E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy

Where am I?

This weird trope page again, deja vu!

E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy is cooperative FPS/RPG by French studio Streum On Studio, with a distinct everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sci-fi flavor. Taking notes from nearly every work of Cyberpunk literature and incorporating classic brutal roleplaying techniques. You play as a member of an ancient demon-fighting cult, the E.Y.E., who was afflicted with Laser-Guided Amnesia and must remember why he was sent on the mission that gave him his amnesia. Along the way you uncover more and more about the incredibly complex backstory and the internal struggle of E.Y.E between his own faction - the Culter Dei - and the Jian Shang Di.

Gameplay-wise, it plays like a combination of a modern shooter and Deus Ex, with all the hilarious ways things can go horribly wrong in a tabletop game. A player can run through the game run-and-gun, go the route of a cyber-samurai - slaughtering foes with their exploding katana or laying down a wall of lead, while using implants to vault into the sky or sprint at 30 miles an hour, hack and possess enemies to get them to kill their buddies, cloak and snipe, or spam mobile turrets while aiding their teammates with medkits, or use psychic powers to fling cars at enemies and Flash Step to their enemies... by teleporting inside their buddy and turning them into wet meat. Players can find technology briefcases which unlock different research items; by selecting a research item and assigning scientists to it, the player can discover new cybernetics, guns, and stat bonuses.

Players doing the main story can find secondary objectives and quests by exploring the large levels, while completing their primary objectives. Between missions, you often stop by the EYE Temple HQ to purchase new guns, implants, and psychic abilities. While at the Temple, you can also engage in side missions for more money at locations you've previously been to, which have randomly generated objectives (such as assassinating a high-ranking enemy, defending allies, hacking computers, and so on).

Development started in 2006; this is Streum's first video game (their previous work being a board game and an obscure Half-Life 1 mod that EYE serves as a spiritual successor to). It was developed on the Source engine and is now on sale via Steam. Critics praised the game's variety, replay-ability, coop, and style, but criticized the often clumsy translations ^note It was supposedly rectified in a fan-made patch available on the EYE forums, but many criticize that patch for stripping away much of the game's mysticism. Also, several French players have come forward to say that the text was just as bizarre and grammatically clunky in the original French, confusing level layout and interface design.

This game contains examples of:

• Absent Aliens/Invisible Aliens: There are aliens, other than the Meta-Streumic Force, but are only referenced in the Library. The poor translation of the backstory, readable in the library, apparently had a war spring between a humanoid race, indistinguishable from humans, aside from their third eye, and the humans themselves, after a series of misunderstandings.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The maximum level is 250. You can easily finish the game around level 50. Including the multiple playthroughs required to achieve the true ending.
• Achievement Mockery: The game has several such achievements:
  • "Nuclear Man" for gibbing yourself with the Excidium cannon.
  • "Low Tech Dummy" for being hacked by a door.
  • "Doctor Hyde" for "accidentally" teamkilling an ally through medkit overdose.
  • Plus a variety of achievements for going insane.
• Alternate Timeline: If you die in combat it costs you a regeneration, and you spring back to life basically on the spot. You only have a limited number of these per mission, and since unless you're playing as a tanking character in heavy armor you're going to die a lot, they are valuable. When you run out of regenerations or otherwise die in a fairly 'permanent' way (such as falling into an area you're not supposed to be, hence cannot be revived in), your character will find himself in the dream hub area that you arrive in upon loading your character, and is informed that the "death" that just occurred was just a premonition of a future in which he failed, allowing you to continue from an invisible checkpoint with all your regenerations restored.
• All Just a Dream: After killing Rimanah and examining the "artifact" regardless of your decision near the end of the game, you're awake and discover that there is no such thing as "Mentor" and "Rimanah". Then there is the objective marker to the same "artifact" you examine before you're awake. Then you're back at the dream gate... and the game loops back, allowing you to unlock the other route and gate ability.
• Anachronism Stew: An incredibly strange variant. The game's style is an anachronism of a plethora of sci-fi classics, from The Matrix (referenced by name, even), Warhammer 40,000, Fallout, Ghost in the Shell, and a backstory Lost would be proud of.
  • The weapons take this further. Advanced firearms coexist side-by-side with war hammers and katanas. And those firearms are considered ancient tech!
  • And finally we have armor, with Badass Longcoats, military-inspired bulletproof armor, and cyberpunk jumpsuits alongside armor reminiscent of medieval knights and Japanese samurai.
    • The best way of putting it is Hardcore Cyberpunk, which is what this setting/genre is called.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Enemies will always drop ammunition for the weapons you are carrying, regardless of how little sense it makes.
• Artificial Brilliance: Mooks intelligently throw grenades to attempt to flush players out of cover. Psychic enemies will often cast polyclones upon seeing the player. Attack helicopters will spam rockets at players in cover, to try and kill them with splash damage. Mooks also bumrush the enemy in an attempt to overwhelm them if they hear the player reloading.
• Artificial Stupidity: Mooks often have "difficulties" opening doors, sometimes won't even notice the player (that is, when their laser vision doesn't work). Mooks sometimes get stuck on each other, and sometimes stand totally in the open, not moving. As such, the game typically kills the player by drowning them in waves of dozens of mooks... and any enemy that's hostile to another faction. Like "giant cyberdemon what fires gatling rockets" or "gunship impervious to small arms fire".
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Excidium cannon is best described as a BFG9000; it's massive, has a splash damage radius that can kill targets over a dozen meters away, and is perfectly accurate. Unfortunately, because of said huge splash radius, you're as likely to blow yourself to bits as the enemy, making it impractical in most of the mission areas, aside from the Noctis Labyrinth. You even get an achievement from nuking yourself with the Excidium. Melee can be this - due to the game's fondness for throwing hordes of enemies at you with knockback weapons, the only time someone should take a melee weapon is if they're wearing heavy armor and have a medkit.
