E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy Review

E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy

Developed and Published by Streum On Studio

Available from Steam: £14.99

“It’s true that I killed my Mentor... and yet, I am not his murderer”: That first standout line spoken by the player character perfectly sums up E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy. The entire game is a long procession of “what the hell is that supposed to mean?” moments, punctuated by some really rather satisfying running and gunning... and occasionally slashing. 

E.Y.E. is an FPS very much in the mould of the original Deus Ex. The dystopian cyberpunk setting, the ability to upgrade your character’s abilities through augmentation and the effect of stats as modifiers upon your actions in the world, speed of movement, damage delivered, weapon accuracy, etc, all, for better or worse, if not directly lifted then heavily inspired by Ion Storm’s magnum opus.

The strange assortment of quotes on the loading screens is a nice touch.

However, where Deus Ex was and RPG that played like a shooter, E.Y.E is very much a shooter with RPG elements. Thankfully, despite all the weirdness, E.Y.E. works very well as a shooter. The ranged weaponry has a very retro, chunky feel to them. The guns feel very deliberate, which gives the impression of real weight. The effect of recoil on aim, the sounds of the weaponry and even the animation of player’s hand being wrenched back by recoil, all mean that even the basic pistol never feels like a peashooter.

Okay...

Unfortunately the combat isn’t all great. The game allows access a small selection of melee weapons beyond the default, last resort sword, but there’s never really any reason to use them in anger. The melee combat just doesn’t feel right, something that’s often a problem in first person games. Enemies don’t react to being hit, and the weapon swinging animations really don’t inspire any feeling of being embroiled in a hand to hand battle to the death. This is especially apparent when using the conceptually badass dual katanas. There is the option to carry a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other. This initially seems like a cool idea, until it becomes clear that it’s just the worst of both worlds; you can’t aim with the pistol nor can you block with the sword. Incidentally, blocking bullets whilst you run for cover is the only real use for the melee weapons during the heavy combat segments. 

With the combat covered, so ends the only part of E.Y.E that makes any sense. The game is clearly set in a cyberpunk dystopia, this much is obvious through the huge neon signs and urban decay evident in some of the level design, and the ubiquity of the use of the word ‘cyber’ as a prefix: cyberlegs, cyberarms, cyberbrain, you get the idea. The game’s main ‘minigame’, the hacking mechanic. Playing like a turned based RPG, issuing commands to reduce your enemy’s stats, most importantly HP, you can hack pretty much anything that has electronics in it. ATMs, Turrets, Doors, even some enemy soldiers can be remotely hacked, possessed, or destroyed. This may sound like it makes perfect sense, and it does, until the first time you possess an ATM or a console and just sit there, functionless. Even stranger is the fact that the other side to the ability to hack anything is the fact that they can counter-hack you if you fail. Getting your mind hacked by an ATM is embarrassing, but being killed by a door’s viral counter-attack is just plain horrible.

Cyberdemon,  is that you?

The bizarreness of the hacking mechanic can’t hold a candle to the story and the specifics of the story however. It’s impossible to understand what is actually going on. The relation between you and the factions seems to change from level to level. The people you were fighting in one stage will become allies in the next. Characters will also die then reappear in later levels. The dialogue just makes things even more complicated. You can often make responses that have no relation to what you were just told. By the same token, NPCs will often respond to questions with nonsense. The weirdness of the dialogue system was crystallised for me when I got an achievement for apparently talking someone into killing himself, I had no idea that that was what I was doing!

All of this comes back to the “what the hell?!” at the core of the game. I normally feel fairly comfortable dealing with the unconventional and obtuse, and can usually tell when something is doing it on purpose, or when it’s just badly put together. E.Y.E is an exception. I really can’t tell if it’s doing all of this deliberately or not. The environments are really well put together and atmospheric, the gun combat is fun, and the elements like the hacking mechanic are well realised. There are other nice touches, like being able to return to the main hub area to buy unlocks at any time, or being able to research new skill bonuses and items after picking up certain items from downed enemies. All of these things point to competent design. Yet other elements seem like someone on the team went on a weeklong bender, slowing only to watch Blade Runner, play Deus Ex and Quake, and then at some point, their body and brain worked in concert to vomit the whole mess out and then somehow that became the rest of the game. Having said all this, with the recurring mentions of madness and insanity, there’s just enough strength, between these and the good parts of the game to force me to give pause and wonder if the nonsensical stuff is meant to be some sort of commentary on insanity and though it’s badly implemented, it is nevertheless deliberate. That’s the problem; E.Y.E works a little too well at its best to totally write the weirdness off as being the accidental product of shoddy design.

All of this aside, E.Y.E does have its weaknesses beyond just being odd. The game uses the Source engine in order to pull off some really big environments. Something that it does very well, the environments are usually well realised, and have some great atmosphere. The problem with this is that the environments feel needlessly big. The levels can be quite sparse, with long periods of nothing happening, as there are no NPCs to be found. This combines with a low movement speed, further compounded if you take a heavy loadout, to mean that long periods can be spent walking from place to place doing nothing. Another problem can come from getting lost, levels can often look very bland, atmospheric yes, but bland nevertheless, so it can be hard to work out where to go, especially as levels can involve a lot of backtracking, and there is no map. Even more annoyingly, it can be hard to work out what is interactive and what isn’t. One level had me lost for twenty minutes because the door I was meant to open looked like all the inoperable doors throughout the rest of the level. In the end, I only worked out what to do after resorting to running along the walls hitting the enter key over and over. You shouldn’t have to be channelling the spirit of looking for hidden doors Doom to make required progress in a game from 2011.

This is all especially damning when you compare the level design of E.Y.E to the poster child for Source: Half Life 2. HL2 had its fair share of large environments, but it at least had the strength of design to make the path forward clear without looking like it was spoon feeding you. Admittedly, E.Y.E is a less linear proposition, but it’s far from an open world sandbox, and it wouldn’t have killed them to make the paths to the goals a little clearer.

With HL2 in mind, much of E.Y.E feels like it would have been better off being a good mod, rather than a fully fledged game. The graphics, for instance, are far from bad, but they definitely show off the indie resources. Moreover, the game’s foibles would be less of a problem in the context of a mod rather than a standalone game. Of course, being an indie title does impose certain limitations, but given the quality of indie titles in recent years, and the ingenuity that has been shown in relation to making the best of limited resources, I feel that the days of simply overlooking problems because a game is independently made are over.

Faux product placement?

I really enjoy some parts of E.Y.E, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the gun handling was some of the best I’ve seen in a modern FPS in quite a while. Whilst other aspects, like the hacking mechanic and the ability to choose your own loadout of armour (heavy, medium, light) and weapons (as much as you can fit in the inventory slots with a generous weight limit) give different options of how to approach a situation. However, it’s just a little too nonsensical and a little too frustrating to be called anything other than alright. If the game was a straight FPS, then the weirdness would be more tolerable, but with the involvement of the RPG elements comes a much greater emphasis on story and setting. If it’s going to have these things, then the story has to at least be framed in a way that means it can be followed, even if it is odd, and it’s in this requirement that E.Y.E really falls down. It’s far from a failure, and if it’s on sale I’d say check it out, just to see how strange a game can get, as the shooting is fun and it isn’t fundamentally broken in any way. But that’s the only possible recommendation I can give it.

6/10.