Thursday, March 17, 2016

Steam Queue Thursdays: E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy (2011)

Review for: E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy (2011)
Developed and Published by: Streum on Studio
Genre: FPS-RPG

Review

EYE Divine Cybermancy is the premier (and only) game from French team Streum on Studio. Released directly on Steam, this project may fit a good place for "dream big, fail big" as a motto. We'll get into the specifics but it's important to understand the game, even if it didn't suffer a few major crash bugs, is rough around the edges, and lacking in the aesthetic finesse it requires to be successful.


Story



You wake up in a dream the dead body of your mentor resting against a green cloudy portal. You step through and wake up again, alone, the slaughtered remains of your group still surrounding you. With no idea what's happened and a bunch of strange monoliths in the cave, you crawl out. Your commander contacts you telling you to get out there. You're being swarmed by an unknown enemy.

This is the first mission of EYE Divine Cybermancy, it's short, sweet, informative, and actually kind of interesting. Unfortunately, the game will not keep this pace.

EYE Divine Cybermancy is set in a distant future where man and machine are one. There's actually a pretty extensive backlog going into the politics and history of the setting of the world. I know because the game sent me there after the first mission and had me read a bunch of pages of exposition.

You also talk to your Mentor and your Commander who represent two different sides of an internal faction war. As you go through the missions you have to navigate these different sides to decide what the future should hold for you.

To be honest it was a bit difficult to parse the finer details because the game is presented in a broken English translation. I don’t blame the developers for being too small to get a decent translation, but it makes the finer elements of the lore and world that much more difficult to understand.

Aesthetics

EYE has an aesthetic reminiscent of Doom and Deus Ex. It’s a dystopian steampunk samurai Shooter RPG that has you going through cities, destroyed landscapes, and temples.



While the tutorial level and central hub are fairly linear hallways, it's a wonder what the dev team has done with larger maps. The depth, height, and width are bigger in scope than most games. It makes the player feel incredibly small in the game world, and that works well as a subversion. There's giant holy statues, gigantic skyscrapers, and so much pulling your eyes that it works in a really immersive way. The first downtown area is literally the closest anything has come to fulfilling the hole that Blade Runner left.

Which isn't to say it's all good. The lack of a map combined with the size of the areas often makes running around trying to find a way to your quest marker a pain. And some things are just animated weird, where it's impossible to tell if something is a quest object or not.

There's also a weird blur when you sprint, and despite there being an option to turn it off, there's still a significant amount of blurriness when you do run. It's not so much a feature as it is a cover up for more bad animations.


Gameplay

EYE Divine Cybermancy mixes the elements of first person shooters from the late nineties with the tried and true Dungeons & Dragons elements of most RPGs. You begin the game by deciding the three genetic traits your character has. These are all strange names of… races? Either way, they influence the vast amount of stats your character possesses.

After character creation, you’re introduced to the three modes of play in EYE; Shooting & Exploration, Hacking, and Dialogue.

Shooting & Exploration is pretty straight forward. You will find an Armory with around twenty different options that you can change freely whenever you want. Swords, Warhammers, Pistols, Shotguns, Submachine Guns, Assault Rifles, Snipers, and Heavy Weaponry is all immediately available with different gun options locked at stores you find later in the game.

You take your guns and walk around the maps going from objective to objective, which typically involves killing/talking to someone, or collective an item. The quest markers are the only thing giving you a semblance of direction, with the maps lacking the details to make exploration not just interesting but engaging.

Hacking is a unique element in EYE. It allows you to access nearly anything, including opponents, by means of a text-based RPG battle. The battle takes place in Active Time, similar to the Final Fantasy series, allowing the player several options from Hacking, Destroying, and Controlling, each of which allows the player to perform different functions. The battle between you two allows for several options which ultimately play out in a semi-complicated way. You have health, attack, and defense, which can be boosted with the correct stats, and your moves involve boosting your attack, reducing their defense, reducing your defense to mega boost your attack, attacking and increasing your own defense.

If Hacking sounds complicated, that’s because it is. The first time you hack you are put up against what seems like a very fast opponent, with most moves between you and him activating in around a second or so. But that’s nothing compared to later battles where you’ll need to be keeping track on all six numbers in small text while also commanding the correct moves.

Dialogue is a pretty common mode nowadays, but here’s where the inspirations of Deus Ex don’t quite hold up. There are only a few conversations I had where the direction of it really seemed to matter. People will typically give you more quests (in other words quest markers) that will give you more to do. The other options are usually not doing these things with varying shades of attitude about it. It actually makes the dialogue seem pretty cheap, even though the game implies that it may slightly judge you for it.

At the end of the day, the gameplay of EYE puts a ton of pressure on a new player. Character Creation is complicated, asking you to make or break a character of which you haven’t even engaged in meaningful combat with yet. And sure, this is a trope of the genre, but games like The Elder Scrolls managed to give you exposure to your combat scenarios before you have to pick one to specialize.



I am a fan of difficult but rewarding RPG mechanics, but there didn’t seem to be much payoff in EYE. I ended up a shotgun-toting madman who more or less killed anyone who came his way. And the game including Monster Closets of never ending enemies ensured that I would be able to slaughter plenty.

Sound

The music in this game is actually disorienting in a good way. If there's one thing EYE does a good job of, it's creating that feeling of disorientation. Again, in many ways that's negative, but here it's a good thing. The soundtrack is primarily made up of heavy synth, the dream your player wakes up in is actually a fantastic soundtrack and one that's as haunting as the landscape around you.

The bad thing is that the sounds, including the music, come off as being rather compressed. Gunshots are generic and don’t vary from weapon to weapon, and I sound like a massive robot whenever I jump at all.

Overall

EYE is just not recommendable. There was a moment where the absolute diehard RPG fan in me wanted to vouch for this game. Sure it's a bit ugly, I said, but graphics don't mean much. Sure it's confusing, I said, but you've worked through harder games than this. Remember Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song? That was like the hardest learning curve I’ve ever dealt with, and the game on the other side is one of the greatest of all time.

EYE is the first game from a first-time developer, and in many ways, it feels destined to fail. There's not enough attention paid to the player. There's too much attention paid to a backstory that isn't functioning or important on the screen. There is absolutely no hand holding to guide the player towards effective or even conscious decisions for their gameplay.

Despite a soft part of my heart still wanting to say that if you're the most hardcore of hardcore RPG fans to give this a try, buggy crashes, and bad aesthetics leave me saying no. It's too much ambition for too little follow through.






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I didn't care for E.Y.E. Cybermancy. So instead, here's a link for it's clear inspiration. This is the latest in the Deus Ex Series of video games, and definitely worth a play or two. Get it, by clicking on the image below!

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