E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy

i keep coming back and im not sure why. this is like vampire masquerade its very niche.

Those that like it love it.
Those put off by it run from it and forget
God is good God loves you

probably one of the best games I can always return to, theres always something to do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GfeLkwKzX0&feature=youtu.be

Sum-Up

In-depth analysis further down.

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[th]🟩 Pros[/th]
[th]🟥 Cons[/th]
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[tr]
[td]
• Unique, well-designed, immersive setting that feels original and terribly grim. The graphics, physics and effects still hold their own despite their age.

• Great variety of builds, each with markedly different gameplay, mechanics and abilities.

• Each weapon and gadget feels unique and handles differently; the gunplay is solid, and the melee is fun despite its jank.

• Tremendous amount of secrets, Easter eggs and hidden locations in each map. Many feature unique enemies, items and interesting interactions.

• Numerous ways to solve quests or approach objectives: from direct gunfights to stealth, hacking, diplomacy and otherworldly powers.
[/td]
[td]
• The story may be overall brilliant, but is laid out in a confusing, obscure manner. I finished this game four times, and still have no clue about half of its lore.

• Progression feels unbalanced: you’ll have to replay the game multiple times in NG+, or grind a lot of side missions, to get higher-level powers, weapons and augmentations.

• Several important gameplay mechanics are never explained or even hinted at; substantial trial and error are needed to figure out how everything works.
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[/tr]
[/table]

[table]
[tr]
[th]🟨 Bugs & Issues[/th]
[th]🔧 Specs[/th]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]
• AI allies’ pathfinding can often bug, making them stuck and unable to follow you properly.

• Inconsistencies in the world’s save state upon loading a saved game. Sometimes, you can lose mission progress for no reason.

• The ability selector resets its layout if the game is alt-tabbed.
[/td]
[td]
• i9 13980HX
• 64GB RAM DDR5
• RTX 4090
• NvME SSD
• 3840x2160
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[/tr]
[/table]

[table]
[tr]
[td]Content & Replay Value:[/td]
[td]It took me around 12 hours, alongside my partner, to complete EYE on the highest difficulty setting, taking extra time to complete side quests and explore each level thoroughly. Given its substantial variety of possible builds that vastly change gameplay, and branching choices in the story, the replay value is high.[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Do I Recommend It?[/td]
[td]It’s not a game for everyone. If you don’t mind high levels of jank, annoying bugs or extremely obscure narratives, and love grimdark sci-fi, then go for it. If you want a polished, accessible experience, stay well away from it.[/td]
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[tr]
[td]

Conclusion:

[/td]
[td]EYE walks the fine line between creative genius and a schizophrenic’s bad acid trip. It’s unique, purposefully obscure and there isn’t anything else like it. You’ll either love it or absolutely hate it.[/td]
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[/table]

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In-Depth

Writing & Worldbuilding

The story and lore of EYE are certainly unique. StreumOn managed to build an entirely original, dystopian sci-fi setting that doesn’t remotely look or feel like anything else. This truly original and, for many aspects, visionary tale comes at a steep price for the end user: obscurity. Even if you take the effort of reading through the massive amounts of lore in fine print, descriptions and dialogues, many points will remain inevitably shrouded in mystery, and open to interpretation. Complex metaphysical and philosophical topics often are intertwined with the story’s events, but not in any way that’s narratively coherent. The quality is undeniable, however, it’s a story that falls victim to narrative overengineering more than anything else.

Visually and artistically, each location nails the grim, brutalist aesthetics that a setting like this demands. Despite its age and clear lack of finer polish, EYE manages to be an immersive experience that will hook you up with its desolate atmosphere and eerie environs. Unhinged violence, total value loss for human life and the annihilation of individualism are the main themes you’ll find throughout.

Exploration & Secrets

You’ll explore levels on foot, each of them being a self-contained map that, regardless, makes up for the lack of a real open world with high layout complexity. Most locations will have layouts that span under or above ground, with many hidden and optional areas, and even entirely redundant ones that don’t really have much in them, and are there for the sake of atmosphere. Hidden NPCs, unique quests, secret interactions and even special enemies will be around each map, waiting to be found, but that won’t be an easy task at all since they’re often behind obscure passageways, jumping puzzles or hidden places that really take effort to find.

