E.Y.E is a game about spacing. The normal, modern first-person shooter would care little for many of the intricacies laid out here, particularly how cover is a rather joking affair, and escaping an enemy is near impossible without your convenient cloak, which renders enemies largely oblivious to your presence at all. E.Y.E is a game about these extremes, and because of these extremes, there is a great wealth of play to explore, but much of it hides in figuring out the myriad of combinations available.
In a sense, E.Y.E is extraordinarily difficult, yet it’s also one of the most forgiving games that exists. Dying in the solo campaign effectively means nothing, and even in the lightest of armament you are a veritable bullet sponge. The difficulty lies instead in the endlessness of any given event. Enemies never stop spawning, they are always looking for you, and many of them will use highly powerful weaponry to laugh at your bullet sponginess. Granted, there are tons of others that won’t, but that’s also part of the point. There are tons of enemies. Screens full of them, all the time.
E.Y.E‘s style hearkens back to, perhaps most notably, DooM and Dragon Quest, in a mish-mash that largely takes these systems and puts them into sprawling maps. Luckily, you are equipped with a speed booster and you can zoom around them quite easily like an ice-skating hipster on meth, using whatever array of weaponry you’ve decided is best for a given encounter. Generally, bigger guns are for bigger enemies, but interestingly you are given all of the big guns right from the start. Instead, you spend your time passively upgrading these weapons and items and spells in what might be the most complex role-playing game system ever implemented in a full-on first-person shooter.
Complex is really an understatement. You will spend a long time staring at percentages and wondering what the hell the various percentages are supposed to be modifying. Though you have a general breakdown of fighter/hacker/mage stats (such as Strength/Intelligence/PSI Force), there are entire sections which have nothing to do with stats at all, an entire research library that you gather while playing the game and researching to see if there’s anything “useful” in whatever you’ve found. Some of these upgrades are hugely applicable to play, others do little, and still others do nothing, or provide flavor text. It’s actually a rather ingenious way to get the player into the lore, as it requires little work to get the player interested in upgrades, simply putting the flavor right in there adds a lot to the cyberpunk/steampunk/futurist murderface game.
E.Y.E is extraordinarily intimidating to those not used to lots of menus and a willingness to experiment. There are walls of menus of which many are not obvious as to how to get them to function correctly. These menus represent, in quite a lot of detail, everything about the character within the game, and there’s also about half an hour of tutorial videos built into another menu to explain everything. But really, who wants to sit through half an hour of tutorial videos to play a game? What makes it even worse is that they’re also inside a menu, and the menu itself is pretty intimidating. Though it certainly explains how to do everything in the game, the menus themselves are not all that friendly. They are functional, but considering they don’t do important things like save your hotkeys very well, it can be fairly frustrating to simply interact with this game at first.
E.Y.E is a game unlike most other first-person shooters I’ve played or seen. It has an original aesthetic, enjoyable combat (and a pretty much endless supply of it), and while the story is not something I really understand even now, it’s acceptable enough to get the game to where it needs to go, even if it uses what essentially amounts to the World of Warcraft questing model (talk to guy A, kill guys at B, come see me at C). I’m unsure whether I could honestly recommend this game to a general audience. In general, I’d say that it’s a good game that’s probably too hardcore for such an audience. The game doesn’t hold much back, and it expects the player to deal with it. If the player is willing, there’s a lot E.Y.E has to offer players, particularly those who want an alternative to playing a first-person shooter, or really, any menu-driven role-playing game (believe me, this game has MENUS). The game’s fast-paced and the environments are interesting, though navigating them can sometimes be a pain, particularly when it comes to objectives. Overall, it’s a game for players of a certain persuasion, but not everyone, particularly console players spoiled by in-game hand-holding. Give it a shot if you play a lot of games and want a look at something old, and something new.
Recommended: No