• Back Stab: Swords can perform a one-hit-kill, silent backstab attack. It sounds fine for the Facere Mortis katana, but when you use the Damocles, the enemy also explodes rather violently when you backstab them. The Arrancadora can also backstab, but it's not like it particularly needs it.
  • Due to the way the game is programmed, you can also backstab helicopters.
• Bad Ass Longcoat: All Federation goons wear some, of the Killzone variety.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The Federation, the Metastreumonic Force, and Rimanah.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Some of the names present in the game. One of the best examples is the Arrancadora de Tripas, which is Brazilian Portuguese for "Guts Ripper". Accurate denomination, for what it does, despise being a techy sledgehammer...!
  • The name of the currency in the game, Brouzouf, is simply a French slang term for money.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: You are a member of EYE, the militant wing of the Secreta, which is dedicated primarily to protecting humanity from demons (and now, the Meta-Streumic Force) and is divided into two subgroups, the Culters and the Jians. You also have the Federation which is supposedly a totalitarian government. EYE fights them not so much to liberate the masses, but to make a grab for power for itself. Then you start finding out that the monsters of the metastreumonic force are a manifestation of the natural environments across countless planets that have been destroyed by Humanity, and some Humans are even siding with the monsters. The only obviously evil side is the one you're told you're part of, which are a group of fanatical Culters trying to make a power grab for itself, are obsessed with killing off the Jians, and take hold of Federation worlds. Outside of them, it's pretty open to debate on who's the real "good" team.
  • In Rimanah's route, a member of the Secreta shows up to berate you for blindly following Rimanah. Mentor was a mole for the Secreta as a whole, trying to stop the civil war and remove Rimanah from power.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: While it's not too bad compared to other examples, there are some examples of sloppy translation, and it notably gets worse as the game goes on. See Guide Dang It! below. There is a mod that makes things more clear on the official Steam forum, but some players have derided it for removing some of the charm.
• BFG: The Heavy Weapons department, particularly the Excidium which seems to be a massive semi-automatic cannon that awards an achievement for blowing oneself up with its splash damage.
• BFS: The Damocles sword, which is essentially a claymore with weird energy generators on it to make the sword's blade explode stuff on contact.
• Boom, Headshot!: Scoring hits to the heads of enemies do far more damage than anywhere else on their anatomies and rewards you with more Brouzouf. Sometimes, one well-placed headshot with certain powerful guns (such as sniper rifles), especially if they haven't noticed your presence yet, will make their heads asplode.
• Boring, but Practical: The S6000 assault rifle and the silenced B.O.S.C.O. sniper rifle. These are bog-standard bullet weapons, but they both have plenty of ammunition (100 rounds per mag for the S6000, and 25 for the BOSCO) and have reasonable accuracy and stopping power for their purposes. This is, in fact, the reason why three incredibly low-tech rifles are issued to Federal forces four hundred years in the future: they're cheap, reliable, and ammo is plentiful.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: There's Federation gunships, KraakNaguls (giant Minotaur-like creatures dual-wielding sledgehammers), and Deus Ex (which are essentially Doom cyberdemons with the Serial Numbers Filed Off). Gunships and Deus Ex are almost unbeatable without armor-piercing weaponry, though the Dragon's Breath psi ability insta-kills Deus Ex just like any other enemy.
• Cast From Hitpoints: The Power Converter augment will allow you to convert your blood (health) into energy - using a mechanical device bolted onto your heart
• Chekhov's Gunman: On the mission on Sulaco, you will come across three friendly Synicles. They'll (if you allow them) tell you about a very powerful psyker hunting down and fighting a wolf spirit. All three of them have a spin on it - he was angry, he was evil, he was sad, and so on, but all of them question if he truly defeated the wolf spirit - or fused with him. If you listened to each Synicle, he shows up as a Carnophage, apparently to settle a score with Rimanah and his goons.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The player. You can betray EYE for the Federation, then once you get onboard the Federation cruiser, backstab them.
• Cluster F-Bomb: The player character is very fond of the word in dialogue choices.
• Continuing Is Painful: The game has an odd mix of this and Death Is Cheap. On one hand, when you die, you're immediately resurrected where you stand as long as you have a Resurrector remaining; running out of Resurrectors just sends you back to the last checkpoint (often, but not always, the start of the level) with your Resurrectors replenished. And you start out with the ability to hold 10 resurrectors, and can buy more. The catch? Every time you die, you also have a risk of getting a functionally permanent 'fatal wound', penalizing multiple stats. While it's theoretically possible to cure these penalties (and become immune to further ones), the process is a Guide Dang It! that requires multiple rare Random Drop items and costs several orders of magnitude more brouzoufs than you'd be able to afford in the course of a normal playthrough.
• Coop Multiplayer: The game has full online cooperative support for the entire singleplayer and all its side missions. If you're crazy enough, you could have a 32 player coop game running.
• Cool Mask: The intricate horned/halo designs of Commander Rimanah and your mentor.
• Corrupt Cop: Corrupt Federals, Secreta members, Culters, Jians, and on and on. Rimanah turns out to be this, playing everyone against the Jians for his own gain. Your mentor and the "real" EYE was against him.
• Cosmic Horror: The Metastreumonic Force is everywhere, and it relentlessly sends its beasts to attack humans. Nobody seems to know if it is even possible to attack the Force directly or otherwise overcome it or if the best anyone can hope for is to repel its attacks.
• Crapsack World: More like Crapsack Universe. Virtually every humanity's figures of authority are vying for power against each other despite the world was threatened by extradimensional beings and Humanoid Abominations. Those that didn't affiliate with the aforementioned figures of authority form the Looter, who indulge themselves with drugs, illicit substance trading, and alcohol. The only organization that's actually trying to do anything about said invasion is also corrupt as shit and trying to seize power for themselves — or, at least, one person is, and the rest of EYE is trying to do something about him...
