E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy Review

Today I'll be reviewing EYE: Divine Cybermancy. EYE is a weird bird indeed. It is a cyberpunk FPS with heavy role playing aspects and takes much, much of it's influence and structure from Half-Life 2. To be honest I don't even know where to begin here. Eye is such a trippy and strange game you don't really know what to make out of it even after you've seen all there is to see. I guess you can still call it a game since you shoot guys and run around levels but the story is almost surreal. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Eye immensely. It was one of the best purchases I have ever made on Steam. Eye however, is broken in many more ways than one. Let me explain. 

The way levels play out in Eye is kind of like an open world experience. You roam around a very, very large source engine levels and kill everything you find while completing various objectives. The difficulty of the game is largely up to you. You can tweak anything from the accuracy of enemies to detection range. Personally I love toying with the spawn ratio so I'm constantly flooded with hordes of soft, soft flesh just waiting to be torn asunder by my blade. And boy, when it rains, IT REALLY RAINS. Gore in this game is hilarious. When you hit a limb with a gun or a blade it flies off and rolls around on the ground in a comical manner just as if it was a plastic bottle on a street corner.

Sadly though, Eye is flawed beyond repair in many ways. Old school RPG stat tracking (in the form of a pen and paper RPG game) does not and will never work in an FPS environment. Casual gamers (at least the ones who dare touch this game) will find it confusing and veterans will find it cumbersome. The levels can also drag on for far too long and the texture quality can be complete crap at times. Lighting effects look good though. However, the game is evidently poorly optimized despite being on the source engine (which was built for PC).

Combat is really a modern take off of 90's twitch shooters. The guns are powerful, fast firing, and have a ton of recoil. The only negative to the weapons is that accuracy is a large issue and hitting your targets from a distance can be a huge problem unless you packed an inventory-eating sniper or pistol. Oh, and by the way I'm not going to even mention stealth or hacking in this review because they effectively serve no purpose. That's right, they wasted valuable asset creation time on stealth and hacking in a largely run and gun game with shit AI. Those frenchies sure know how to rustle our jimmies! Oh, and multiplayer (except the awesomeness that is co-op) is shit too.

Overall, EYE is a fascinating game with too many elements to talk about in a blog review. I highly recommend it if it's on sale. Grab it with some friends and you will have a hell of a Friday night playing co-op.

Epic Vids Episode 1

Here's your funny video of the week. I'll try to upload them every Friday.

Battlefield 3 for Free!

I am so fucking stoked for this. It looks like EA is giving another game away on Origin for FREE. Yes, until June 3rd you can literally receive a copy on your account just by using Origin.


EA is trying to make this seem like an act of charity but it really does come off as a desperate attempt to get people to use Origin and sell DLC at the same time. But who's complaining? I just got an awesome triple-A FPS for free and all it really took is me reinstalling Origin. It's not like Origin is bad, isn't it? Whatever it does it Steam probably does it too, except EA at least has working customer support. The only downside is that Origin is extremely limited in what it does, unlike Steam which is more akin to a Swiss army knife.

So if you're looking for some summer fun give this offer a try, you may like it. And if you're one of those internet conspiracy theorists that say Origin is spyware then you really need to get your priorities straight. Steam does the exact same thing, maybe even worse since nobody checks the user agreement because "OmG 1T'Z FR0M G4B3N!!!". At least EA is whipped into line by hordes of angry gamers.

Go on. Give it a try. You know they won't do it again.

Toribash Review

Toribash is an odd one. It's a free physics based fighting simulator. In fact I believe it is the only one of it's kind. Let me explain as this game is incredibly complicated and unique.

Toribash puts you in control of a mannequin that has to kill another mannequin a la fighting game. The interesting thing about it though, is that it's a simulation. Fighting games aren't meant to be realistic in any sense of the word. Toribash lets you map out each and every muscle movement in full 3D space including your hands. This lets you slay your opponent in an almost infinite number of ways. This makes for some interesting situations when both players are trying to struggle and execute each other at the same time.

As you can see I'm completely rotten at it. Toribash is an art unto it's self. It has quite a steep learning curve and is almost impossible to master. Mapping out each and every possible movement AND predicting where your opponent will strike is almost impossible. Multiplayer matches almost always lead to a bloody struggle and a disappointing draw. This is where Toribash fails. It gives us too much freedom and too much margin for error. You see, most players can't comprehend where each and every muscle will land leading to a disappointing mess of tangled arms and blood. Furthermore you can just memorize the executions and put them into play frame by frame. However, they are all highly unfeasible as your opponent moves just as you do so vital limbs may be hard to catch.

All in all Toribash is a great game, especially for free. It is quite fun if you can get the hang of it and is quite quirky. However, it may prove to be to complicated for some users and for that the most I'll give it is a neutral rating. If they make it more accessible to new players by adding in tutorials that aren't complete shit than maybe I'll change it to neutral-positive.

Hello World

Hello everyone. Welcome to my blog. You can expect to have a good time here and maybe learn a thing or two about culture (or counterculture). I will mostly focus on game reviews or album reviews but sometimes I'll throw something else out. I'm trying to go into the field of game design and I love art and anything else that shows emotion or symbolism. Enjoy your stay and have fun.