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.
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