E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy review

Lately I’ve been having a vicious streak of stress dreams. Not sure why, but the fact remains. For the most part they alternate between two different scenarios. In the first, my mentally unstable ex-girlfriend stalks me and tries to slay me, but is ultimately thwarted and eats a bullet courtesy of my current girlfriend. The other involves me attending a middle school German language class in which I am apparently the only student that forgot about the test that is about to go down. So here I am trying to cram something – anything – into my brain, but one of my classmates is running her nails across the chalkboard, and naturally I can’t focus on shit. In the dream I want to go crazy and scream in her stupid face just how much I hate her and how much everyone else hates her and how the universe itself must have a personal vendetta against her and that if there was a God, he’d probably say he wasn’t too fond of her either. But every time I stop myself because I feel bad as she only has one arm. One arm and a hideous stump.

My experience with E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is pretty damn similar to that of my stress dreams.

There are the triumphant moments, similar to when Olivia severs Do Not Answer’s spine with a .45. Those are the times when I’m rocking a combo of a sword and pistol. An enemy unloads a machine gun clip at me, but no big deal because I’m blocking it with my sword. When he goes to slap another clip into the bullet sprinkler, I spray him with rounds from my hand cannon until I can get in close enough to relieve his neck of its head problem.

Those are the times when I struggle to avoid taking the first flight available to France so I can buy everyone involved a round of beers (or whatever French people drink, wine probably) for bringing this fine, fine piece of software into existence.

But, there are other times that seem to mirror my experiences with the one armed bandit and the chalk board. These being when I’m running backwards, while being pursued by 15 mind-numbingly generic monsters, all featuring attack patterns only a small step more cunning than Doom’s award winning A.I. could muster, and I’m trying to reload my shotgun but, what do you know, I’m out of bullets, because I somehow forgot that every time I reload, the game disposes of any bullets that were in the chamber. I definitely love that.

In my dream, I can never work up the nerve to give the uni-arm girl a piece of my mind, because it’s like she gets a free pass to be a bit of an asshole because, well she’s only got one arm. She’s working at a disadvantage. It’s the same way with E.Y.E. Every time some boneheaded ass design decision pops up, or a bug comes up, I remember that the game was made by about as many guys as a football team puts players on the field at a given time. And just like in the case of the lopsided girl, it doesn’t make it less irritating, but it seems to make it more forgivable in a way.

I bring up my personal contentions with dreams for a reason though. Because E.Y.E. as a whole feels like playing someone else’s dream. It seems like little more than the digital recreation of the mumblings of a madman when you break it down. With visuals that create an ethereal cyber punk dream world by of art direction that is insane hodge podge of futuristic dystopia, medieval and Japanese shogun culture. Sure the visual style and story made almost no sense to me, but like any memorable dream, when it’s happening it’s undeniably fascinating.

Perhaps most dreamlike of all, is that the game doesn’t seem to give a rats ass if you understand what’s going on or just how anything works. Sure there are 23 odd tutorials built right into the menu system, but it’s as though each of these videos was made at a completely different point in the development cycle, and the guy writing the video is never exactly sure how the system is going to be implemented in the final build. Or alternately it is as though the developers have decided that it is best that the player just figure out how the whole thing works on their own, and the tutorials are only in place to provide the mere illusion that they give a shit if the player understands any aspect of the game. In either case, the situation is compounded severely by the fact that English is quite obviously only a hobby for the translator.

Plus the game costs 20 bones.

Oh yeah, and remember the part where I was using the sword and the pistol at the same time? I could’ve used my psychic powers to make his body explode. Just sayin’.

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