E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy review

I love weird things. The absurd and the surreal are always welcome additions to my life, and I tend to gravitate towards these things. Bizarre speculative fiction worlds filled with trans-humanism and rich histories involving mushroom people and fungus based science are the basis to some of my favorite books. My favorite moments in games are non-moments for most people, little nods toward a larger unspoken world, like the creepy watchers in that one world of Mario Galaxy 2.

So of course E.Y.E. caught my… eye. It’s a blend of steam punk, cyber punk, and a dystopian future all wrapped up in an FPS/RPG hybrid with multiple solutions to problems. How could I resist? I had my fond memories of Deus Ex to fuel the fire, and by the time I started the game I was excited for the experience. The entire game was summed up for me in character creation, not that I knew this at the time. You are presented with an assortment of skill modifiers, none of which are explained to you in anyway. So, with no understanding of how it will impact the game, you spend your points and build your character. I can tell you now that each stat determines how powerful or effective various powers and abilities will be, including those researched or acquired later on. I also know, by cheating and reading the wiki, that where you spend points affects some powers you are granted by, essentially, determining your characters class.

So... Many... Things...

Despite the confusing process of making my character, I figured it would all come together with time. After all, I would just level and spend points later on as I learned more. I jumped in feet first hoping for a strange and interesting story to drive me through this world. Hours later and I could certainly confirm the strange part. Otherwise I had no idea what the hell was going on.

This is a realized world with terms and rules all its own, so as everyone talks about the different factions and “the metastreumonic force” it can all get a bit overwhelming. That metastreumonic force, by the way, is apparently causing strange monsters to appear in the world that like to kill and eat everything, although the hows and the whys behind this are a bit cloudy for me. All I know is that I learned how to make one explode out of an enemy’s chest for fun. To make matters worse, the translation then comes along and ensures this won’t be an easy to follow thread. It’s rough, to say the least, with plenty of awkward phrasing and odd word choices. I will be totally honest with you, I had no idea what was happening most of the time. To be really honest with you, I still don’t.

We can't stop here, this is metastreumonic force based monster country!

“Well, I may not understand anything that’s happening in this world,” I thought, “and have no idea what motivates these people, but I still have gameplay to look forward to!” So I plowed forward, resolute to hack stuff and approach situations in unique ways. Like a filthy and murky wishing well, the experience is clouded with frustration speckled with brief shining moments of brilliance. Except not so much brilliance, more just some pocket change with patchy algae growth.

One such patch is player choice, at least I think it is. See, the game has a sort of permadeath system in place. When you die, your character is resurrected through some system that exists in the world. This is paired with an autosave function and no quicksave. Basically, if you do something or make a choice in the game, you are married to that choice. I’m pretty sure that choices I have made through dialogues with various characters have impacted how levels, and the game, have progressed. I just can’t load a previous instance to compare the choices to know just how significant these choices and changes were. I love this because it makes these choices matter. Every other game I can load and save constantly and in doing so remove all meaning from the choices. The only problem is that in EYE, most of of the choices were all about things that still don’t make any god damned sense to me. Still, it feels awesome to have to own up to the choices you make and how they shape how a level will play out.

Run out of resurrections and this guy lets you know it was all a dream.

The levels are all massive and sprawling, often existing as empty and dilapidated city blocks for me to get lost in. I’ll bumble my way through encounters to reach objectives, then get told to head back again and somehow get lost returning from where I came. This process is repeated until a screen pops up letting me know I finished the mission, and really makes sure I know I finished the mission by crashing to my desktop. That last part is the most frustrating of the bugs present in the game, but it seems like its at least rare for someone to encounter it with my frequency. Overall level design is a series of massive spaces bathed in the grey/brown palette with plenty of murky fog on the edges. Getting lost is inevitable, but it does make bumping into baddies a bit more exciting this way, and bumping into enemies is when you get to bust out all the various abilities and powers that make this game so interesting.

Choice is really what this game is all about, and it’s also what is responsible for every shining moment you will experience. When you create your character, it has nothing to do with looks, like I mentioned earlier its all about the modifiers that will impact your play style. It’s about the choices you make in the levels that impact how those maps play out and how faction alliances shift throughout the experience. But it’s how you level up that will determine the meat of the experience.

Yer plan is OK I guess, but may I suggest another?

You have access to CyberTech, which are cybernetic enhancements or straight up replacements of organic bits, like a shiny new CyberBrain. Once you install one of these enhancements you can upgrade these at anytime by spending money on them, which in turn raises their levels. These additions to your body improve and alter your play style in various ways. Want to hack better? New brain. Shoot better? Get yourself a Cyber Weapon Interface. Be a better Psionic badass? Install yourself a Psi Decuplator. These don’t even cover implants you can install, which allow such abilities as cloaking, night vision, and enhanced armor. Both of these categories either grant the player abilities and powers or augment other categories of abilities and powers.