It’s worth doing so, though, since some of them give access to unique content and extra lore you’d otherwise simply miss. You won’t have a map, nor fast travel: only your quest objectives will be indicated on your HUD, and not always, especially when the objective is finding something that doesn’t have a known location. It can be quite hard to get your bearings, but that does add to the experience in a way, forcing you to explore more thoroughly.

Combat System & Bosses

Fights in EYE play out in first person; it’s above all an FPS, but with several additional mechanics that give the combat system more depth. Other than a variety of guns ranging from pistols to sniper rifles, shotguns and even automated drones, you’ll have an array of psionic powers at your disposal, and a hacking module to take over machines and even people that have modified their bodies through cybernetics. The pacing is fast, and on higher difficulties, fights are brutal: just a few shots will dispatch both you and most enemies, explosives are terrifying and will shellshock you, while machinery like fixed turrets or gunships is outright devastating.

Each level usually has damage sources like explosive barrels, pitfalls or other hazards you can also use to kill your enemies in different ways, without spending much ammo or other resources. You’ll constantly be put against overwhelming forces, with most maps having enemies regularly pour in as reinforcements; they have a maximum amount, but that will often mean plowing through dozens and dozens of them. Firefights feel meaty and satisfying, with plenty of gore and good weight behind both melee and ranged weapons. Bosses are, mostly, just regular people — only more skilled, armed and armored. Even they can be one-shotted by calibers high enough in the right spot, or by overwhelming damage.

Character Progression & Quests

You’ll gain XP by completing quests and killing enemies—the standard fare—but there’s much more to it than meets the EYE. First of all, to access most higher-level weapons, augmentations that grant unique skills, gadgets and psionic powers, you’ll need to complete their related research. This costs money, which can be earned by vanquishing your foes. The research items are randomly dropped by enemies, and it may take very little or very long, depending on your luck, to get the one you need to complete your build. Other than that, leveling up also gives you stat points to invest in attributes that govern health, hacking skill, speed, damage and many other aspects of your character; a minimum requirement is in place for most stuff, so you’ll need to specialize and reach it before buying and equipping that gizmo. It’s not a bad progression system, but the random factor tied to research, and the high amount of grind involved through multiple playthroughs to get the best stuff, make it quite annoying.

Quests can range from hacking a device, or finding someone and speaking to them, to eliminating a specific enemy or clearing an area of hostiles. There’s enough variety of situations and objectives that the game doesn’t become stale, as new enemies and threats get added regularly as well.

absolutely insane video game. could not tell you anything that happened when i played. my legs are ok.

Cons
Janky. Confusing. Poorly paced. Grindy as fuck if you want to unlock the best stuff.

Pros
Made by genuinely crazy people in the best way possible. Hack anything. Teleport inside of your enemies. Fire 3000 RPM submachine guns with 100 round magazines.

Conclusion
My legs are okay!

You can run at the speed of sound, cross mountains in a single leap, teleport inside of people to blow them up, or just straight up toss a car at them, unless you decide to try to hack their cyber-brain through an RTS hacking mini-game to temporarily take control over them.

This game has a staggering amount of options for how to play it, with the only limiting factor being how much time you are willing to put into it to even begin to approach the upper ceiling of how much fun you can have.

It is an absolutely delightfully janky mess of a game. The maps are way too big, the mission design is frustrating, it is sorely lacking some QoL features, but for better or for worse, I don't think you will find a gameplay experience like this anywhere else.

10/10, can recommend, never playing it again.

Me and my friend found a rat and injected it with our healing syringe so much that it died from an overdose

A true masterpiece. It has Euro jank but it's actually a really polished immersive sim experience. Great cyberpunk fiction too. Oh and you can coop the entire campaign. And you never lose character progression. And you are always gaining Brouzoufs. And you can be the cyber-augmented, psychogenetic, black-op hacker-ronin of your dreams.

I recently finished Cyberman after putting in over 126 hours, and I have to say it was a very good. I bought the game in 2012 and at the time said 'Nah' but I reinstalled it 13 years later and gave it another chance. The game's combat mechanics are solid, and the variety of guns is a lot of fun to experiment with - personally, I favored the heavy Sulfatum gun and the Motra submachine gun for most missions. The game could use QoL features like maps and some of the spaces in the game are way too large.

Btw my legs are Okay

An absolute masterpiece, executed in the most suboptimal fashion imaginable.

