Reviews - SIGILL

After playing the final two levels of the game, which must have been the most frustrating gaming experiences I've had in my life, I can sadly give a real quick summary here:
'E.Y.E: Divine Cybermance' tries to do a lot of cool things but fails to execute them well. 'Clumsy' would be a good one-word description. The game- and level design are pretty bad and seem to be a result of the game being developed by a very inexperienced team(?) that was too ambitious and had too little resources.

On to some more details...

First of all, despite this being only a 5/10 rating, I want to say that I really wanted to like this game and I take no pleasure in stating that the hard work of someone else isn't that great. It's obvious that the developers really tried to make something special here. In fact, I have been closely following this game during its development because I love cyberpunk settings. So far I have only played the game in solo mode, so no co-op or PvP.

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy has a lot of cool concepts and ideas. The possibility of different playstyles, a variety of weapon types, character development through skillpoints and cyberimplant upgrades, a mental health-, karma- and health condition system (for example bleeding that has to be tended to), a research tree, dialogues with NPCs, hacking and a story involving multiple factions. In short, it's a cyberpunk FPS/RPG that has enough systems to make it feel like a game with a lot of depth and complexity.

Unfortunately most of these things are implemented in such a way that they feel confusing, opaque, bothersome or in the case of NPC dialogues an illusion of choice. In my opinion most of those things only distract from the fun and immersion. For example the hacking UI is awkward and it is difficult to see what is going on, especially due to the layout of the elements. Because of this, my strategy to winning these hacking minigames is to take a good look at the initial stats of my character and the system to hack, think of a sequence of actions that I need to perform to win the minigame and stick to that plan without looking at the real-time statuses of me or the opponent. While the minigame is supposed to be real-time and dynamic, the only way for me to not get frustrated is to reduce the minigame to a static sequence of steps to perform repeatedly.

The world- and level design also aren't that great. Levels are large, but dark and empty, and there are a lot of dead ends that require the player to backtrack long and boring paths. For me it has been unclear which path to take to reach an objective marker, and most of the time I picked the wrong path first. The headquarters, which is the player's central HUB area, makes this particularly visible. In that area everything is so far apart that I have to consider whether or not I really want to go check if I have enough money to buy a new weapon or implant, and spend some mind-numbing time in this large, confusing and featureless environment.

It's also painfully obvious that the developers are not native speakers of English. Besides the grammar being a bit off in a lot of cases, there seem to be a few occasions at which words are chosen that don't make sense in their context. The text in dialogues is generally cringy, there is a lot of swearing, bad mouthing and edgy behaviour by both NPCs and the player character. Most of it is accompanied by an abundance of exclamation marks, which for some reason is something that for me personally can quickly ruin immersion. It is possible that these issues with the textual content could be the reason why I don't really have any idea what's going on with the story, or perhaps the story is just unclear and confusing on purpose, since the player character starts the game with amnesia.

I would only recommend this game to people that are very eager to play a game with cyberpunk setting and have low expectations of the game. The FPS part, when disregarding the RPG systems, can feel quite satisfying at times, but for me it is just not enough to make this game actually fun. I only continued playing just to be able to add the game to my 'completed campaign' list.

If the game did not suffer from game breaking bugs I would have rated it 6/10. Unfortunately I was forces to load a previously saved game because the game stopped responding to input or I couldn't pick up a mission-critical item.

Other reasons why I gave Shadowrun Returns only a 5/10, even though I mostly enjoyed the playthrough:

- Lacking in depth. Class and race choice don't seem to matter. Very little use for skills of which the player can expect to open up alternative possibilities.

- Extremely linear game, both in dialogue and 'physical' routes. Alternative routes are offered only once in the whole game. To use them the player needs to have drones with him/her in the party, else he/she still has only one route to follow. Because of the linearity the game feels more like an interactive story instead of a game in which the player's actions have impact on the world.

- The levels, both indoor and outdoor, feel very empty. The NPCs are all static and there is no ambient sound.

- 'Hard' difficulty, on which I played the game, is not hard at all. I did not die once and actually never came really close.

I just started playing the Steam workshop entry 'Shadowrun Unlimited' and from what I have read this fixes quite a few of these problems. The mods may add (higher quality) replayability, so that's a pro for the game as user generated content platform.

Q.U.B.E. has challenging and interesting puzzles and mechanics but the controls get frustrating at times. Between every 'command' is this incredibly annoying delay, which makes the controls feel unresponsive, makes timed puzzles a pain in the *** and makes little mistakes you make take way too long to undo. In my opinion of course.

There is no story which made me wonder who the f- I was and what I was doing in those puzzle rooms, and the game is relatively short. The puzzles themselves are very enjoyable though, as long as you don't have to time things right.