E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy Review

Player Affinity is the latest publication to offer a review for the ambitious indie cyberpunk FPS/RPG E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy, and while they note that “E.Y.E. feels like it’s reaching farther than it can manage, and suffers as a result”, they seemed to enjoy the end product and award it a respectable enough 7.5/10.

The gameplay itself cribs from Deus Ex quite a bit, with options for stealth, hacking, socializing, and straight up combat. In this manner, E.Y.E. is quite enjoyable, though in most of the ways that the original Deus Ex is not. For instance, the combat. In E.Y.E., the combat is satisfying, fast, and engaging. The guns all sound really great, and enemies go down in a few shots. Even melee weapons are effective, since you can block bullets and kill enemies with a couple of slashes. This makes going through the entire game guns blazing very tempting, however, blocking out other paths. This is a good thing, since the stealth is nearly impossible, unless you’ve spent many, many skill points and credits into making you character stealth oriented. The hacking isgood, though. It’s a strategic, faster paced take on turned based RPG combat, with you fighting against the target and trying to take down their “Cyber HP”. It’s fun, challenging, and complements the minute-to-minute gameplay well. It’s also great that you can hack almost anything, even enemies. So if you want to go all hack, it’s possible. The socializing is fine, though marred by the lack of voice acting. What’s cool is that it doesn’t require any skill points for you to be a persuasive smooth talker, you just need to logically pick the right dialogue options.

Where E.Y.E. suffers is the level design. From level to level, there’s a lot of variety, such as a tense standoff in an apartment block between the Federation and some criminals, and an Aliens-style atmospheric level, which ends in a survival against waves of monsters. While there’s variety, the levels themselves aren’t designed particularly well. It’s clear that Onstreum wants to create large environments that feel expansive and alive, but they fail in this task. Instead, they end up with environments that are too large with insufficient content to fill them up. Most of my time in E.Y.E. was spent sprinting towards objectives hundreds of meters away, with no opposition, or backtracking to turn in a mission. Some ventilation shafts are incredibly long, with the slow crouching speed making things even worse. There are also very few NPCs, making the environments feel large and lifeless. The worst case of this comes at a level near the end, where it’s an onslaught of enemies across thousands of meters of open, linear canyon terrain.