents for the player character to collect, and the interface for reading them is primitive. The player can only page forward through a document, so if he accidentally skips ahead a page or wants to go back to review something, he must go back to the beginning. There also seems to be no way to close a document other than to page completely through it to the end.
The puzzles are simple, even simpler than those in Syberia, but they aren't always fair. After having every interactable in the game marked with a special cursor and being promised by the tutorial help that this would be done, the speaker poles in the marshlands were not marked in this manner.
Gameplay mostly consists of wandering through monotonous areas looking for an object to collect or a control with which to interact. Most nodes have nothing of interest in them and were included simply to increase travel time and assist the player in getting lost. For people claiming that the point of the game is the joy of exploring, that sounds like a fanboi attempt to justify the game's limitations, weaknesses, and failures. If the point of the game is simply exploring the environment, then why didn't we get an environment worth exploring? Even after solving all the puzzles in Myst, it's fun to spend a little time revisiting the prettier locations and just soaking up the ambiance. Each time I left an area in Amerzone, it was with a sigh of relief to be escaping that dreary place.
Amerzone's graphics are dated, though this is mostly apparent with character models and some creature models such as the crocodiles. The graphics are also grainy, dimly-lit, drab, and bleak. Amerzone is in dire need of something beautiful or appealing such as the Art Deco architecture and automatons of Syberia. Some of Amerzone's creature designs are creative and well rendered, but we don't get to spend nearly enough time with them.
The story revolves around a species of bird which has the ludicrous reproductive strategy of producing the entire next generation within a single egg that must be cleansed with a special potion in some tribal ceremony. Talk about a recipe for extinction! This story is revealed in the game's opening scenes through an interminable exposition dump via multiple, lengthy documents and via speeches from NPCs who die or disappear after expounding. The rest of the "story" is simply carrying out a fetch quest.
In short, this is a tedious game with dull graphics, a preposterous story, and no real puzzles. The only things it has to recommend it are some interesting creatures that look like they belong in a science fiction setting, good sound effects, and surprisingly stirring music. If you have not yet played Syberia, don't prejudge it by this game; if you have already played Syberia, Amerzone suffers by comparison.