Developed and published by Sig Publishing, City Eye put you in the shoes of a crime-filled city’s CCTV surveillance operator. Keeping a sharp eye on the city, your task is to spot any crime, wanted felons, outbreaks of fire and medical emergencies and duly dispatch the relevant emergency responders.
Upgrade the City’s Security in City Eye
As the eye of the city, the onus is on you to ensure a safe place for your citizens. Starting the game with a single camera, you have a very limited view of Sin City. However, as you fight crime, save lives and put out fires you will earn money to use on more cameras or upgrades.
Handily, these purchases are made from the city map, allowing you to see your current coverage and, in turn, where best to situate your cameras. Once purchased, you can upgrade your equipment to semi-automatic (alerts you to any areas of interest) or, for $5,000, fully-automatic, where the cameras detect emergencies and automatically send out the correct services. Additionally, these frontier tech devices boast face-recognition software. Catch those wanted perps without lifting a finger.
City Eye Quickly Starts to Feel a Little too Rinse and Repeat
The concept of City Eye offers an abundance of possibilities and untapped potential. However, the final product seems incomplete and hastily published. With that being said, the game is still in its early stages and we can only hope that certain issues are resolved due to feedback.
Police Files
Police files are a perfect example of example of great potential falling flat on its face. On first glance, the feature seems like a flash of brilliance, a look into the lives of ‘strangers’ as seen in the likes of the Watchdogs franchise. The bitter truth, however, is far from ideal. With only people of interest actually having a police file, the game fast becomes a game of clicking everyone until you see a police file, then sending out the force.
These police files would have added a much needed depth to an otherwise lackluster title.
Lack of Variety
As much as we enjoyed City Eye in the earlier stages (we were still willing to forgive the police files at this point), it quickly transpired into a rinse-and-repeat scenario. There’s no detective work involved or any call for thinking outside of the box.
City Eye is Full of Bugs
With more bugs than a $10 motel room, City Eye often provokes frustration. It would be nice to see a future update resolving these frequently game-breaking errors. A great example of this was when we saw a man standing next to a flaming bin. One of our semi-automatic cameras alerted us to a crime and we quickly switched to ‘Camera 2’ to save the day. Sadly, the garbage arsonist (in more ways than one. I mean, he never even left the scene), wasn’t even clickable; nothing could be done to apprehend the perp for a perfect score. In fact, he’s probably still out there, setting fires and standing by them laughing at us.
Summary
The idea behind City Eye really appealed to us. Fighting crime and being nosey are our two main hobbies, so City Eye seemed to be our ideal. Sadly, all that potential has gone to waste in the hands of Sig Publishing.
With City Eye still being in its infancy stages, we’re not willing to write the game off just yet. Most of the bugs could be fixed with an update and adding police files to innocents would bring some real depth to an otherwise shallow production.
City Eye is available now on Steam.
Rating
Our Rating - 4
4
Total Score
A camera monitoring sim that is repetitive, an interesting concept, but also littered with bugs.