Have You Played... E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy?

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is a name so crap I can't even be bothered to mock it. And yet unlike 95% of crap names, I never forget it.

EYE is one of my favourite games. It's a mess. There's so much wrong with it that I could probably slag it off for two full reviews, but I still like it too much.

The plot is as mad as anything in Metal Gear Solid, except less desperate to treat women like shit and pretend it's subversive, or beat you over the head with how smart it thinks it is. Its setting is a monstrous Frankenstein of a dozen other works, somehow made into their own distinctive shape. And that shape is weird. You're an amnesiac samurai priest in some distant, galactic future, partly alien and partly cybernetically enhanced inquisitor in a civil war between... oh god who even knows, it's utterly nonsense and whichever ending you choose doesn't end it anyway. It all just loops you back around to the beginning, where you have to walk through a dream in which you've just murdered your mentor to get back to the game whenever you die or reload.

It's ludicrous. Your Deus Ex-like augmentations range from indispensible to useless. Your upgradeable body parts gradually, over scores of levels, turn you into an unstoppable sword-slinging Spring-Heeled Jack, or a superhacker who can take control of an interceptor (like the one in the sewers. Somehow) and have it fight for you. Almost every cool thing you can do and every brilliant idea it has is massively flawed in some way - hacking is a tedious chore, mind control is extremely buggy, the entire mental health system is utterly wasted (you can cure anything for free at any time by pressing one button). The writing is juvenile and incomprehensible, and the AI really just swarms you constantly.

But one time I was trapped at the top of a flight of stairs when the feds attacked, and I leapt off the top floor, spun around 180 degrees, shot an agent in the head in mid-air, and landed unharmed on my upgraded cyber-legs before massacring another dozen of them with my rifle, shotgun, sword, and grenades. Most of the guns are freely available from the very start, including a pistol that spews out about 45 bullets per second, an anti-tank rifle, and an absolutely devastating minigun. It's the source of some of the most memorable shootouts I've ever had.