Its a cult classic for a reason, but don't expect it to be classically good

Let Madness fill you, and hear the voices from the other world.

my legs are ok

Like: Able to customize loadout, you can use hacking, stealth and/or brute force. Amusing achievements. As long as you get enough money (brounzoufs or something like that) you can upgrade yourself with cybernetics fairly well. Still need research, which randomly drops in briefcases from mobs, so not too easy. You can hack some enemies and turn them into allies.

Dislike: somewhat buggy, sometimes sentry turns into a random magazine in inventory. Stealth is very difficult at lower levels. When you hack enemies, you only have 2 commands: "follow me" and "go hunt", A "defend this position" would be nice. Possession movement is awful and you can't get the possessed enemy to climb/descend stairs.

Overall, it is very fun, but the bugs can make it frustrating at times. It is an old game, so there probably won't be much improvement. I'm a bit disappointed no sequel has come out. The storyline, atmosphere and gameplay are well worth the time, in my opinion. It might be a bit much for those lacking any sort of gaming skills, though. With the Jan, Looters and the Federation there should be enough to have hackable enemies, and with the others (mutants/demons) you could potentially even make some cybernetic and hackable for a sequel.

👍

My legs are okay.

If you throw Quake, Ghost in the Shell, and Half-Life into a blender than add a dash of methamphetamines you'll get this game. Don't get me wrong, it's good, it's damn good, but you'll need to wrestle with an obtuse UI and being hard punished for tactical mistakes.

total french death?

9.99 worth it to me. I spend more dumb shit anyway.

Sensei Approved.

Very difficult to get into

.

The game is a very mixed bag gameplay-wise, but overall I enjoyed playing it.
It has some weird design decisions. But you can easily understand why the game was made like this if you consider that the developers were a small team, probably without a dedicated programmer, and they were also quite ambitious and decided to implement both solo and coop modes that "influence each other", according to the game's store page. To accomplish this, both modes use the same implementation - every mission is just a server to which you connect and do some tasks. This is how all Source games work, but in other Source games single-player and multiplayer maps are usually separate, so they can accommodate things like saving, tracking mission progress, etc. But in this case the developers just made one version of the map for both single and multiplayer modes, thus we have the weirdness that we don't usually see in single-player games.

Examples of weird design decisions
1. Enemies infinitely respawn on most maps. It impacts exploration, especially in early game when you are low-level, since you will spend most of the time looking around for enemies rather than focusing on exploring the level. Moreover, enemies already know where you are when they spawn, which can further interfere with the exploration or hacking, unless you invest in turrets and just place them next to you every time you want to hack something, which can be very cumbersome. The cloak won't help you because it drains energy faster than the time it takes to hack most of the targets.
2. You can't save during the mission. It's not a huge issue, since the game remembers which objectives you fully completed and continues from the next incomplete one when you reload the map. Some players reported bugs with saving mission progress, but I never encountered them myself.

Things that are poorly implemented (and not influenced by the design)
1. Not all game mechanics are properly explained. Some things are explained in the tutorial videos, which you can access anytime, but they are quite surface-level and not very "immersive". You are expected to experiment to find out how some things work. This is not bad by itself, but if you take into account that mistakes can sometimes cost you your life and that you can take a random penalty on death, it really impedes the will to experiment to your heart's content.
2. Enemy AI is very simplistic - "just find the path towards a player and attack when a player is in sight".
3. There is no real incentive to explore the maps. The only reason is to find quest givers or people who will tell you something about the world. Apart from that, there is nothing more to find.
4. The random nature of some mechanics: what research drops from enemies and when, which enemies become "special", etc. This can lead to excessive grinding if you want some specific research.

Things that are good
1. Visual design. Everything looks great - environments, enemies (both human and inhuman), and weapons.
2. The vast number of mechanics available to you leads to the great number of choices of how you can play the game.
3. Since this is an immersive sim, you can complete most missions in different ways. Although most choices that you make have little impact on other missions.
4. Hacking mini-game is surprisingly enjoyable once you get the hang of it.

Notable things that are neither good nor bad
1. The story and lore are hard to understand, and this is intentional. I personally don't mind not seeing the full picture, but someone might find it unpleasant in case they want to fully comprehend what they are doing and why.
2. The localization can appear very bad, but I think it somewhat contributes to the incomprehensible story. Others say that it's just the writing and not localization.
3. The maps are big and spacious, because they need to be able to accommodate a lot of players in coop mode. Because of this, you will spend a lot of time just running around from one point to the next. But at least you have some respawning enemies to kill in the process, and also look at some gorgeous environments.
4. You need to play the whole campaign 3 times with one character if you want the "true" ending. I think this is just a way to pad time since the game is not very long.