• Critical Failure: Owed from its tabletop influences, this is very common and often hilarious. The most common Critical failure is a failed attack — "Bullshit! Ultra-failed attack!", which does reduced damage, which becomes hilarious if you managed to kill the target of your ire anyways. However, it's also possible to get tainted medicine - instantly killing you. Hacking can cause your head to explode if the opponent counterhacks you. And some of the psychic abilities have the change to spontaneously kill you.
• Cyborg: Players are encouraged to augment themselves with appropriate cybernetic components. A hacker might replace parts of his brain with a computer, a swordsman might install a large artificial adrenalin gland near their heart and tear out their nervous system for a much more complex circuit board, a gunman might have their limbs replaced with hi-tech prostheses to reduce recoil, et cetera.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Each story arc rewards you with a unique and hyper-lethal "Gate" psychic ability. The Hypnotic Gate instantly and permanently paralyzes an enemy, Triangular Gate warps an enemy out of reality, and Substitution causes the player to be healed if the enemy takes damage, and damage the enemy if the player is hurt. All of the abilities are also hyper-lethal for the user, as they have a very high probability to fling the user towards random directions at lethal speeds, drive them insane, fry their brains, or cause permanent trauma which hurts stats and persist even after resurrector usage.
  • Of course, one can remove these permanent traumas with Bioregenerations, Which also prevents you from having said traumas again. They have been fixed since 1.3, but not everyone is sure if these powers prevent you from them for good.
  • The powers become a lot less lethal when you combine them: hitting an enemy with Hypnotic Gate makes him easy pickings for the Triangular Gate (which is too dangerous to use without a reasonable guarantee you'll hit), and if you've hit him with the Substitution Gate before that you'll instantly regain all your health and sanity too. Opinions differ on whether or not this has some connection to the overarching story.
• Dead All Along: Mentor and Rimanah, but possibly others - and it's very likely others are seeing them as well. Who knows, maybe EYE does not really exist, and you are just a brain in a jar somewhere...
• Difficult, but Awesome: A more beneficial way in dealing with Interceptors is by hacking their AI, having control of one will let them sweep the area and kill a whole lot of lightly armored enemies, especially with its missiles. But hacking them is so painfully hard: you have to make them lower their depth of flight just to be able to even start, meanwhile, you're worrying about your stamina draining as you remain cloaked while doing so - and that's if the Interceptor doesn't leave your hacking range while you're fighting a brutal battle to get inside its systems.
• Doppelgänger Attack: The Polyclone ability allows the player (and some mooks) to summon up to 6 clones. The clones typically die in one or two hits from even the weakest gun, but they are capable of using incredibly powerful weaponry. An alternate version of the Polyclone ability can be bought in the library, which instead summons a single, much more durable clone.
• Dump Stat: Mental Balance, which reduces the likelihood of insanity or Madness to use the mechanical term. Depending on your playstyle, this may or may not be useful - the Maintenance skill only takes a few seconds and cures all ailments, but as the game prefers Zerg Rushes near constantly, those few seconds may be very, very precious...yet in practice it's rarely an actual hindrance. Late-game research makes the user totally immune to madness, making the stat pointless.
• Electronic Eyes: The Cyber Eyes implant and EYE Vision.
• Elite Mooks: Federation Special Forces and Shock Troopers are equipped with energy weapons, which no other faction in the game has access to (Special Forces use a long-range continuous laser beam and are often stationed as snipers, while Shock Troopers fire explosive energy grenades); they also have cloaking devices as well as energy shields that let them withstand several hits before falling. Then there are rival E.Y.E. operatives, especially the Master-level ones who have powerful dermal armor that can absorb multiple full magazines from any non-armor-piercing weapon, and will use Psi Clone to create a handful of weak clones of themselves to aide them in combat.
• Evil Is Not Well-Lit: The Federation Cruiser which you board if you betray the Secreta, is very badly lit, with the only lighting being a couple spotlights.
• Expy: The Deus Ex Machina enemy looks an awful lot like a certain iconic ''Doom'' enemy...
• Face–Heel Turn: invoked by your superiors - in one mission, to track down leaked information stolen by pirates, you have to go undercover as a disgraced Jian to work for a bandit group operating in a run-down mall somewhere.
  • Your mentor apparently turns on you if you sided with him on Mars during the final battle, but he's invoking it - when you kill him, he leaves a message, saying that you've gained enough strength by absorbing his to take on Rimanah and his goons. This gives you a Triangular Gate PSI power.
  • And finally, you can join the Federation, provided you take the right dialog choices on Mars when a Federation agent offers you a chance.
• Fictional Currency: Brouzouf is essentially the game's version of universal credits.
• Final Boss: The game always ends with a final showdown against Commander Rimanah regardless of which of the three ending paths you end up choosing.
• Fragile Speedster: Light Armor. Even at high levels, you can be nearly-instagibbed by enemies wielding the Hunting Machine or Bear Killer, and even squads of Federation troopers armed with the humble Rotten Mound will gun you down quite easily. However, you'll also be able to run around at truly ridiculous speeds, once you've leveled up your agility and cyber-legs.
• Gaia's Vengeance: The Metastreumonic Force, the wrathful manifestation of thousands of destroyed ecosystems wrecked by colonization.
• Gas Mask, Longcoat: Federal Police and Light Armor Jian mooks.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The majority of the Federal Police and Federal Special Forces along with Jian Light and Heavy armor.
• Gatling Good: The Sulfatum minigun. Fires a solid wall of bullets from a 500 round drum.
• Genius Bruiser: The protagonist can be this, quoting Sun Tzu and the like.
