I’ve played over 12 hours of MindsEye, the new semi-open-world action game from former longtime Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies. I finished it. I reached its terrible ending after pushing through countless bugs, horrible performance issues, and so many boring phone calls. And yet, after all that, if you were to ask me, “Who was MindsEye designed for?” I wouldn’t have an answer for you. Maybe it was designed for people who like to gawk at wastes of money and talent?
MindsEye is far too linear to be a good open-world game, and yet it’s also too big and boring to be a fun, fast-paced linear action game. Instead, MindsEye is a collection of various ideas, some good and many bad, molded roughly into the shape of video games you’ve played before, but missing most of what made those games good. It’s bad, yes, and in the worst way possible. It doesn’t swing for the fences and fail in a fashion you can respect and which might at least make it memorable. Instead, it’s a very expensive, below-average, somewhat pretty but totally bland...thing that is completely forgettable and dreadfully boring.
So, what is MindsEye?
Here’s the basic setup for MindsEye: You play as Jacob Diaz, a former soldier with a weird cybernetic implant in his brain. During a mission, things go south and a lot of people die, which is mostly blamed on Diaz and his implant. Years later, he gets a job at Silva Corp, the company behind his implant. They are set up in Redrock City, which is this game’s version of Las Vegas, complete with a big dome in the middle of the place. Diaz wants answers from Silva Corp, and eventually his quest for the truth becomes entangled in a plot that involves AI, an evil general, rich tech bros, interdimensional beings, and super robots.
That might sound cool. Maybe even exciting? Sadly, MindsEye somehow turns this bonkers plotline into one of the dullest things I’ve played in years.
You want to know what I spent most of my time doing in MindsEye? It wasn’t fighting baddies using the game’s unremarkable cover-based combat system which feels ripped directly out of GTA V. Nor was it causing chaos in big chase scenes against police or robots. Instead, about 60 percent of this game is spent driving to locations and calling people to chat about what happened, what is going to happen, and what will happen after that. It’s the most tedious way to deliver exposition and build out the world.
And sure, GTA games often do similar drive-and-talk sequences, but they’re usually very short and are sprinkled throughout bombastic missions that take place in highly interactive open worlds. By contrast, in MindsEye, you can’t even steal random cars during missions. At one point, my car got stuck on a rock so I went to steal a parked vehicle. Can’t do that. I shot at a car and the driver got out. I went to get in. Nope. Then one of the characters on my phone call yelled at me for taking too long to drive to the next boring cutscene.
A beautiful but boring playground
To developer Build A Rocket Boy’s credit, MindsEye looks wonderful. Character models are high quality, textures look great, and the lighting in some areas is very realistic. It all runs like crap, especially if more than a few cars are on screen at once, but Redrock City is rendered quite well. Driving around the place during the game’s 12- to 15-hour campaign, I spotted people camping, abandoned locations, police helping people out of a car wreck, and so much more.
It’s a real shame that there’s no reason to actually explore the city during MindsEye. You can’t even start shooting cops to get a wanted level. It’s a fabulously rendered playground that’s about as interactive as a picture of Las Vegas on your phone.
When you finish MindsEye you get a final cutscene that doesn’t answer any of your questions or resolve any of the game’s, like, six dangling plot threads, and then you get a post-credits scene that—especially following the horrible reviews the game’s received and reported layoffs at the developer—feels very presumptuous to have included. Yeah, I’m sure, we’ll be getting more MindsEye one day...
I mean, I guess we will, because the game includes (or will include) user-generated missions set in Redrock City using MindsEye’s assets. The plan is for PC players to make new missions and game types and so on, and then for the devs to pick the best and share them with everyone. For now, though, it’s just missions made by the team behind MindsEye. These missions sometimes appear in the campaign, letting you take a break from talking to people while you drive for five minutes to instead shoot some “gangbangers” as a merc or fight off cops to learn more about how criminals live. I uh, didn’t like any of these missions, and I’m not expecting many fans are going to be designing stuff for me to play in the future.
Here’s your reward: A bad open world
Once you wrap MindsEye and roll your eyes at the terrible ending, you unlock an open-world mode that lets you freely explore Redrock City. However, you’re stuck playing as a weird dude in a gas mask, and the city is filled with the most boring, cookie-cutter missions you can imagine. It feels like something added at the last minute because the folks involved knew people would complain about not having an open-world mode.
Here’s how slapdash this mode is: Your character makes the same noises as Jacob, and it doesn’t even have a map to look at when you pause the action.
What do you do in this mode? You mostly drive to highlighted spots, shoot 20 people, grab a thing, and bring it back. Or maybe you drive through 40 checkpoints in races that go on way too long. None of these missions have voice acting or new music, or introduce new features. It feels like playing a weird, unfinished mod of MindsEye someone made. And this is your reward for beating the game. Congrats! You can drive around a boring city with no radio stations to listen to and bad missions to complete. Oh, and you still can’t steal most cars in the world, instead being forced to drive around in a white hatchback.
Like I said at the top, I have no idea who this game is for, and I don’t think it will find an audience. Perhaps after months of updates, MindsEye will run better and feature fewer bugs. But that won’t change how boring, bland, and utterly unremarkable this game is. MindsEye is a bad game that isn’t even so bad it’s good. It’s just bad, and it will probably be forgotten in a few months, only remembered briefly when the game’s servers are shut down with little warning.
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