So today I took a gamble and picked up E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, because it looked interesting. And boy, am I glad I did.

The level of ambition these ten guys have gone for is outstanding and, in my opinion, companies with 20 times the budget and man power would be unable (or perhaps they are just unwilling) to recreate the controls and scope of this project.

Aesthetically, I love it. It actually reminds me a tad bit of Chaos from WAR40k, mostly due to some of the armor, and Deus Ex, in terms of the gameplay. Overall graphics wise, it's nothing to write home about, but not bad by any means.

Gameplay-wise, it's phenomenal. Non-linear levels, with different ways of doing your missions. Quite a bit of customization as well, with research, cybertech, actions (psi force, cyber control, drones, etc), numerous weapons and three different armor types (All changeable via the armory), a fairly good hacking system, etc.

Downside, there's a few typo's here and there, not TOO much of an issue as far as I'm concerned. Some other bugs with the AI acting up, as well as sometimes still being followed after cloaking (though I haven't experienced it myself). There's also a problem causing crashes on 32-bit systems. The dev's have said that they will be fixing them all though.


It's ~$18 on Steam. A great deal in my opinion.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/91700/

There's also multiplayer, co-op, and local co-op, which is always a plus to have.

So, has anyone else picked this up yet? I'm really looking forward to see how well this game does, and what the dev's do next.

How's the single player campaign? Will one miss out much of the game if one ignore the multiplayer aspect of the game?

I haven't touched multiplayer yet at all. I'm running through the campaign myself, and I'm strongly enjoying it. It's a good bit like Deus Ex, so perhaps I'm biased in that regard. Storywise, it's interesting, but hasn't QUITE grabbed me yet. It's odd though, and I like odd.

Here's the background:

As a member of the strange secret society E.Y.E, you wake up after a fight in which your fellow teammates were killed. E.Y.E, an armed branch of the Secreta Secretorum is attempting a coup against the all-powerful Federation, a coalition of several worlds and planets that rule with an iron fist.

To complicate matters, E.Y.E itself is plagued with its own internal conflicts between the Jian faction and the Culter faction, to which you belong. Your loyalties are torn between Commander Rimanah, your superior and the chief of the Secreta who is a separatist with an unstoppable ambition, and the "Mentor" your friend and instructor. The "Mentor" tries at all costs to unite the two rival factions. In doing so, you are thrust into the middle of a fratricidal war frought with political conspiracies and quests for power in which different groups and megacorporations are implicated.

These troubles set the stage for an attack by an unknown force bent on destroying humankind.

It looks interesting and the spec requirements very tame (to the point that I think my laptop could handle it). Is there a retail version available, by any chance?

I don't think so. They are indie developers though, so my guess would be paying for box's, box art, discs, etc, would be way out of their budget.

Yeah I like it so far too, with just a few minor annoyances: a lot of the game is incomprehensible unless you sit through a load of irritating tutorial videos, your headquarters are WAY too large and it takes ages to run from one place to another, and the pace isn't what it should be. Apart from that, yeah, it's a lovely game.

I downloaded it today, too. I've such a soft spot for cyberpunk, that the instant I saw those Blade Runner like streets in one of the trailers I had to give it a go. I've only just started playing it. I like it so far -- Source engine is still great.

Edit: seeing as how there a few of us BGSFers who have the game, I'd like to see how the multi-player works.

I'd be down for giving it a go sometime. Thumbtack Jake on Steam.

I like the sound of it, but I'm on the fence about it due to the price. I'm super cheap when it comes to digital games, and all but one of my 90 Steam games cost less than $10 (yay sales). One of my favorite things about Deus Ex is that is has a good amount of lore, much more than most games bother to have. How does this game compare? And how is the exploration?

The lore, as far as I can tell, is not really in your face all that much. You kind of have to go looking for it. I believe in the HQ, there's a section with a "library" of sorts. Though I'm sure if you read all the quest and mission text thoroughly you'd have a better understanding of what's going on (I myself am just skimming more or less) EDIT: Yup. In the archives.

The levels are quite open, and I've seems some achievements you can get for finding rare stuff (pirates treasure being one of them). I've also found a small secret place/monster quite early on though just from exploring and what not.

Wait, a pc game with local co-op? Color me interested, how does that work?
I see it's over lan, interest drops again.

I watched a few videos, and it looks pretty complicated. Does it come with a decent tutorial?

There's 23 in game tutorial videos you can access at any time, which are pretty much what you have to use. Press T, and it'll list them and you just click to watch. When you start out it'll tell you which ones to watch as you go along though. It can still be a bit difficult to understand though, or at least it was for me.

Now I'm an absolute svcker for FPS-RPGs but E.Y.E. is definitely the worst I've ever played.

