REVIEW: ‘MindsEye’ Is An Unfinished Tech Demo

If you haven’t heard about MindsEye, the third-person shooter by Build a Rocket Boy and published by IO Interactive Publishing, count yourself lucky. From heads of the studio leaving under arduous circumstances weeks before launch, to a massive marketing budget focusing on the game being made by “former Rockstar developers,” MindsEye did the wrong things to get its name out there by the time it launched.

What’s worse, the launch was a developer’s nightmare. Nasty game-breaking bugs, glitches galore, and frequent crashes on all systems it was released on. I can confidently tell you that after finishing it, Mindseye is somehow worse than all the videos have shown you.

MindsEye doesn’t take a breath right from pressing “start.” You are dropped in behind Jacob Diaz, a special forces operative, in the midst of a mission in the near future. As you may expect, everything does go wrong very quickly. An unknown orange electricity affects Diaz’s MindsEye, a piece of military tech that allows him to communicate directly with a drone. The drone goes haywire, attacking his unit. After this incident, Diaz suffers memory loss and PTSD-like symptoms and is discharged.

After being hired by Silva Corp, Diaz finds himself in the post-Casino future of Las Vegas, now called Redrock. Silva Corp and the mayor of Redrock have transformed the city into a model of the future. Robotic police and robotic servants are everywhere—better public transportation. And now, a computerized contact lens, called “Lenz,” is used for almost every facet of life. But things quickly go wrong as he starts his new job and life in this world he barely recognizes.

The MindsEye story goes nowhere.

Every time MindsEye has a chance to say something—anything—it doesn’t. Take the PTSD angle. Jacob suffers from trauma because of what happened during his last mission. He lost allies. He thought his drone killed them, and that it may be his fault. But nothing comes out of this. Besides a couple of quick scenes in the beginning, PTSD talking points barely get covered, except for a brief moment near the end where he learns what happened wasn’t his fault.

Heck, even the line delivery of that moment didn’t carry any of the weight you’d expect by learning you weren’t at fault for something so traumatic in your life. None of the baggage looks or sounds like it was left behind. And that carries on to numerous parts of the game’s uncreative story.

As Jacob arrives in Redrock, the robots that have become ingrained in various aspects of life start to malfunction. The copbots start attacking civilians, and the electrical cars begin going haywire and driving into a pit in the desert. And a Musk-like tech billionaire is behind all these inventions and not facing responsibility. Does MindsEye take a moment to address why copbots who can go haywire, have a high chance to racially profile, and are run by an algorithm, are a bad thing? No, of course not.

Jacob questions whether this is what society needs, but the billionaire, Silva, basically waves it away. It’s never pushed beyond that. Heck, even the issues Jacob is facing are pointed directly to Silva, but he never really faces repercussions for using Jacob for his ulterior goals. MindsEye often appears to be heading in a certain direction, such as questioning whether tech billionaires reshaping our society is even bad; instead, it chooses the most boring path. This game is the worst form of art: Message-less.

MindsEye feels like a bad action movie.

But what’s most mind-boggling is the moment-to-moment writing. MindsEye is like a bad action movie. It tries to have reveals and twists that are beyond predictable or add unfeasibly guessable twists. The story’s lack of creativity extends to the world-building as well. Like the reason why Las Vegas no longer has casinos. This is quickly explained because the “Families First Act” banned all moral depravity in the U.S. Only casinos are mentioned explicitly as being banned due to this.

And naturally, a corrupt mayor is in the picture who has a hand in every part of Redrock’s rise—except for Silva Corp. This mayor is cartoonishly evil (even though we see worse evils in today’s world). For instance, her husband got killed by an electric car that was too quiet. Now, in a world where only electric cars exist, they all have familiar engine sounds. The Mayor just so happened to be on the company board that made those sounds. And nothing comes out of the Mayor doing regularly awful acts in the name of total control.

Or better yet, a character betrays you and Silva twice. Both times it’s shown as a surprise. But why? Why was the second betrayal just as impactful to Silva and Jacob as the first time? They knew this character was evil and had a vendetta against Silva because a higher power controlled the strings. And yet they brought her in on a mission later just to get screwed over again. Issues like this happen repeatedly throughout MindsEye, where the dumbest choices imaginable are made repeatedly. A patch can’t fix a bad story.

Similarly, the patches Build a Rocket Boy have promised won’t fix the overall game, either. Beyond the three crashes on an Xbox Series X during my 10-hour playthrough, there were too many glitches and poorly designed gameplay mechanics throughout, not even to give the game a chance at being saved.

MindsEye is a mess of a game.

At its core, MindsEye is a mess of a game. The shooting mechanics themselves are lackluster, the guns, even when experimental in their design, are unoriginal, and the most significant portion, the combat, is just like a shooting gallery. Enemy AI itself is possibly as dumb, if not dumber, than a PS2-era shooter.

There was no point where I was having fun with the shooting portions. They’re all boring. And that all boils down to how uninspired the combat itself is. The enemy AI will basically run in a straight line towards you and non-methodically pop out of cover to shoot at you. They also have the worst aim imaginable. Sometimes enemies, like robots or military-trained units, will be standing next to you and somehow miss an entire clip. And they all die the same.