Don’t feel like gunning someone down? Then perhaps you will use your various psionic powers to handle the situation. Through these powers you can change dropped enemy weapons and ammo into health, create clones of yourself to help you in combat, infect enemies with madness and create chaos among enemy ranks, cause a monster to burst out of the body of an enemy and attack everything it can see, and several other powers. These powers can be purchased and taught to you by a faction member in the world hub, and others are acquired by playing the game and the choices you make. These powers all come at a price, however, often in the form of the force you are wielding costing some of your own health, being thrown back by the sheer power you are channeling, or by being mauled by the monster you created. Which is why I mostly stuck to hacking.

Plenty of upgradable options.

Hacking was my bread and butter throughout the game experience. At first I had no idea how to do it, and basically ended every hacking encounter either dead or wounded with my vision impaired by the counter hack used against me. The process involves uploading viruses in an attempt to reduce the targets CyberHP before the same happens to you. You have an attack virus, a masking virus, a scanning virus, a shielding virus, and an overflow virus. Eventually I found a rhythm of what hacking skills to use to be more effective, or I just dumped enough points into it so it didn’t matter; again, I’m just not totally sure thanks to the impenetrable language and knowledge barrier. Regardless, it gave me access to some pretty sweet powers. I was possessing my enemies and scouting ahead or just gunning dudes down with sentry turrets, turning enemies into my hacked attack buddies, outright turning off their brains and killing them, or leaching power from them like some kind of remote access vampire.

Its almost overwhelming the number of ways you can enhance, augment, and modify your character. Every situation you come across, with the exception of computer terminals that can only be resolved by hacking, can be approached in a variety of ways. It feels good to build yourself up into the problem solving engine of your choosing, and I doubt I even saw all the different ways I can customize my character, I certainly didn’t touch on everything I experimented with here. The fact that I got so excited every time I found a new addition or ability for my character kept me going despite the fact I had no damn idea what was happening. It’s a real shame that using all these powers can be as convoluted as they are.

I saw this screen a whole lot.

It’s true, that handling these encounters with enemies is filled with options, but those options are buried under several convoluted menu screens. What this boils down to is, if you happen to see enemies before they see you, you can take the time to trawl these menus and employ some of your various abilities. More often then not, they will see you regardless of how hidden you think you are, and you just keep shooting them until the problem is solved. You can place some powers in a quick selection wheel to limit those to one menu, but you can only fit so many on that wheel. It feels like your being robbed when your limiting the number of skills and powers you can use in a reasonably speedy fashion to a small fraction of the total available to you.

To be fair, when I manage to find situations where I can use my abilities, I enjoy the experience. Hacking dudes and aspects of the environment is deviously good fun, and it’s always funny when your opposition hacks back and your vision is filled with a laughing smiley face. One memorable moment for me was when I found a particularly stubborn door that I was determined to hack. Failure was taking its toll on my health, and eventually I just decided to give up after one last attempt. My last attempt left me with that screen filling smiley face I mentioned, and as I moved away from the door to attempt and hack myself to fix it, I fell into a hole the smiley was obscuring. What followed was a frenzied nightmare of combat with a gang of monsters while a massive smiley face laughed at me and made it impossible to see anything. It was terrible and awesome. I wish the game had more of these moments, but sadly it almost always devolves into using the biggest gun you can as fast as you can without other powers or abilities coming into play. The game never frowns on your choices, but I kind of wish it was friendlier for the non-gun related options.

Also saw this screen a whole lot.

I generally hate tutorial levels in games, but E.Y.E. is a massive argument for why they can be important additions. I tried to figure this game out, but it’s stuffed to the gills with ways to enhance and augment your character that all exist down spirals of menus and in game locations. Eventually, after consulting various forums, wikis, and twenty or so tutorial videos, I came to the same conclusion I did for my combat problems. Get the biggest gun and shoot more bullets. I tried to be a cyborg with the power to puppet master hapless rubes, but it just wasn’t worth it. These abilities don’t fix the level design issues, the enemies all have binoculars for eyes and believe the best approach to combat is to get close enough to hug me. The game buries you with options, but using them will just frustrate you and get you killed.

I really wanted to like this game. I still do, as it’s just a few player mods away from being a great game. Fix the enemy AI, centralize the character upgrades from being spread out everywhere to being in just one set of menus, and perhaps add a waypoint system with a minimap. Suddenly all those options are fun and valid, just fix some of the translation problems and baby you got a game goin’.

I really love the random people you can find and talk to.

This is one of those flawed games that I hope is destined to cobble together a really loyal and dedicated fanbase. One that will keep playing the game, modding it, and genuinely pouring love into the thing until its better then it was before. Like Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption, this is a game with more ambition then it had room for, but that doesn’t mean a few people can’t come along and make it better then it was. To polish all those unique aspects of the experience until it really glows the way it should. I really like this game in some ways: when it worked, it worked well. It’s a shame that right now it’s buried under the weight of everything it tried to be. I can’t tell you how much I want this game to get that cult following so that it can get better, so for all you masochists and gamers who love flawed gems that need some TLC, get this and fix it for me. The rest of you should stick to less ambitious but less flawed experiences in cyberpunk dystopias.