E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy

The game is a jank masterpiece and I'm not really sure I can write a traditional review for it so let's just imitate the style of the game and go with disconnected and fragmented bullet points jumping around while not trying to make any waves in the process 1. The sense of mechanical progression is quite good and far better than games even today trying to do a similar thing. You go from an emaciated cyberschlub who can barely hit a space helicopter with a pistol round or walk down a street without needing to catch a breath o a lore-accurate 40k space marine spraying bullets from a minigun and each one slamming into some guy's head while you're jumping off of a cliff. 2. The story is "pregnant with mystery" but at it's core not all that complex or hard to parse contrary to the cultic fanbase wank about it. The esotericism in the game is mostly through poorly relayed visual themes; some of this is due to graphical limitations, some of it through muddled intentions in the writers/developers room. No, I won't explain "what it really means", in as much as such a thing can be done with art, but I can tell you to waste your time reading Girard. 3. The gun selection, though obviously limited for its time, is quite good and almost all of the weapons feel suitably powerful and entertaining to use. Melee is a bit of an afterthought but once you get your RPG points in it becomes viable and as with any game it's an eternal amusement to cave some mob's head with an explosive charge-laden doomhammer. 4. The writing is spastic and energetic but scarce throughout, it reads like it's been put back and forth through a half dozen AIgen translators, but regardless it has charm and contributes much to the overall aesthetic of the game. 5. The RPG mechanics are kind of a mess but drawn out enough to where you'll have something to put your widget points or brouzoufs (this is some kind of slang for money from a french sci-fi bit, apparently). While it's hard to "tank your save" by doing this or that incorrectly and "your build" will likely be viable no matter what you do past level 15 or so the $$$ and point costs do ramp up considerably after a while so if you're masochistic enough to want to max everything out in 2026 you're going to be at it for a very long time. 6. The way of "beating the story" is convoluted and not clearly explained anywhere so I'll try to lay it out without spoilers. There's a mission where you get put into an alien landscape with a few different teleporters (I think it's called "Noctis Labyrinth; the devs were clearly big 40k fans so there's a lot of thematic draw from that) and your choices there basically determine which ending segment you get locked into. There's "mentor" (your mentor, a good guy, but not blameless afaik), Rimanah (the commander of your cultic hashashim brigade, something of a sympathetic villain), and the Federals (fascists, the Rules Based Universal Order, the department of control in Control) and you need to finish all 3 on successive campaign runs to get the true ending, which is basically you having a quick chat with a witch. 7. I told you not to make waves!!! All in all it's worth 5-10 bucks or whatever but know that it is extremely janky and have an idea of what you're getting into before you go; there's nothing to really spoil outside of the ending bits. On balance I'd say that the mechanical side of the game is more interesting than the median opinion suggests while the lore/story side of it is less. As always, YMMV, but I will say that I find myself opening this game every now and then just to run around at hyper-speed and turn various criminals and cops into a red mist. The combat in it is kinetically very satisfying in a way that Source engine mods rarely achieve.