E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy
E.Y.E is a Cyberpunk RPG/FPS produced by French developers
Streum On Studio using the Source Engine and released in 2011. It's currently available on Steam for $9.99. If you want to skip my nonsense and just try it yourself there's also a demo at the storefront.
I wish I could tell you where E.Y.E takes place, when or even what the plot is. You start the game having just woken up in a cave after dying or being hit on the head or something and it seems like you spend the rest of the gaming in a daze from it.
The tutorial brings you up to speed on the basics while you drag yourself out of the cave and make your way back to your headquarters which is located in..somewhere..
That's the first thing you gotta let go of. There game never gives you any kind of grounding in a place or time period. At least not that I could discern. Some of it's supposed to be on Earth but it's not clear what. I tried muddling through the ingame archives and the website but it's clear the developers purposefully left everything vague so as to make exploring the game more interesting.
Frankly the lack of information hurts as much as helps because it keeps you from being absorbed in the character or story. I was also never given a reason or purpose for anything I did in the game. You're basically just a foot soldier in a futuristic mercenary guild. I think your guild is called E.Y.E. Theres a competitor guild called Jian, nameless roving street gangs and a policing government called the Secreta. That's about all I can tell you about the story.
As you receive missions you're given options on who to agree with be it a thug begging for his life, your conniving mentor or the boss of your faction. These choices will affect your missions you're given like investigating a Martian mining operation that's gone silent or killing a group of street hackers and stealing their data. It gives you some legroom to breath but it's not quite as verbose as games like Stalker or Elder Scrolls.
Your character and equipment is where the game really shines and where choices can be difficult depending on the sort of character you see yourself playing.
Character development has three separate aspects each with many paths.
You have your basic RPG character stats made up of things you value most like strength, agility, endurance, accuracy, and several others like hacking which I'll get into in a second. each level you gain nets you points to place in each category.
On the next page you've got Cybernetic enhancements you can purchase and level up like a titanium plated skull and a balancing implant that assists with aim. These cost a great deal of money but can be well worth the price.
Lastly on the character development side of things there's research. As you play through the game, usually when defeating high powered enemies you'll find attache cases containing prototypes and specimens. You can pay a team of scientists to research these items for ways they may benefit you like cybernetic enhancements and methods. The research is very costly and does not always pan out but anything that will speed along your progress is gonna be money well spent.
Outside of character stat advancement you can also purchase special abilities and weapon unlocks. A free one I'll give you since I had a rough time of it is Cloak. Buy it the minute you can afford it. Like all special abilities Cloak costs PSI power like mana. These abilities are exactly what you imagine and if you're at all familiar with Crysis you'll understand why having them is so important.
While some of the starting weapons I actually preferred through most of the game there's many weapons and a couple support droids you can purchase and unlock. Once unlocked you can equip and re-equip these at any time throughout any mission. Guns ranging from high powered pistols to sniper rifles and machine guns. You purchase a sentry droid and a mobile sidekick droid who follows you around defending against foes.
Don't ever imagine yourself invincible though. Keep it light and keep moving. Use cloak whenever possible. I've been ambushed by 20 or more enemies at the worst possible moments.
The gameplay itself is straight forward. You join a large map, in most cases a cityscape ranging about 10 city blocks in size and are given various objectives. Sometimes to kill someone, sometimes to support a group and sometimes to sabotage or control a piece of hardware. What sets this game apart from most is your PSI abilities which gives you a large edge in combat and hacking.
Hacking comes in several forms. You can hack something to make it work for you, possess which means to take control personally or you can destroy something. Hacking is central to this game. It's very nearly impossible to play this game with out doing any of it. What you have is up to you.
You can hack anything almost, even people. I most often turn enemy turrets in my favor but when it suits me I may hack ATM's for loot and even once took control of a gang member and walked him off the side of building for pestering me a bit too much. Still feel a little guilty about that. Hacking happens in realtime. you have a set amount of attack power, defense power and Cyber health.
You have the option of attacking, lowering their defense or attack or raising your attack power and defense. It all happens quite fast. You must react and choose wisely otherwise they may counter-attack and you do not want to be hacked. There's nothing worse than being both humiliated and left defenseless by a damned ATM.
Once you've killed all the baddies you're told to and completed your masters dirty work you'll rewarded in money. Lots of money. You once you've blow your cash on upgrades it's time to get right back into the fray.
I finished E.Y.E shortly after midnight last night. It took me longer to complete than I'd have liked. I'm disappointed by the fact that I'm glad to be done with it and ready to move on to something else. My experience with E.Y.E is difficult to describe other than to say when I went to uninstall it found myself not quite ready to do so. Whether you enjoy it or not there's so much content to E.Y.E it's impossible to finish in one play through.
After much patching E.Y.E appears to be nearly bug free, buuuut it does have some problems I gotta warn you about.
Firstly the dialog is like watching a very very poorly dubbed foreign film. You get the general gist of what people are saying but most of the time you'll be left with a quizzical expression on your face after a conversation. I haven't foggiest idea what the purpose of my last mars mission was. It was fun mostly?
Secondly both your temple and missions can feel empty most of the time. No one has any real personality. Your whole base is made of us guys in 3 or 4 standard armor types. The enemies in particular can often get repetitive. It's very never enough to make you quit but when the same soldier guy attacks you for the bizillionth time you'll be ready for a smoke break. A long one.
Lastly and the worst offense really. Around the fifth mission the difficultly ramped up by like a 100%. I literally had to quit the main campaign and do a bunch of side missions to gear of my character enough to move forward.
I don't really want to give this game a numerical score. Personally it be some like a
7.5/10
But specifically I want to give advice to anyone considering a purchase of E.Y.E. The character building and RPG elements are the core of this game not "perks" you'd find in most FPS. If you're expecting story or a corridor shooter you can cruise through go somewhere else. Additionally I want to mention that this game was originally built for co-op. Unfortunately I couldn't find anyone available to play with so I had to judge this game on it's single player merits. I would suggest this game to anyone with a core group of friends heavily into co-op.