• Glass Cannon: A hit-or-miss variant; Polyclones are copies of yourself that are under your orders. They die in less than 2-3 shots. What makes this a hit or miss is that the weapons they get are relevant to your PSI-Force (And they don't get the appropriate weapons for the situation either); they earn weapons which are either good for crowd control, or are only good at single targets.
• Goomba Stomp: You can do this if you can jump high enough, and it does damage your enemies.
• Gratuitous Latin:
  • The Facere Mortis katana's name is (bad) Latin for "Maker of death".
  • The Spiculum Ovum grenade launcher's name translates to "spike egg".
• Grenade Launcher: The Spiculum Ovum. It fires manually detonated Kinder grenades in a nearly straight trajectory, which will stick to any surface.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: While you cannot carry dead enemies, you can pick up their dismembered pieces. So if you exploded a bandit with the Damocles, you can then pick his head up and psychically hurl it at other looters to kill them.
• Guide Dang It!: The penultimate level, if you choose to spare your Mentor; he sends you to find someone called Akmal. This is undoubtedly one of the most annoying levels of the game, and it gives you no hints on how to complete it; you have to solve it by Trying Everything. The level is made even worse by the translations of dubious quality - the game mentions that you need to destroy a "switch" - said switch is a rusty metal wheel in the top corner of the level, which activates some gas below. What it doesn't mention is that you need to shoot the pipe on the level below twice to actually ignite the gas.
  • On the upside, it also doubles as a Breather Level after the long slog on Mars, with no combat whatsoever.
  • The process to cure an otherwise permanent fatal wound is long, obscure, and costs several hundred thousand brouzoufs.
  • The last few levels (once you reach Mars) are borderline unbeatable without armor-piercing weapons, as the Interceptors, Deus Ex, and boss fights are extremely difficult without one.
• Guns Akimbo: The BK13 pistols. Two rapid fire pistols, one in each hand.
• Guns Are Worthless: Mostly Averted. Most Mooks can be dropped in a couple of well placed shots, but a character possessing high endurance and wearing heavy armor will take next to nil damage from low-caliber weapons.
• Hacking Minigame: A unique example; all hacking attempts are subdivided into what you want to do (Possess, Hack, Destroy, or Steal) at which point a battle minigame is played out where both the player and the object being attacked attempt to gain the stat advantage and reduce their opponents health to 0.
• Hand Blast: If an enemy gets too close, causing the player to lower their weapon, their attack button will make them shoot a psychic blast from their left hand. The blast is capable of causing weak enemies to explode in a shower of blood, while more powerful enemies are violently shoved back. The psychic blast can also be done when sprinting, and it has a chance of setting an enemy on fire.
• Hand Cannon: All of your pistols. You start off with a .50 cal as the bog-standard handgun, and you can also use dual .45s if that's more your style. Later on you unlock a .222 cal revolver that packs a bigger punch than the last two, but the king is the .444 cal Bear Killer revolver. It's so damn powerful that you can shoot down gunships with a few shots.
• Heroic BSoD: Gameplay variant. Constantly fighting while damaged or consistently taking damage, especially while suffering an injury (broken bone or laceration) will cause excess stress. Too much and the player character falls into a psychosis, ranging from hallucinating enemies and paranoia, or even the controls locking up and the character freezing in terror. An ability can be used to apply "maintenance" to yourself, and get your mind back in the game.
• Hub Level: The Temple HQ.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Synicles, which looks like veiled (but wearing a revealing coat) woman. They didn't speak (except one non-hostile instance later in the game) and will gun down everyone except their own regardless of afiliation. One easily missable dialogue from one of the EYE member said that The Synicle is a metastreumonic projection of the wife of a past EYE commander who was murdered by her own husband.
• I Have a Family: A random kill message you can get is that "You've killed a good and caring daddy".
• Improbable Aiming Skills: The Targeting System implant allows you to temporarily remove all weapon inaccuracy and recoil, allowing you to fire your fully automatic weapons with perfect accuracy while running or jumping through the air. The implant is pretty much required to use the HS010's 3000 rounds-per-minute firing mode.
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • Of all the things you can throw... in one level where you assault a Jian Temple after killing your Mentor, you can actually kill a group of them by throwing a porcelain jar.
  • On city maps, you won't find jars. But you will find cars. If your PSI force is high enough, they are very throwable cars. Possibilities abound...
• In a Single Bound: High levels of Agility and several levels of Cyber Legs gives the player character an absurdly powerful Cyber Jump ability - jumping several stories into the air.
• Infinite Supplies: The Mobile Armory somehow has a bottomless amount of weapons, armor, and ammo for you to replenish your gear.
• Industrial Ghetto: The Wurster Corp level is this, complete with a thick haze of green pollution.
• Interface Screw: This has a chance of happening in true Cowboy Bebop fashion if you fail the Hacking Miniga- YOU'VE BEEN HACKED
• Inter-Service Rivalry: The Culters and Jians, both divisions of the demon-fighting EYE foundation, are at each others' throats, mostly struggling for power. There's also Vindico the Corporation, which is supposed to be a front for the Culters, but as of late, has been cutting more deals for the Federation and feeding info to the Jians.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Players have several slots for carrying equipment - a huge back slot to carry two-handed weapons, and 4 shoulder/thigh holsters for one-handed weapons. Each location has a grid which weapons and ammo is inserted to, and weapons physical size effects the shape and size of their inventory use. A Damocles is very long but narrow, so it uses the entire vertical portion of the back holster, but only uses 1 horizontal space, allowing you to also carry a "tall" weapon like the Rotten Mound in the same slot. Heavy weapons use most or all of the back holster, limiting what you can carry (in addition to the weight malus imposed by heavy weapons)
• Invisibility Cloak: Cyber cloak, which is an implant you can buy at the Temple. It gives the player a Predator-esque invisibility, which enemies can see close up, but only barely see from afar - they will head to your general direction if they see you running around while invisible.