There’s no real difference in what gun you use against someone. Shooting anyone to death leads to their collapse. The only time the death animation changes is if you kill a robot, which always explodes. Thank goodness they added weak points to everything. Otherwise, the already inconsistent ammo drops would lead to you constantly filling bullet sponges. But once you get the hang of taking out every enemy’s weak point, there’s no reinventing what you’re facing.

Plus, the guns are also extremely unsatisfying to use and inconsistent in their sound design. Take the laser weapon you get about two-thirds through the game. Some shots, it sounds like a laser weapon firing. Other times, it sounds like a bubble blaster from Splatoon. And there’s a third option. The sounds get overlaid so you hear both at once. Combine the unrefined sound quality with no impact feel from bullets hitting, and the whole crux of the game’s combat just collapses.

There’s never enough time to do anything in MindsEye.

Same for the animations. If you pay even a modicum of attention to any combat scenario, you’ll see that the bullet tracer effects just stop randomly. Every bullet fired at you has this effect. So why doesn’t it go until the bullet stops? Items like this are an afterthought that is even worse when you pay attention to the enemy combatants as well.

Numerous times, enemies will be coming at you, and they may not even be facing you. Their guns will be pointed at a wall, and they will still be shooting at you. The same applies to them clipping through cover and being vulnerable to being hit. Every part of combat is just so poorly designed that even extra time could barely fix this mess.

The same goes for the driving, too. No car feels satisfying to drive. And almost a fifth of the game will be spent driving between objectives, too. Trust me, I timed it. You’ll spend a significant portion of the game driving the same cars or aircars around in the most boring settings. And you can’t hijack other vehicles, either. What that game tells says you can take is what you get.

But even then, NPCs make a point of how great the Lenz system is. It gives you a minimap, the distance to your next objective, and sometimes a timer for how long it should take you to get there. The timer is very inconsistent in when it’s used. But worse, it feels like a timer that would project how long it’d take you to arrive. Instead, it’s a timer that you aim to beat to reach your objective with no penalty for going over. What’s even the point of it, besides triggering an unnecessary voice line from one of the NPCs to be mad at you for being slow.

And then there are the needless minigames to pad the game even further. Lik the notorious CPR minigame that lasts way too long. Or digging your own grave. Their inclusion lasts way longer than necessary and even then feels needlessly pointless while controlling quite inaccurately.

There is no world map in MindsEye.

Yet, beyond the mechanics, there are some parts where the game even feels like the developers didn’t believe in MindsEye. There’s no world map, no way for you to put objective markers down or waypoints. And even side-missions, which are pitched as only appearing in the overworld, are all selectable right away from the pause menu. All of these together just give the impression that the developers don’t want you to look too deeply into the world. They only want you to spend the time completing the game, and that’s it.

Even the free roam mode feels so half-baked to the point that its inclusion feels insulting to those who do want to spend more time with the game. There’s no fanfare about it. After the credits, you’re just plopped into the world with a character you have no affiliation with. No objective, and with an even smaller loadout. You might wonder why this is included when so little care is taken to add it, beyond simply checking a box.

Similar case with accessibility options. Subtitles are such a staple and almost a bare minimum for accessibility. Yet they aren’t enabled by default. And are only turned on through an unlikely menu in the settings, the HUD options. Not sound, not accessibility, but the HUD. Plus, there are no options for adjusting the subtitles either. Only “on” and “off.”

But all of this is overshadowed by how poorly optimized the game is for console. There is horrible stuttering, consistent frame drops, inconsistent crashing, and missions failing for unclear reasons. All these issues could be fixed, yet they affect how the overall game feels, like a beautiful tech demo with little else given the same TLC.

MindsEye feels like an unrefined tech demo.

The cutscenes are also horribly optimized. Every scene starts with a character popping around and assets loading in that are already prevalent in the world. It’s all just distracting that you can barely believe the game was okay’d for launch. Any shift in the camera angle has the same effect.

The saddest thing about the MindsEye situation is how detailed the world is designed. Without all the issues noted above, a game in this setting and world would be a prime example of a current-gen game. However, looking pretty only goes so far when the rest of the game makes the design feel like all the development efforts went into making the game look nearly photo realistic. Given that, it’s a shame to say that the only way to fix MindsEye is to just start over from scratch. Cut the losses and actually make a functional game with coherent ideas.

MindsEye is an unrefined tech demo full of unfinished ideas rather than an actual video game. The story is beyond unoriginal while somehow being a mishmash of every modern-futuristic trope. It’s bogged down by awful gameplay mechanics that do a disservice to its overall idea. And worst of all, it’s a buggy mess where not even a year more of development could fix the overall package.

For those hoping several patches could make MindsEye into a possibly well-executed game, there’s no salvaging the mess left behind in Redrock. The only praise I could give is that it’s an easy 100 percent for those who like achievements/trophies, but even the headaches to get them aren’t worth the hassle.

MindsEye is available now on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.