MindsEye Review

MindsEye arrives with sky-high expectations, not only due to its genre-blending ambitions but also because of the pedigree behind it. The game is the debut title of Build A Rocket Boy, a studio helmed by Leslie Benzies, the former Rockstar North president who had a central role in the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises.

When MindsEye was revealed, its futuristic aesthetic and third-person action drew immediate comparisons to Rockstar's open-world epics. Yet, unlike its spiritual predecessors, MindsEye launched to a cold reception, facing a barrage of performance issues, a lackluster gameplay loop, and narrative execution that left much to be desired.

In MindsEye, you assume the role of Jacob Diaz, a former military operative with a mysterious brain implant known as the "Mind's Eye." After leaving behind a shadowy past, Jacob finds himself in Redrock, a dystopian desert city that's home to Silva Corporation, an Elon Musk-style megacorporation that now rules society with militarized technology and surveillance.

Diaz accepts a job with Silva, which quickly escalates from mundane security duties to full-blown espionage, assassination, and robot warfare. Even though this is how the story is set up, it has problems with pace and awkward exposition.

The story's biggest flaw is its artificiality. There are times when characters act like they were born in the game, with flat reactions to crazy things like mass shootings or crazy plots. Dialogues are littered with cliché-ridden techno-babble, and the so-called political satire feels more like an extended meme on Elon Musk than a clever critique of techno-dystopias.

The game often introduces ideas like memory wipes, rogue AI, and drone warfare, but never gives them the emotional or intellectual weight they deserve. It's a case of narrative promise undermined by clumsy execution.

MindsEye plays like a blend of third-person action and semi-open world exploration. It tries to mix elements from GTA, Watch Dogs, and Cyberpunk 2077, offering driving sequences, gunfights, stealth infiltration, and gadget-based objectives. However, unlike those inspirations, the execution in MindsEye is stunted.

Movement is floaty, aiming feels like wrestling with molasses, and the driving mechanics feel like an early prototype. While driving through Redrock, cars frequently flip over from minor bumps, and a reset button awkwardly replaces realistic recovery physics. In MindsEye, gameplay attempts to merge third-person cover shooting with exploratory semi-open world traversal and mini-objective encounters. 

You can engage in routine missions involving escort tasks, infiltration assignments, and vehicle-based pursuits. The core gameplay loop is centered on linear mission progression, but the game offers off-path diversions such as drone recon sections, environmental data scanning, and side activities that trigger from holographic portal nodes. 

These optional missions range from street races to timed survival combat challenges. However, due to clunky AI and poor vehicle handling, many of these diversions become chores rather than opportunities for variety. The game includes hacking sequences as basic mini-puzzles, though they rarely influence mission outcomes.

Interactions with environmental terminals and terminals scattered throughout Redrock offer lore snippets and sometimes trigger combat waves. You can also explore apartments or restricted labs for lore pickups, but interactivity with the environment is mostly cosmetic. 

Despite trying to emulate systems seen in open-world action RPGs, MindsEye lacks dynamic NPC behavior or emergent encounters, reducing exploration to empty traversal. These gameplay systems feel disconnected and surface-level, never integrating into a cohesive gameplay identity. The potential is there, but the execution often feels like placeholder design awaiting further refinement.

The mission design ranges from dull to passable, often falling into a repetitive cycle of "drive here, shoot five enemies, watch a cutscene." You can interact with drones for reconnaissance or trigger "portal missions", offering side objectives like races or challenge arenas, but these feel tacked on and undercooked. Even the map editor, an ambitious feature promoted in pre-release materials, is hard to access and barely functional on consoles.

Combat in MindsEye is rudimentary at best. You can choose from a modest variety of firearms, with a primary focus on shooting both human enemies and robotic threats. Cover mechanics are stiff and unreliable, and the AI is astoundingly unintelligent—opponents either stand still or take cover and never adapt their tactics. Most firefights are easily winnable with basic shooting, and enemies rarely flank or pressure the player.

The gunplay itself lacks impact. Weapons, especially pistols, sound like ray guns from Destroy All Humans, clashing with the grounded sci-fi tone the game aims for. There's no melee system, and player animations barely react to being shot. The game introduces verticality with drone enemies, allowing some skirmishes to involve shooting into the sky, but this does little to add depth to the combat. Ragdoll physics are also inconsistent—shotgun blasts send enemies flying, while pistol shots drop them like puppets with cut strings.