• Jack of All Stats: Equilibrium Lords, when properly built are able to adapt to any situation while being suited for anything you pack them with. Further developing this particular class into a Grey Master can lead to a character that can use his Medikit effectively, run fairly fast despite wearing heavy armor, hack turrets fairly faster, take considerable amounts of damage, prolong the time it takes to suffer a Heroic BSoD, and cast PSI-Powers VERY effectively (Wherein casting an Invocation commonly spawns a powerful Carnophage).
• Justified Extra Lives: Your character's "Resurrector" revives you from clinical death a limited number of times with a cocktail of drugs. Dying by either falling into a pit or running out of Resurrector charges causes you to wake up in the monolith area again as a character explains that your previous attempt was All Just a Dream.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Energy weapons used to be better, until the humans started to fight the metastreumonic forces. Faced with the fact that energy weapons are nearly ineffective against them but kinetic weapons are effective they began using kinetic weapons from Dark Age again. Energy weapons are still used by Federation Special Forces, who primarily fight humans, and are extremely powerful; successfully hack a Special Forces sniper and they can lock down an entire sector or even bring down a gunship with their laser rifle.
• Klingon Promotion: Invoked by your Mentor. He attacks you when you arrive to back him up in the assault on the Culter Dei headquarters if you sided with him at the end of the Mars mission, claiming You Have Outlived Your Usefulness — but only because Rimanah and his goons severely wounded him and that killing him would cause you to absorb his power, which will help you defeat Rimanah.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Notable in that it is very laser-guided: the protagonist remembers practically everything except for plot-relevant information. Though the reason behind this becomes evident if you get the hidden ending.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Zig-zagged; although PSI-powers are devastating on their own right, they consume a chunk of your stamina enough for you to notice that they aren't always good to use. Endurance (despite being a health increasing stat) reduces stamina costs for Cybernetics (Another way of spending your stamina if you're not into powers though "Stamina" is used for said powers) by a tiny percentage and an implant for the heart increases Stamina recovery rate...with that said, any class has the freedom to choose their armor size and can have any weapon available at the armory with the right carrying weight. However, after a certain point, levelling up becomes prohibitively grindy, so you'll need to carefully distribute your points.
• Lightning Bruiser: Dump enough points into Speed, and you're able to stay reasonably fast in Heavy Armor, packing a Hunting Machine to one-hit-kill enemies or a gatling gun to mow 'em down.
  • By the time you hit level 120, you will be fast enough to chase down cars, strong enough to do so with heavy armor on, resilient enough to take rockets to the face without any complaint at all, and deadly enough to kill people just by willing it hard enough. When your energy drops down, you can re-energize yourself completely for a small sliver of your health, then annihilate a group of soldiers by teleporting into them and regain all your health in the process. The only thing that could possibly put you down at this point is other people just like you. In the dozens. You'll still probably win.
• Lost Technology: Technology from the "Dark Ages". Some weapons and technology are relics from it, like the "Medkit" healing system.
• The Lost Lenore: Upon achieving the true ending, you find out that the plot was driven by Rimanah's guilt for the torture and execution of his wife Circe, and as a result was trapped in a cycle until he could redeem himself.
• Luck-Based Mission: At the beginning, when you roll a new character your stats are randomly determined. The variance is huge; it's entirely possible for a well-rolled character to be as powerful at the beginning of the game at level 1 as a poorly rolled character at level 25-30 in the endgame. Fortunately, you can keep rerolling your stats until you get a roll you're comfortable with, and rolling with a mix of 3 Metastreumonic genes seems to result in the greatest variance but also gives the best potential results.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Large caliber weapons will often cause enemies to simply explode in a cloud of blood and assorted limbs. The Damocles sword causes enemies to explode (and send arms and other body parts flying), while the Facere Mortis simply lops heads off. Critical killshots may also cause limbs to fly.
• Metaphorically True: The player-character sees a difference between killing his mentor and being his murderer. This is true for two endings - he's either brainwashed into killing his Mentor, or his Mentor tricks him into killing him, sacrificing himself to empower the protagonist to take on Riminiah.
• Mighty Glacier: Heavy Armor is nigh-indestructible, but is slow if you don't put enough points into speed, and has less capacity for heavy guns. Players in Heavy Armor can have a dozen enemies wailing on them and only take a small amount of damage - and given the game's fondness for zerg rushes, this is very useful.
• Mind Screw: The entire game gets progressively weirder the closer you get to the end until it culminates in you waking up in the base and finding out that neither your master nor Rimanah have actually been around, others are having dreams just like yours, and at the end you step into a portal where the Mysterious person tells you some cryptic things along with Rimanah and the Mentor before sending you back to the start of the game. You have no way of knowing what events, if any, actually happened.
  • At least, most notable event that may have actually happened (The New Game+ "of sorts" makes it confusing) was the Monolith mission where you can talk to the 2 unimportant Culters. One tells you that you've been talking to yourself lately (Mentor and Rimanah), while the other thought that your Mentor already died on a previous mission with you, but was easily convinced that he wasn't when you denied it.
  • Gets even crazier if you side with Rimanah. Apparently, he's had you brainwashed and now you see all your friends in the order as enemies and vice versa. Huan, that guy who has been mocking you like a schoolyard bully from the beginning, was apparently your best friend. Your impossible-to-please mentor? Apparently, he's more like a level-headed father figure.
    • If only it just stopped there. Your Recurring Dreams are sometimes triggered by your death and you are told you only saw a glimpse of the future. All of your resurrection charges are replenished afterward. Or maybe in reality your mind was wiped once more; plugged into another body and shipped out on the same mission. Just how many other operatives has Rimanah been doing this to? And the worst part about this, you start realizing that your character was not all too sane to begin with, or just about anybody you meet for that matter.
