Until we actually got our hands on MindsEye, we weren’t clear what kind of game it even is.
Is it an open world title? Is it linear? How does the user-generated Everywhere project fit into it all? We’ll get into all of those, but the most important thing to know about MindsEye is that it’s a disjointed and tragic mess of a game. It’s like Build A Rocket Boy forgot it had a school project due, and this was the best it could rustle up on short notice.
MindsEye is a third-person action adventure set in the futuristic city of Red Rock. It’s a Las Vegas alternative filled with robots, drones, and plenty of neon lights — it even comes with the now iconic Sphere. Despite its large scale setting however, MindsEye is not an open world game.
Instead, this is a more linear tale focused on former soldier Jacob Diaz, a man with a patchy memory thanks to his MindsEye implant. He’s infiltrating the tech company Silva, the creators of his implant, in the hope of discovering what went wrong all those years ago. What follows is a story of corporate secrets, military aspirations, and maybe even something a little more sci-fi than the robots.
The story itself isn’t terrible. There are some decent-ish characters and the semblance of a semi-entertaining tale, although it feels like part of the story has been cut. Its cutscenes do deliver top tier character models and facial performances, however, making for some fantastic looking cinematics. The real issue is everything else.
Let’s start off with the gameplay and visuals. Despite its cinematics, the actual gameplay of MindsEye is horrendously optimised. It’s capped to 30 frames-per-second, even on PS5 Pro, and it quite often struggles to maintain anything above 20.
Maybe that would be somewhat understandable if MindsEye was a real looker, but the game is so blurry it’ll have you booking an appointment at Specsavers. There were times we genuinely could not believe how poor the image quality was. It’s a shame too because there is a good looking game in here, especially regarding its lighting, but it’s clear that it just wasn’t ready.
Then you have the actual gameplay which is clunky, over-simplistic, and just really dull. It’s a cover based shooting system with a GTA-style weapon wheel, except you’re basically locked in to your cover, so there’s no dodge or roll feature, and you can’t even melee enemies. Also the AI is dumb as a doorpost, and it never really mixes things up outside of some enemies being a little bit stronger. We’ll give it it’s due, though, there are some great haptics and adaptive trigger features included.
One of the shining lights in the game is its driving. Although things are a wee bit light and bouncy — it’s really easy to flip a car — the controls on vehicles always feel attuned, with cinematic arcade-style drifts, and it even has some cool burst tyre physics.
That’s just as well, though, because MindsEye is padded out with numerous lengthy drives. Despite not being an open world game, it is set in a large map. What that means is that in the moment-to-moment you’ll drive to a location, maybe watch a cutscene or engage in a shootout, and then drive to another location.
However, with no fast travel you’re quite often driving for upwards of five minutes, with no dynamic events drawing you into new content — there isn’t even a radio to listen to music. At least, the game basically packs a lot of its story into phone calls which take place during your travels.
If we’re being honest, there are a lot of games that pretty much do the same, but they quite often have the lively feeling of an open world to go with it. But with nothing to do in its open world, we have to ask the question of why even bother setting it in such a large map.
It’ll likely take you over 10 minutes to drive across its entire map, yet there are only a handful of locations and buildings actually utilised across its story. Not only that, but the game isn’t afraid to make you fight through the same locations again. There are no shops, there are no dynamic events with NPCs, there are no collectibles from what we could tell, and if you stray too far from the path, it’ll actually instantly fail the mission you are on.
That’s right, if you want to freely explore the city of Red Rock, you have to unlock Free Roam mode late into the game, where you play as a random character, but again: what’s the point if there’s nothing there?
There are these Play missions available in the game, which we suppose constitute side content, and these can be found in the open world as portals to walk through. These are often five minute skirmishes, races, or minigames which can be replayed, but they can all be accessed from the Play menu at any time, so there’s no need to hunt them down.
What’s even worse is they offer nothing. There’s no XP levelling system to grind, they don’t unlock new weapons or vehicles, so they are entirely for the “fun” of it. Once we completed the story, we tried one out in free roam, racing around the city, and once it finished it just automatically booted us to the very beginning of the campaign.
These Play missions are seemingly going to be the driving focus of MindsEye’s post-launch, user-generated content, but if this is the foundation they have to go off of, it doesn’t really light our fires with excitement. It seems evident that Build A Rocket Boy had other plans with its Everywhere platform — a Fortnite-like platform that MindsEye was supposed to launch on — so what we have now is just a shell of what was originally intended.
Conclusion
MindsEye is a broken, boring mess of a game that has somehow been allowed out in the world. It has little glimmers of something semi-entertaining in there with its cutscenes and story, but it’s bogged down by a vapid large scale map that is at odds with its aggressively linear campaign, and padded out with a dull repetitive gameplay loop that is nothing short of archaic.