1. Story and writing are garbage. It feels like a 14 year olds Warhammer 40k fanfic. And I'm not even the kind of person who puts a big emphasis on story as long as it doesn't get in the way, but the game tries to be so absurdly grim dark but then you have character's with dialogue that sounds as if it came straight out of a CoD multiplayer match. And it's not because of the shoddy translation, but really because of half-arsed writing.

2. Levels are atrocious. There is no design or rhyme and reason. They're just big areas of identical (and often way too dark) corridors and buildings with respawning waves of enemies. Eventhough the game gives you plenty of tactical tools, it's usually just way more effective to take a shotgun/sniper/assault rifle and blast your way through.

3. Combat is laughable and unbalanced. Enemies die like flies even on the hardest difficult, the only thing to keep things challenging is the often zerg-like respawn , but that gets old after awhile.

4. The RPG mechanics are a mixed-bag. They just threw everything possible in there, resulting in everything feeling half-assed.

The game offers a lot of options, but when the single best option is to go Serious Sam on everybody, I'd rather play Serious Sam, it's more fun. Definitely not worth the money, get Deus Ex1, or even Deus Ex2, Bloodlines, STALKER, Fallout3, System Shock2, Bioshock or whatever.

Ouch, that's not very promising.

Yeah it's that bad

Really my main problem is that they give you so many tools that in the end feel entirely pointless. If you give the player so many options you also need to have levels that support them.

Sure I can hack an turrent, then use a PSI power telefrag an enemy and cut a group down with my katana. But if they just respawn 30 seconds later it doesn't feel like there's much point to setting up any plans and you might as well archive the same effect by playing generic FPS style, chucking a few grenades and shooting everyone down with your rifle.

The maps are "too large/monotonous" because they provide multiple paths for people to take if they AREN'T a hulking brute of a FPS character.

Start a new character, use the DNA mixer to focus as much as you can on either psi force or hacking. Let me know how your serious sam approach goes.

Also hacking, if you're successful at it, is arguably better than your "serious sam" (which, by the way, I love the reference to, since it's a game that literally was designed with no plot or point) method of combat. You can hack practically everything and everyone in the game. It makes for some interesting scenarios when you turn the feddies against themselves or the heavy cannon turrets against the meta's.

I'd be curious to see your arguments to explain that New Eden or Forgotten Factory are identical... For example.

Like you the big sizes remind me serious sam maps at first. But with serious sam it stops at being a wide multiplayer arena with some obstacles, maps of EYE are so far to be that crap that I can only assume you just quickly played something, not sure what.

Have a bit of curiosity and dig the maps, find the secondary missions, secrets and tricks.

There's also a reinforcement setting you can mess with in the options menu under game. I've cranked mine down, as I do agree, sometimes they often respawn much too quickly.

As for the writing, yeah it's not the best. I don't think it's as bad as you describe though. Like I said earlier, you actually have to go searching for it (archives, side missions, etc). The Dialogue... yeah it's pretty off. A bit due to translation. But I know what you mean when you compare it to "CoD talk", but at the same time, I think some of it is spot on with how many people would react, in any day and age.
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Patch's are on the way. This was posted just an hour or so ago:


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It genuinely seems that IGN no longer can handle reviewing PC games, let me post some of my favorite parts of the review.

"With character building making up such an important part of E.Y.E., it feels near criminal that it's handled so poorly, all but completely marring the experience. On top of having to seek out the proper venues to buy the various upgrades I wanted, I also had to figure out an unnecessarily difficult research system and in-menu upgrade system. Why couldn't everything live in one place?"

"Maybe with enough time to learn the ins-and-outs of proper builds and where to allocate my hard earned experience and money, I could craft the ideal character to make a more satisfying play through, but E.Y.E. just isn't entertaining enough to warrant the effort or revisiting."

Complaining about having to learn how to play a game? Bloody brilliant.

So you have multiple monotonous corridors instead of one, great


That's the funny part, I did focus my character on hacking. And in New Eden I used it extensively since the respawn isn't that bad yet, but in later levels it's a pain in the neck to find a safe spot for a few seconds just to hack, especially in the randomized side missions with the ridiculous respawn, so I just think "why bother" since even when I'm not completely specced on firearms I can still kill anything and everything with shotgun and sniper fire faster.


Great so you have 1 or 2 hidden NPCs on each given map that will give you some other generic destroy/hack mission. And the maps simply are boring and lack atmosphere, I found nothing interesting or memorable about them.
Leveldesign wise I can't remember any game as bad as this one in recent years. They lack character and just feel like big boxes with some corridors thrown in for good measure and a bunch of enemy spawn points placed at a whim.


I actually completely agree with IGN there, since like I mentioned the RPG aspects simply are a mess and are all over the place, between the skills, leveling, upgrading the passive cyberware, buying spells, buying new cyberware, the researching and all of it is presented in a boring and lackluster interface. Games like Bioshock and Deus Ex Human Revolution handle almost the same stuff much more elegantly. Even in RPGs in the 90s you didn't have such a convulted mess as here.