    • And that's all before you unlock the hidden ending. Apparently, you're actually either the head of the Secreta or Commander Rimanah himself, and you've been condemned to an endless, multiversal loop of the events of the games for your unspecified crimes. The only way to break out is to attempt to fuse the two timelines - Riminah and Mentor's - together, but as you're sent back to the cave, it failed.
  • Lampshaded by the Carnophage who allies with you in the endgame if you found three hidden Synicles in the Sulaco mission. You can doubt your own sanity at everything that's happened so far and if anything is even real, at which he'll shrug and say "if it's in your head, you're not really any killing anyone, so no damage done, right?"
• Money Spider: Every enemy you come across drops Brouzouf when killed/destroyed. The money is automatically transferred to your interface once this is done.
• More Dakka: The HS010 submachine gun can be best described as a bullet hose. It already fires faster than most guns in other games - and there's a firemode to triple its fire rate to around 3000 rounds per minute.. The hundred round magazines lets you wildly spray the gun - which you will need to do, since it can't hit the broad side of an aircraft carrier in rapid fire mode. Good thing you can install an implant which removes recoil entirely when activated. The Sulfatum and S6000 are no slouches in this department, either - the former being a giant gatling, and the latter a Dark Age assault rifle that has a hundred bullets in each mag.
• Multiple Endings: 4, all of which are determined by your actions on Mars. The first ending has you siding with your Mentor to kill Rimanah, one where you defect to the Federation and wipe out the Secreta (which also results in Rimanah's death), one where you side with Rimanah and kill your Mentor, and a final, hidden Gainax Ending that's only available when you clear all three previous endings.
• New Game Plus: Every time you beat the game, you start over from the first mission, but retain all your research, levels, guns, and psychic abilities. It is necessary to play the game three times in order to get each of the Gate abilities, unlocked on the final mission of each story branch.
• Nintendo Hard: "Master" and above difficulty, when playing solo, especially after the major nerfs to ammo storage - players need to actually scavenge for ammo now.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: You can find a looter lieutenant named Andras on the Electric Sheep level who justifies his raping, killing, and looting of civilians by saying that they do nothing to fix the broken society they live in and instead cowardly escape their problems through drugs, video games, and partying.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Several enemies spawn where you're not looking. Even if this means they spawn directly behind you with no obvious ways to that spot when examined.
• Oh, Crap!: As enemy groups get cut down, they start screaming things like "Ai sedai sedai!" (which we hope means 'oh crap' in futurespeak) and general groans of pain and despair.
• Omega Ending: The "true" ending can only be seen after acquiring the 3 Gate abilities from the 3 different normal ending paths.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: The theme of Temple HQ has it at the end. This music box tune is played again in the ending theme.
• One Bullet Clips: A nice and rare aversion of this trope for a shooter... despite being far in the future and where magic outright exists.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: The Damocles is a 15kg high-tech katana normally held with both hands, but by using the Sword and Gun combo (with a fully automatic .45ACP pistol nonetheless) it can be held one-handed with the only downside being a slower swing speed. Probably helps that the players are heavily augmented
• One-Hit Kill:
  • The Arrancadora, Bear Killer, and Excidium will kill any human-sized enemy with a single hit. Backstabs will kill anything in one hit.
  • The Triangular Gate psychic ability can kill anything in one hit on a successful use, including endgame bosses.
• Parrying Bullets: The Facere Mortis and Damocles swords can be used to deflect/absorb bullets - even if you're being shot at by a guy holding a Sulfatum. However, this is a result of a nigh-impenetrable force field that drains your stamina for every shot. While you can still block without stamina, the results are what you'd expect it to be.
• Press X to Die: On Mars, the Immortal King offers you to join his army of the dead (with predictable consequences if you agree).
• Psychic Powers: Either they are recruited into dual-government/different government special forces or E.Y.E. Rogue psychers are actively hunted down.
• Punny Name: Because come on, "Meta-Streum On-ic" forces?
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: Akmal, the supposedly super-powerful traitor of the Culter Dei. Mentor claims he's as dangerous as ever, but he's senile, tends to go off on tangents, is somewhat grumpy, and devolves into gibberish at times. Even the protagonist wonders what he accomplished by talking to him.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Sergeants, Colonels, and Generals are all tougher than regular Mooks, especially if they're Federation Special Forces or E.Y.E. operatives. The toughest non-boss human enemies in the game are E.Y.E. Masters (including Your Mentor, the Four Pillars, and Huan), who are almost unbeatable unless you have armor-piercing weapons to bypass their dermal armor (they can otherwise soak over 90 rounds of assault rifle fire before dropping). Then there's Final Boss Commander Rimanah, who's 2-3 times even tougher than even the boss-level Masters and can create 2 to 3 times as many Psi Clones as normal, all of whom are equipped with heavy weapons instead of normal ones.
• Real Is Brown: Everything is covered with at least 3 layers of grime, in keeping with the cyberpunk setting. Most maps are brown, but some swap brown for alternate colors - cm_wurster has Real is Green, and cm_sheep has Real is Blue.
• Recurring Dreams: "It is true that I killed my mentor... and yet, I am not his murderer."
• Respawning Enemies: Most areas have respawning enemies, so it's not possible to clear out a level (though you can lock down an area pretty effectively with turrets or by hacking enemy snipers).
• Respawn on the Spot: Resurrectors automatically respawn the player where he died. There's a limited amount of resurrector uses, and they are shared between players in coop mode. Running out of resurrectors or falling into a bottomless pit results in the player being transported back to the dream world.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: The Betty Boom. A sawed off 12 gauge shotgun with iron sights shaped like a cross. Unlike all the other shotguns, it can fit into a hip slot, normally reserved for submachine guns and pistols.
