E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy Review
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First off, E.Y.E begins to make a lot more sense when you look at it as a co-op game. The hub area where one chooses between missions in a large open environment, the strange dream sequence lobby encountered upon deaths and starting the game up, the large number of enemy respawns and occasionally impossible odds, the reliance on death and resurrection exploitation to win in difficult fights... and once you've got a friend or two to play E.Y.E with, it's elevated to a completely different level. The rough edges remain, but when two separate characters are able to tackle a situation intelligently, it provides a great sense of accomplishment. Co-op games typically use this to their great advantage, but in E.Y.E, with full control over your own character development, your dream of a fully co-operative Deus Ex-style game, with one character doing the fighting and another healing, or one hacking and another infiltrating, or any other permutation, can be realised. Second, the sheer size and scope of E.Y.E, even next to many big-budget games, ensures that there is tons of game content here. The campaign is of a reasonable length, clocking in at about 15-20 hours, and with the random enemy spawning, side-missions, and number of possibilities in building a character, is likely to be quite replayable for those who are interested. If you're the type who likes to play a game multiple times just to see how the play-style changes, how high a level you can reach, how to cope with both old and new situations, well, E.Y.E definitely accommodates. A more cynical perspective might say that it's grinding for the sake of grinding, however, and that's a viewpoint I can't deny the validity of as well.
One place where E.Y.E doesn't falter, for the most part, is in its visuals and audio. From the moment you start the game, it immerses you in a dark cyberpunk world and doesn't let go. While other games have attempted to present cyberpunk before, most notably System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, E.Y.E feels much closer to visions put forward in Blade Runner and other strong defining pieces of cyberpunk aesthetic, with a wide variety of strong colours, lots of contrast and light bloom, flickering advertisements, and silhouettes painted against the sky. Character designs, meanwhile, borrow heavily from traditional Samurai and Roman armour, giving a sense of history and culture to what is for the most part an oppressively bleak world. Musically, the game revels in distinctive ambient and electronic soundscapes, going for everything from slow, abstract, atonal drones and hums, to more upbeat pieces that wouldn't sound out of place in other sci-fi games. The quality is consistently excellent, and the subtle nature of much of the soundtrack means it doesn't grow repetitive or intrusive.
There are still a few downsides to be found in presentation, and they're the usual kinds of things you'd expect from a lower-budget title. There's a lack of environmental ambiance and effects, and very little voice-acting to be found, none of it in English. Weapon sound effects are a little bit on the weak side from time to time, and some of the character animation and texture work can be inconsistent, as well. Despite running on Valve's newest version of Source, at times it can feel as if the technology really isn't being used to its fullest, with even the original Half-Life 2 and Vampire: Bloodlines offering up more detailed and consistent environments. Overall, for a $20 game put together by a team of five ex-modders, E.Y.E looks and sounds pretty much like you'd expect: strong vision hampered by a few real-world limitations and the distinct sense that you're still, underneath it all, playing a Half-Life 2 mod.
If there's one thing about E.Y.E that's going to determine how you feel about it, it's how many bugs, interface issues, and frustrating game systems you're willing to overlook in order to get through to what is, at its core, still an enjoyable game. What we have here is a hugely ambitious, well-intentioned game brought down by design oversights, multiplayer-driven compromises that drag down the single-player game, and the limitations of a small budget and development team. Simply put, it buckles under its own weight, but there's still a lot to like left over in the wreckage provided you're willing to wade through it. If you're looking for a replayable co-op game with heavy and generally well-executed role-playing elements, combined with fast and precise action, E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is one of the few games that meets such criteria today. For someone expecting a modern, polished rebirth of System Shock 2 or Deus Ex, though, you'll probably want to hold onto your money for Human Revolution in a couple of weeks instead.
