Sum-Up In-depth analysis further down. 🟩 Pros 🟥 Cons • 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. • 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. 🟨 Bugs & Issues 🔧 Specs • 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. • i9 13980HX • 64GB RAM DDR5 • RTX 4090 • NvME SSD • 3840x2160 Content & Replay Value: 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. Do I Recommend It? 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. Conclusion: 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. Follow the [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41449676/]Summit Reviews Curator and [url=https://summitreviews.biz]Website to see more high-quality reviews regularly. 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.
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