• Scars Are Forever: If your karmic scale is off balance, every time your character dies they'll run the risk of suffering an irreversible stat penalty regardless if they used a resurrector or not.
  • However, a late game research tree removes penalties. If your stats have reached the point that it costs double (or even a massive 25 times as much) to increase each level up, this can increase them at the cost of at least 110,000 credits.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: The game doesn't have a difficulty curve, so much as a difficulty mountain range. The difficulty of missions slams up and down to a hilarious degree at random, courtesy of the enemies and enemy types being randomly generated on most missions. One level may play like a milk-run, with only low-level Looters opposing you, while the next has the Federal Police shoving Interceptors down your throat. And even that easy looter level will decide to bury you in hordes of looters.
• Self-Damaging Attack Backfire: When you fail a hack, there is always a slim possibility that your brain will be fried by the firewall, resulting in instant death regardless of how many resurrectors you had. Using dangerous psychic abilities has a chance to drive you insane, kill you, or give you permanent trauma. Excessive use of the medkit before it has time to regenerate can give you tainted medicine (though you get an achievement for killing an ally with this).
• Self-Duplication: The Polyclone and Transmutation PSI abilities allow you to make copies of yourself. Polyclone will 1 to 6 clones of you, but they are all individually weak and typically die in one hit. Transmutation makes a single copy of you, but it is far more powerful than the polyclones.
• Shapeshifting Seducer: The Synicles look like attractive women in alluring, nun-like coats with Navel-Deep Neckline and are the most humanoid of the creatures spawned by the Metastruemic Force. A few Culter Dei surmise they're actually creatures taking the form of human women to distract or throw off unsuspecting enemies.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The Betty Boom, for obvious reasons, cannot kill past a couple meters. The CAW hammer gets some of this, but not nearly as badly as the Betty Boom and makes up for it by being full auto. The Deprezador on the other hand, averts this entirely, being effective even at fairly long range due to its small choke - the combination of aiming ease, a huge magazine, and massive damage make it a very practical weapon.
• Shout-Out:
  • Legions of elite warriors, belonging to an ancient cult and prone to heresy and civil warfare, stationed all over human space, who are heavily indoctrinated into a cultist mentality, and who have fortresses designed to look like cathedrals. The loading screen quotes are definitely riffs off the "Thought for the day", as well. In the background, a "Dark Age of Technology" happened, which reduced humans to relying on either archaic, lost technology, or using inferior, obsolete weaponry.
    • Manducos are totally not scaled-down, less-lethal Genestealers. They're even formerly human.
  • The bombed-out cathedral in the Wurster Corp level contains a spider-tank - it's in the same position that the Major left it in during the first Ghost in the Shell movie.
  • Investigating a mysteriously-quiet facility with dark hallways, on the planet Sulaco. The main enemies are totally not Xenomorphs, and you nuke the site (but not from orbit). There's also an achievement called "Corporal Hicks".
  • "Doctor Hyde" for teamkilling with a medkit.
  • "Dirty Harry", for killing a bandit with the .222.
  • "Deckard", for destroying a certain Mecha Mook with the .444.
    • Also, one of the regions is named "Electric Sheep".
  • Your personal Scrab says "by your command".
  • You get the achievement "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." for killing an irradiated man, one of the many random achievements you'll get when blasting random mooks. The game seems to affix random titles to random enemies, giving them some inkling of a backstory:
  • "Conan" for killing a... llama.
  • "Untouchable" for killing a corrupt goon.
  • "Miami Vice" for killing a drug addict.
  • "Night Watch" for "killing a strange man".
  • "Natural Born Killer" for killing a "good and caring daddy".
  • The achievement icon for killing an Adventurer is a fedora.
  • Similarly, the icon for the achievement "Paranoid" is a eye hovering over a person.
  • The phrase "Laputan Machine" is used as a code-word in one mission.
  • There's even an achievement called "Full Metal" if you manage to find and kill a homunculus.
• Significant Anagram: The name Rimanah is an anagram of "Ahriman", which is the name of the destructive deity in Zoroastrianism.
• Sniper Pistol: As there is no sway in aiming and very little spread if you aim down the iron sights, it is perfectly feasible to take down faraway snipers even with just the starter Black Crow pistol.
• Sniper Rifle: Three flavors. The BOSCO rifle is the weakest of the bunch, but offers a 25 round magazine, is lightweight, has an easy-to-use scope, and is silenced. The TRK AD is a high-powered .50 cal anti-materiel rifle that can take out attack helicopters in two hits. The Hunting Machine is essentially a Bear Killer in rifle form; it offers even more extreme damage and an 8 round magazine, but lacks a high-powered scope and is stuck with a very distorted holosight. It's more like a semi-automatic rifle.
• Speaking Simlish: Everyone speaks a corrupted, vaguely Slavic/Russian language, or a corrupted, vaguely Japanese language, though almost all of the in-game writings are in English.
• Stealth-Based Mission: You can play most missions in the game like this, only taking out key targets and avoiding the Mooks.
  • However, the enemies have shockingly good eyesight and will open fire if they have a clear line of sight to you. A popular play style has become throwing stealth out the window entirely and instead relying on heavy armor and miniguns.
    • The 1.3 patch essentially allows you to choose this in the options menu, since you can now adjust enemy perceptiveness in the difficulty menu.
• Sword and Gun: It's possible to carry a katana or a Damocles in one hand, and a single BK13 pistol in the other. Once you unlock the Bear Killer, you can swap out the piddly fully automatic .45ACP pistol for a .444 rifle round that can kill attack helicopters.
• Super-Strength: Even at baseline you can throw physics objects at nearly gravity gun speeds. With very high strength stat, you can even throw cars at your enemies.
• Take That!: "You killed a video game censor!"