Only play the game if you know what you are getting into. Don't try to play it as your first immersive sim. Don't be ashamed of using guides. Don't expect handholding. If you keep all of this in mind, you will have a good time.

extremely clunky and runs poorly even with modern hardware

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy isn't a game but an anti-game—a deliberate rejection of coherent design that accidentally achieves brilliance through its commitment to incomprehensibility. It's gaming's equivalent of Finnegans Wake: impenetrable, frustrating, and secretly genius. Buy it for $10, play it for 2 hours, refund it, then buy it again 6 months later when you're ready to admit you miss it.

Maps are massive, and I keep dying to enemies throwing grenades from 8 miles away.
Not sure why this game has such a cult following despite being poorly translated as well.

its like if Fallout and Darktide had a horrible rapechild next to a nuclear dumping ground and the mother started doing LSD and had a premature birth with this game being the child. Its so fucking good.

It's like an oven roast, but without the meat (engaging/fun gameplay) and only vegetables (story and mechanics).

I will give it to 'em, the "vegetables" are very well-cooked, but without the meat it ain't a roast.

My crazy Serbian friend really likes this game and I'm just trying to support him.

Unplayable due to broken UI.

I've been binging this and haven't even scratched the surface of it. I'd sacrifice my firstborn for a community patch and grafix overhaul tho.

kino!!! soul!!!

I'm pretty sure this game just manifested in my library through some sort of demonic magics. That may just be the French, though.

what the fuck

This game walked so Cruelty Squad could OD.

+

An engrossing mix of immersive sim, RPG, and FPS. It feels right at home in the source engine. At first you will hate it, but give it time and you'll start to understand why it's a cult classic.

It's boring having to walk through these empty shooting galleries looking for terminals to hack and feds to smoke. I like the story

devs pls make a sequel

i hated it at first, but i was constantly thinking about it when i wasn't playing it and decided to give it another shot. the game is incredible and really sticks with you. this game has what so many lack nowdays. a soul

Really foward thinking game for the time it came out in. I feel like everybody has that one weird game that they feel like only they understand and this is it for me. Game is just so cool and the passion shows. From weapons to cybernetics and psi abillities it has way more in it that first impressions might suggest and you can even play the whole thing in Co-Op! If you dig Cyberpunk/Warhammer 40k/ or just wanna try an inspired out there FPS/RPG hybrid give it a shot.

Samsara Simulator 2011 - Game of the Kalpa Edition
"10/10 - No words. Just jawdropping" - The Hat Man
"7/10 too much water" - Machine Elves
"Skyrim with guns" - IGN

horse tier game design

You gain Brouzouf
You gain Brouzouf
You gain Brouzouf
Your legs are broken
Your legs are okay
Research is over

I don't have a lot of time in it yet, but I wanted to give my first impressions/thoughts. It's pretty unique and has RPG/thematic elements not commonly found in other source engine games. So far the setting/vibe feels like Half-Life meets Deus Ex meets System Shock meets S.T.A.L.K.E.R. meets Warhammer 40K. It's not perfect (what games actually are?); the interface is pretty convoluted (wish I could also change the size of it) and a lot of mechanics are poorly explained or not explained at all when it feels like an explanation is probably warranted. The stamina/endurance is more tedious than most games and there can be long periods of walking on occasion. The gunplay feels pretty good, although the skill/weapon selection is more complicated than it needs to be. I have only played it singleplayer so far, but I could see this being a fun multiplayer game.

PROS:
-interesting lore
-good dystopian setting
-cool level ups and abilities
-good gunplay
-funny dialogue

CONS:
-bad level design
-too much walking
-walking and bad level design are made much worse by the energy drain/endurance system (essentially everything you do other than shoot or walk takes energy)
-takes too long to level up your endurance and special abilities
-poor options for key binding in terms of weapon selection
-missions need to be completed from beginning to end in one sitting before it saves your campaign progress. This would be fine if the missions didn't take so long to do. I don't like feeling like I have to commit to that much gaming in one sitting.

It's still one of the best action FPS things ever made. try the shotgun, you'll thank me.

it's good

Know what you're getting into, and love every weird detail about it

I don't know wtf this game is supposed to be about but it's a trip for sure.

i have zero idea how this is in my steam library but its really cool. i think it showed up around 2014