In the months leading to the release of MindsEye, I received many press mailings promoting some new information or media for the game. Many of those were passed along to you in the form of several brief news articles. One thing I didn't see in any of those mailings was information about review opportunities for MindsEye. The PR company handling these mailings usually starts to include links or details about requesting review codes well in advance of a new game's release date.
After receiving another pre-release PR email for MindsEye on June 5th, I again saw there was nothing about requesting a review copy in the email. That feeling of "well, this is odd" began to form, but maybe something came up. Sometimes things happen and every so often a review code offer will come in at the 11th hour. I still took a minute to email the PR company to let them know I was interested in a review code if possible.
A day or two passed by and I never heard back on that email. It was particularly unusual because I've worked with this PR company for years and they're usually very prompt in responding to emails. Then it happens: Early copies of MindsEye were being sold at retailers.
Those individuals that managed to pick up an early copy started to share gameplay videos online for MindsEye. They shared their impressions. Very few of those impressions shared by early players were positive. Hell, I cannot even think of a single positive one. I did, however, see numerous negative impressions about the game from these early players. The lack of response to my review request email was starting to make a lot of sense.
On a whim, I also checked out a service that often handles game key distribution for those in games media and influencers. MindsEye was one of the titles on their site, but there was no option to request a review key there either. Instead, a message reading "this product is not available to request," was all that was said. That message remained there when the game launched and remains there still to this day.
Fortunately for you, and unfortunately for me, I acquired MindsEye through Steam on launch day. After a few play sessions totaling a bit over 10 hours, I not only finished MindsEye, I perfected it. That's right, I earned 100% of the achievements in MindsEye. Why? Could it be from a deep-seated self-loathing that led me to use this game as a form of penance for a life filled with transgressions? No, I honestly just thought it'd be funny. It was also laughably easy to earn all achievements in MindsEye. I missed just two achievements from casually playing through the story: One was to "earn all other achievements" and the other required me to spend just three minutes doing one specific action in a prior mission. I also believe that 10 hour completion time could have been cut down significantly if I didn't have to deal with a few crashes, the inability to skip cutscenes I already saw pre-crash, the myriad of downright asinine failstates present in the game, or the numerous bugs that forced me to reload previous checkpoints.
MindsEye makes the launch version of Redfall look good. It makes Gollum, a game with a significantly smaller budget and team, seem like a delightful romp. Outside of some decent looking visuals, mostly alright cutscenes, and some decent voicework (especially from Alex Hernandez), I have nothing positive to say about the game. The gameplay is clunky and boring. The world is somehow even more boring. The story could have been good, but it's not. The game also runs extremely poorly on PC, though I hear players on console have it far worse than I did.
MindsEye sucks. It just flat out sucks. It's a terrible game and nobody should play it. Oh, how I wish I could just end my review there and call it a day. Sadly, I suspect I should go into a bit more detail on the game.
MindsEye is a highly linear, third-person action-adventure game set in Redrock, a fictionalized version of Las Vegas and surrounding lands. It's a place full of robots, drones, and people going nowhere at (almost) all times. Missions are exceptionally linear, despite being set in this expansive world. Each mission includes a considerable number of cutscenes, perhaps a few too many of them if I'm being honest. Most of the beginning of the game is more cutscene than gameplay.
Redrock is a vast play area that features nothing to actually do. I mean that literally. The world does not allow you to do anything in it. MindsEye is very much not an open world game despite being set in a large-scale environment. At most, you will get to see the sights, but only in set paths that the game permits you to go.
You play as Jacob Diaz, a former soldier suffering from memory loss thanks to an incident involving his MindsEye implant. He ends up scoring a job working for Silva, the tech company that made his MindsEye device. Though just a security guard, Diaz hopes to find out what happened to him years ago that caused his device to freak out during a mission.
We assume control over Diaz on his first day at his new job at Silva. What follows is an absolutely bonkers story that starts out somewhat strong about the dangers of rogue AI and military robots, which then pivots hard to aliens. Aliens that created some computer virus ages ago that infects electronics in the modern age. Aliens that were able to see the past, present, and future at once, or so the game claims. Oh, and the aliens wanted to return to the present in order to mass harvest humans. Yeah, that whole mass harvesting of humans was just something that was thrown in at the very end of the game.
I mean, I think it was aliens? That, or it was some sort of unknown secret advanced civilization of beings that came long before humans? It all got really, really stupid in the second half of the game. I feel like even the game couldn't really make up its mind if it was aliens or this secret ancient civilization of highly advanced beings. I don't even care if you know about these plot points because I doubt any of you will play this game, nor should you play it. There are also a fair number of plot elements that seem like they might be important that ultimately go nowhere and are never resolved. Had MindsEye stuck with the "rogue AI" aspect and not gone completely off the rails, the story may have at least been serviceable.