• Tech Tree: Players can find research briefcases after killing enemies, which will unlock new items for research, though sometimes other things must be researched first. Research is done via a menu in the character screen; the player selects an item to research, and tells how many scientists the wish to assign to the item which will determine the cost and the speed of the research. Research progress is saved between missions.
• The Syndicate: Several, with enough power to contest control of a likely galaxy-spanning empire (background data puts over 1200 worlds in control of the Federation); the main character is a member.
• Tomato in the Mirror: While the truth behind the game's plot is very obtuse, the general fan consensus seems to be that you're actually that commander (see Humanoid Abomination above) who murdered his wife and ended up in a Purgatorial endless repeating cycle as a result. That commander was implied to be Rimanah, which the interpretation seems to be supported by the Steam achievement you get for obtaining the "true" ending.
• Too Dumb to Live: Several times you'll have the option to negotiate with a hostile NPC, usually an officer or commander. You can threaten them to do what you ask or die, and they will frequently refuse to believe you can kill them, even if you cut through their entire force to get to them in the first place.
  • Dutch, in the fourth area. If a monster gets behind him, he'll let it scratch his back with their foot long claws unless you kill them.
    • In addition, EYE agents don't seem to receive sensitivity classes. Its not so much knowing what will tick off a person so much as finding a path through the dialogue tree that does not reduce yourself to declaring to his face that you want to rape his dog, shoot him in the face and use his mother for pipe tobacco. You are just generally not a very nice person, Mr. 100 Karma.
• Unbreakable Weapons: None of the weapons can be destroyed. What makes it especially odd from other Unbreakable weapons in other games is that in this game, you can use your weapons as shields, by holding it up to your chest with the shift and right mouse button depressed. Your gatling gun will happily take several hundred rounds to its receiver and barrel, and keep functioning. The HS010 submachine gun will continue to work perfectly fine even after firing several dozen magazines in its triple fire rate mode, though firing in this mode does make the weapon sound like it's ripping itself apart.
• Used Future: All human-occupied areas are run-down slums, everything's covered in dirt, there's trash everywhere, and most of your weapons are centuries-old designs? Check, check, check, and check.
• Useless Useful Stealth: Though it is possible to be used effectively, Steath drains your energy stores and you must periodically take cover and let it recharge. Though you can easily get around while invisible, enemy NPCs have a habit of accidentally stumbling into your out of the way hiding place with machine guns ready whenever you stop to recharge. In addition most attempts of just sneaking past people are made impossible due to the insane sight range of your foes.
  • It's a bit better with that latest 1.3 patch. You can tone down the vision distance and hearing sensitivity of enemies, but they still have above-average awareness. You can sneak without cloak now though.
• The Virus: It's strongly implied that those killed by the Metastreumonic Force (or at least some of them) are reanimated as creatures under the Force's control. The Force is also able to take control of E.Y.E. operatives that are over-exposed to its power, due to them having been genetically engineered with Metastreumonic genes.
• Was Once a Man: The creatures of the Metastreumonic Force are speculated to be this. The Synicles appear to be the opposite; creatures taking the form of human women. Specifically, Rimanah's wife, Circe.
• Water Source Tampering: In the Forgotten Center level, one of your objectives is to poison the water supply of the bandits with a toxic barrel.
• WcDonald's: In Year 15 (2395 in the old era), the most popular fast food restaurant is named Mc Hack.
• Weaponized Teleportation: The Dragon and Triangular Gate PSI abilities. They both functional fairly similarly - they teleport the player inside an enemy, killing the enemy regardless of its size or health, but the Gate can be very dangerous to the player casting it.
• Whatevermancy: Cybermancy, Necrocybermancy.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Mentor makes full use of any opportunity to berate you, whether it be for getting caught off guard in the prologue and the amnesia that comes with it, or not using stealth to take down a Federation mole in the second mission. On the other hand, he's also quietly proud if you DO follow instructions.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Psychic abilities have a chance to cause insanity or cripple the user. The Gate abilities are almost guaranteed to drive the user insane or outright kill them.
• Who Forgot The Lights?: The game had extremely dark levels to go hand-in-hand with its Cyberpunk themes at its release, to the point where the flashlight (and sometimes EYE Vision) had to be activated pretty much constantly. An update a few weeks after its release increased the lighting brightness in most areas to be more playable.
• The Workhorse: The Rotten Mound and KA93 assault rifles, both of which are centuries old (dating back to the Dark Ages) and extremely simple, but are used heavily by all factions due to their heavy stopping power, low cost, and high accuracy. In-game, they're some of the most common weapons used by enemies, and the preferred weapons for many players due to their versatility.
• Wretched Hive: Practically every heavily-populated area. This game is distinguished by showing just how many strip clubs, brothels, etc. would exist in such places.
• You All Look Familiar: There are about five bandit types (each distinct from the headgear they wear, and nothing else), three models for both factions of the Secreta, one model for the federations, two models for their robot goons (one of which is also used by the Secreta), and four Metastreumatic monsters. Not much else.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Overlaps with Videogame Cruelty Potential in that after you possess someone and make them kill their comrades, you still have to dispatch them yourself because they remain hostile when you break the possession. Rimanah also essentially does this to you if you side with him, but the actual EYE shows up to shake you out of it and tell you what you've done before he can really kill you.
• Your Head Asplode: Most weapons will cleanly take off the head, while others, such as the Bear Killer, will just make it explode in a fine red mist.
• Zeerust: In-universe: most of the in-game weapons are horribly outdated - the RK and Rottenmound are both two centuries old and still in service, since everything else was too expensive to make or lost in a great Dark Age.
• Zerg Rush: In a normal difficulty game, expect the game to throw at least three goons your way every five seconds. At worst, you can get squads of twenty-plus goons coming for you. On normal.

...and yet, I am not its reader."