Despite several shortcomings, Divine Cybermancy is a surprisingly solid first person shooter with RPG elements.
Divine Cybermancy runs on the Source engine (like games such as Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2) and despite the engines apparent age, it actually looks pretty good, and isn't exactly demanding in the requirements department. I'd talk more about the graphics, but personally, as most of my favourite games are old gameplay-over-graphics titles, I sort of don't know what to say when it comes to graphics. Either way, the game still looks pretty good on a technological level.
There are a lot of influences to the artistic design. Some of the character art looks like it's been lifted from Warhammer, or from some ancient Samurai armour. A few of the large city hub's where missions take place are reminiscent of cyberpunk classics, like Blade Runner and Deus Ex. These influences; particularly Deus Ex; are also evident in the gameplay.
Gameplay.
Divine Cybermancy is a first-person shooter first and an RPG second. The FPS portion of the gameplay is on a whole, rather satisfying; all the guns sound and feel powerful, and blasting the crap out of a swarm of enemies is as satisfying as ever. Most enemies don't take many bullets, and the almost swarm-like number of often-respawning enemies gives an old school pseudo-Serious Sam feel to the game. There are Cyber-abilities, which will probably remind you more of the augments from Deus Ex and the abilities from Crysis. This includes stuff like an upgradable super-jump power, a quasi-nightvision power which illuminates foes and makes environments really easy to navigate, a shield, and an active-camo cloaking device. All of which can be upgraded in one way or another using Brouzouf, the games currency which can be earned during missions + killing enemies, and can be used to purchase weapons, powers, and upgrade 'implants' which usually affect cybernetic related abilities or general character stats.
The game also has PSI powers, similar to the psychic powers from System Shock 2 (or the plasmids from its spiritual successor, Bioshock) albeit to a much more limited extent. The range of psi-powers isn't very large, and some aren't particularly useful. There are some cool powers though, like the Dragon Breath ability, which teleports you into an enemy making them explode in a lovely explosion (telefragging them). Your mastery of psi powers also extends how heavy objects you can pick up, and with a high PSI stat (more on stats later) you can lift up and hurl cars. Insane stuff.
There is also a half-baked hacking system. At any time, you can call up a hacking menu which allows you to target Bank Dispensers, Humanoid enemies, sentries, etc. Using this you can hack doors to gain entrance, mind control people + turrets to fighting for you (or manually controlling them through possession, which controls pretty poorly) or straight out kill someone. The hacking takes place through this short real-time 'fight' of sorts, similar to the 'active' turn based combat systems seen in some JRPGS. Overall, the hacking system as a whole is pretty unsatisfying; the hacking itself is pretty boring, and is poorly balanced as far as your stats go.
STATS. As part of the RPG elements in E.Y.E, your character has a series of stats which are upgradable when you level up. The main point of upgrading these stats is not so much to affect your character progression as a whole, but to remove restrictions to some of the stronger powers or weapons which require certain stat points to be used. The stats themselves don't seem to have as much of a pronounced effect as the stats in, say, Deus Ex 1. In other words, even with a low accuracy statistic, you'll still be able to whip out your revolver and line up the shots with an enemy bordering on the horizon.
One particular complaint is it's role in hacking. When hacking, your temporary Cyber-stats (as well as that of the enemy) are randomised every-time you try to hack something. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, even when I raised my hacking skill, I still got the same sort of variability and low-cyber stats as I did with a lower skill. For the most parts, your stats seem to have a minimal effect on the actual gameplay. This isn't bad by any means; it just undermines the whole statistic development system.
As far as gameplay is concerned, the different aspects of gameplay all compliment each other, leading to some noteworthy in-game moments. To name a few of my own:
1.) Out of ammo, a sniper was shooting at me. Grabbed a car and threw it at him.
2.) Sniper was laying out a hail of bullets on my allies, along with more federal agents charging me. I used Dragon Breath to teleport up to the sniper, killing him instantly. I then used my rifle to provide covering fire for my allies.
3.) Using the possession in hacking to manually make a looter sprint through the streets screaming as you force him to gun down his looter friends.
4.) Cyberjumping over a wall and behind some pesky turrets, lifting a turret into the air, which then went haywire, shooting wildly and gunning down the Federal Police that it was initially protecting.
5.) Cyberjumping and landing onto a car, which explodes from the pressure and sends the cop standing next to it into a meat-sandwich.
Anyway, level design and mission structure.
The levels are for the most part, pretty large. Most are also very open ended, especially the first main Mission Hub called New Eden (a cyberpunk city full of looters and federal cops). In the solo campaign, you receive a series of objectives marked via on-screen navigation points. There are also hidden NPC's which will give you extra side-missions. Due to the big open levels, there are a lot of different ways to tackle each mission giving a 'Deux Ex' feel to the open-endedness of the gameplay. The main hubs can be revisited through the Temple. Doing so is a good way of grinding for exp and money, as you'll receive a random set of objectives to complete. Sometimes this can be a bit buggy and some of the objectives are pretty crap; I'll mention that.. actually, I'll mention that in the following section.
THE BAD.
As you can tell, I've enjoyed a lot of my time with Divine Cybermancy. However, the game has several shortcomings.
I said earlier that Divine Cybermancy is a shooter first and an rpg second. The character development for the most part, doesn't do that much, and there is little interaction with other characters. When there is dialogue, however, a lot of the writing is pretty poor. This might be a problem stemming from the translation, or maybe just a problem in the writing to begin with. I've heard people comparing the factions, history and story to some of the Warhammer lore, but honestly I can't really say because I've skipped a lot of the History panels you can read through. I can understand the basics of the current plot, and as a whole the story is decent, but is nothing remarkable by any means and is more or less, pretty forgettable for the most part. The hacking is pretty meh, for reasons mentioned earlier. The game can be extremely buggy and prone to crashing. Some of these problems are apparently linked to 32-bit operating systems, or something. But either way, yeah, the game can be pretty crash-worthy. Multiprocessing + Ultra-Violence had to be turned down to stop crashes, along with dropping graphical quality to medium to prevent crashing on loading midgame in one of the earlier levels. All of this was pretty annoying. Sometimes the hacking menu can get borked requiring you to close the game and reopen it, and your polyclone ability almost always leaves you surrounded and trapped by your ai partners. The 'karma' function (which does little but affect how likely you are to receive fatal stat reducing wounds on death) is so buggy and can randomly skyrocket from 0 to 100 with little warning at some times. The music is pretty average, and for the most part, pretty absent too. Also, on the secondary missions, some of the objectives don't show up and it makes finding them an excercise of frustration. Also, I personally had a lot of trouble with Transcoms for an objective in New Eden never appearing anywhere, and therefore being indestructable making the temporary quest unfinishable and forcing me to quit and go back in to get different objectives.
In Summary:
I personally enjoyed Divine Cybermancy, and I'd love to give it a higher score if it wasn't for some issues. It had bugs, surely, but it was lengthy game, and the variety of different gameplay options and abilities at your disposal lead to some awesome moments. The problems I've encountered have hampered my enjoyment, but not enough to sullen my overall appreciation of what is otherwise a good, solid game. It's cheap enough to give it a try, so support the developers and at least try it out if it appeals to you in any way.