The only real bright spots concerning the story lie in the fact that the actors seemed to make the most of what they were given. Again, high praise to Alex Hernandez for portraying Jacob Diaz. You may best know Hernandez for portraying Lincoln Clay in Mafia 3. He's a great actor and I would love to one day see Hernandez in a leading role in a game that doesn't suck. I'll also give props to Anjali Bhimani, Tanya Alexander, David Sakurai, and Jake Thomas for their performances. Again, the actors did a stellar job and made the most of the slop they were given. The cutscenes are also well crafted and feature great looking character models with nicely expressive facial animations.
Outside of the cinematics, the game's visuals are fine (at least on PC). They aren't super impressive but they aren't terrible either. The lighting work is the real standout here. However, the game is almost completely unoptimized. Playing at just 1440p, I had to set DLSS to Balanced and enable Frame Generation just to possibly get adequate frame rates at times. Even with that, the game still often dipped below 60 fps, typically while driving through the heart of the city without much else going on. There were also severe framerate drops when looking down the scope of the sniper rifle. That issue was made worse by the fact that the game forces depth of field to be enabled, which often caused the "scope" to be unable to focus on targets properly. Adjusting visual options barely moved the needle for performance. Those on a better CPU than my 5900X and high end 50-Series cards from Nvidia also reported abysmal performance, with reports showing an RTX 5090 hitting just an average of 50-55 fps at 4K resolution.
Hitting a 55 fps average at 4K with an RTX 5090 may not be too bad if MindsEye included any form of hardware ray tracing, but it does not. MindsEye uses software Lumen only. There is no hardware ray tracing used in MindsEye and certainly no full path tracing being used here. Naturally, the typical Unreal Engine 5 traversal stutters are included on top of the already abysmal base performance.
MindsEye's gameplay, much like its performance and story, fails to impress. It feels like a relic from the Xbox 360 era, plucked directly from a bargain bin. As a cover-based shooter, the weapon wheel offers a limited selection of mostly uninspired and weak-sounding firearms. Diaz's combat drone is the only highlight when it comes to combat, but even that has issues. Movement is stiff and rigid, particularly when you are locked into cover during gunfights. There is no rolling or sliding from cover to cover. There is no melee in the game at all. The enemy AI is also laughably dumb, with most enemies just standing still and firing at you or running straight at you without taking cover.
There are a couple of minigames in MindsEye that pop up in two missions. One requires you to perform CPR on someone and the other forces you to dig your own grave. They feel extremely awkward on mouse and keyboard and if you mess up slightly, it results in yet another failstate this game loves to throw at you. There is also at least one forced stealth mission in MindsEye. In this mission, you are tasked with avoiding the vision cones of robots that move at roughly a snail's pace. MindsEye, mind you, is not a game built around stealth. As you can imagine, this mission kind of sucked. Granted, most of the missions were pretty bad but that stealth mission was extra terrible.
At least the driving in the game feels mostly fine. The cars are responsive and it's at least a little fun to powerslide into turns. However, the cars often feel like they lack enough weight, which does lead to some over the top jumps and flips, particularly in the desert areas. It's a good thing the driving aspect is passable because you sure do a LOT of driving in MindsEye. Thanks to the unnecessarily large map, getting to and from each location takes too damn long. These long drives are broken up by some plot dumps through phone calls at least. There is a fun quirk with the calls I discovered: If you stop driving, the conversation in these calls seem to stop progressing until you drive further along. Yep, it sure seems like the calls are distance based and not time based.
Further along in the story, you'll be doing a bit less driving in cars and more piloting of passenger drones. These drones still move far too slowly for the amount of distance you have to travel. It also makes travel that much more boring because you no longer get to weave through traffic, dodge pedestrians, or even turn much. In a few missions, the game does throw some mini-combat drones at you while in the air, but they're taken out in just a few seconds and then it's back to the monotony of moving in a straight line.
That's really what MindsEye boils down to here. The moment-to-moment gameplay is just so very boring. Missions typically involve making a long trip to the start of a mission, watching a cutscene, driving somewhere else, getting into a gun fight, travelling somewhere else miles away, and watching another cutscene to end the mission. As the game lacks any form of fast-travel, you could be driving for 5, 10, or 15 or more minutes depending on how far out you are. Maybe the worst part about all of this is the fact that if you ruin your vehicle, or the tires get shot out, or you get the car stuck, you cannot commandeer any other vehicle. You are allowed to enter and use only a very limited number of specific vehicles that the game says you can use. It's so damn annoying and such a horrible design choice.