What MindsEye gets right in combat is its weapon recoil, which adds a bit of realism absent from many third-person shooters. However, everything else—from AI behavior to weapon feedback—feels unrefined. The enemy variety is minimal, and difficulty scaling is artificial. In "hard" mode, enemies simply become bullet sponges without any strategic upgrades, reducing combat to monotonous repetition. Even the game's most intense firefights become tiresome, thanks to the lack of adaptive AI and uninspired mission design.

Combat becomes even less compelling due to performance issues. Frame drops and stutters during action sequences render precise shooting almost impossible, especially on PS5 and reportedly even high-end PCs. These problems hinder what could have been average combat and instead make it an endurance test.

MindsEye includes light progression mechanics, though it largely lacks a robust XP or leveling system. You don't get to engage in meaningful upgrades or skill trees, and progression is more linear than dynamic. Missions unlock sequentially, and enemy difficulty doesn't evolve in any engaging way. 

The absence of meaningful XP progression means that player investment is never rewarded beyond unlocking the next cutscene. Tools like the reconnaissance drone can be used to tag enemies, but since most threats pose little danger, there's rarely any need for tactical planning.

Built on Unreal Engine 5, MindsEye aspires to visual excellence but collapses under its own ambition. During nighttime or cinematic sequences, lighting occasionally achieves striking results. There is polish in some areas of Redrock, with lots of objects placed close together and accurate shadow play. But this visible polish isn't always the same. There are a lot of places that feel empty because they have flat interiors, low-detail textures, and not much world interaction.

Worse, MindsEye is riddled with visual bugs, screen tearing, texture pop-in, and severe frame rate dips. Even on PlayStation 5, the game struggles to maintain 30 FPS, with some areas dropping into slideshow territory. Compared to other Unreal Engine 5 games like Expedition 33, MindsEye appears unfinished. The city feels lifeless—NPC density is laughably low, and animations are robotic. It all adds up to a world that never feels alive or immersive.

Composed of ambient synths and eerie cyberpunk textures, the sound design in MindsEye is a mixed bag. Occasionally enhancing the atmosphere during downtime or cinematic moments, the soundtrack, surprisingly, stands out. The music captures the moody aesthetic the game aims for. However, the sound effects are dissonant sometimes, particularly for gunfire and vehicles. The pistol, for instance, has a toy-like zap that ruins immersion, while vehicles sound flat and underpowered.

Voice acting fares no better. Characters deliver lines with little conviction, and emotional moments feel forced or downright awkward. The main character, Jacob Diaz, sounds like he's been reading off-cue cards, and many side characters seem uninterested in what they're saying. While the audio mix sometimes works during cinematics, it too suffers from glitches, with desynced lines and looping errors that further pull players out of the experience.

MindsEye is a fascinating case of ambition undermined by execution. With Leslie Benzies at the helm, expectations were naturally high. What players received instead was a product that felt like an extended beta rather than a finished experience. From its buggy performance and lifeless world to its uninspired combat and stale narrative, MindsEye struggles to find solid footing in any of its core systems.

The most impressive elements are undoubtedly the cinematic sequences, bolstered by high-quality mocap and slick direction. But when gameplay resumes, the illusion shatters. The lack of interactivity, the repetitive missions, the broken AI, and the absence of a living world make MindsEye feel hollow. Side content like portal missions and car chases often pad the runtime but lack substance.

This isn't to say MindsEye is entirely without merit. There are glimpses of a compelling narrative beneath the clunky writing, and the music creates moments of genuine moodiness. Yet, these are just a few bright spots in a world full of missed chances. If the developers are serious about salvaging this title, it will need a lot of extensive post-launch patches, overhauls to combat AI, and optimization improvements.

As it stands, MindsEye is a cautionary tale with star power behind the scenes that cannot carry a game that lacks polish, balance, or soul. For a game trying to explore the intersection of consciousness and technology, it's ironic that MindsEye itself feels so utterly lifeless. A mind-bending vision is lost in translation, where high-concept dreams crash into low-effort design.