That bad design choice is just one of many made for MindsEye. There are no radio stations to help pass the time. No stores or shops to enter where you can purchase gear or cosmetics. There is no gun store or even an ammo resupply kiosk. The only way you get weapon ammo is by picking it up from the enemies you take out. Several missions are on timers. Sometimes you are made aware of the time limit, sometimes you aren't. If you were too slow for the game's liking, the mission will fail. You'll want to move as fast as possible though because NPCs will nag you over and over and over to hurry up. It's either that or they complain you're going the "wrong way," even though you're moving at top speed and precisely following the GPS path towards the objective. Missions will also fail if you don't drive exactly where the game wants you to drive. There's nothing of real note to do in the game world. Again, this is a linear game set in a needlessly large game environment.
Every so often you will see these portal bubble things pop up during missions. Entering them will load up one of the extra content missions, called Play missions, created in Build a Rocket Boy's mission-editor thing. These same extra missions can also always be accessed from a menu. A couple of them do seem to be tied to the main character's story, though they offer no meaningful lore. Some of them have absolutely nothing at all to do with anything in the main story and feel even more out of place. Upon completing these roughly five-minute long missions you are given a rank based on your performance. However, you are never told up front what you're being ranked on. Are you being ranked based on your completion time? Will the rank come from the number of enemy kills you earn? Who knows! But also, who cares. Hell, even the bonus car races in the game are as barebones as can be. They're checkpoint races but there are no fail states. There's no reason to engage with them. You get nothing for them. They're maybe worth trying once and that's it.
The game does feature a "free roam" mode but it's very bad. First, it doesn't even become accessible until near the end of the game, at which point you can select it from the game menu. Also, you don't play as Diaz in this free roam mode. Rather, you play as some random dude in a gas mask wearing a colorful mansierre and equally colorful shorts. You have no access to the full arsenal of weapons and no access to the combat drone that Diaz uses throughout the campaign. This random guy has access to two weapons and one vehicle. You cannot customize this character in any way. You can drive around, attack civilians, or partake in the aforementioned side-mission things that pop up in the game environment. The kicker with the free roam mode is the fact that the game automatically kicks you to it once you complete the campaign. It comes out of absolutely nowhere and is a huge "what the fuck is this?!" moment if ever there was.
Then there are the bugs. I saw everything from enemies T-posing, to cars spawning inside each other, to enemy helicopters spinning like a top in mid-air instead of flying into the play area, and more. Sometimes my weapon's flashlight failed to actually light up the environment. I saw tire tracks floating vertically in mid-air a foot above the road. There were other instances of decals left floating in mid-air, including during cutscenes. I already mentioned the sniper scope issue where it failed to "focus" on targets directly in front of me while also causing huge performance dips. I had scripting in at least one mission completely break for me, which then led to me getting stuck inside of a wall. Thankfully I was able to restart the checkpoint by killing my character with grenades. I saw NPC's running straight at me that were facing 90-degrees to the right. The list just goes on.
I also became exceptionally frustrated with the automatic targeting of my combat drone. I could be looking directly at enemies and instead of targeting what I was looking at, the drone would instead shoot an explosive object right next to me. It resulted in my death a few times here and there. It pissed me off every single time. I frankly do not know if this was a bug or intended behavior though. At least this wasn't an issue when I took manual control of the drone. I will say that outside of those periodic targeting issues, I generally enjoyed using the combat drone in fights. The ability to knock out specific enemies was super useful, even if the drone's other abilities were quite weak. It was fun to zap a few enemies here and there, though I wish the recharge rate on the abilities was a lot faster.
Honestly, I think I've said about all that can possibly be said about MindsEye. Outside of a very few semi-positive points I think MindsEye just fucking sucks. It's buggy, it's boring, the story is bad, the gameplay is bad, and it runs like garbage. Don't play it. Don't support a studio that is now having their team work "around the clock" to fix a myriad of issues that should have never made it to release. Don't buy it now nor even when it inevitably gets a deep discount.
Score
Additional Information
- MindsEye
- Developed by: Build a Rocket Boy
- Published by: IOI Partners
- Price: Starting at $59.99 (USD)
- Platform reviewed on: PC (also available for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S)
- PC Specs: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, Nvidia RTX 4080, 32GB DDR4 3600 RAM, 1440p resolution
- ESRB: Rated M for Mature 17+ (Violence, blood, sexual themes, and strong language)
