MindsEye review — Beautifully anachronistic lens to the past

MindsEye is going to be a difficult review to write.  There’s a great deal of positive but somehow an equal portion of negative that results in a game that has me writing carefully to ensure that I’m giving it a fair shake, but also providing an honest accounting of what I just experienced in the last 15 hours of storyline.  I don’t want to pile on like I’ve seen some do, but instead try to give MindsEye a proper analysis.  Let’s get into it. 

From the time the game launches, the graphics in MindsEye are absolutely stellar.  The character models are incredibly detailed, motion captured to shocking accuracy, and keep pace with any top tier company on the planet.  Particle effects, explosions, amazing reflections for all of the shiny future tech, cloth that moves realistically, and more make MindsEye’s presentation top tier - no surprise for an Unreal Engine 5 title.  Or at least, it does in those cutscenes that the prelaunch marketing has focused so hard on showing.  In the field, it’s not too different, though you’ll face hitching and framerate issues, even on an RTX 5090 with every bit of AI-powered wizardry shoving it forward – again, no surprise as this bug hits a lot of folks using Unreal Engine 5.

I struggled to play the game in the launch window, but I was able to figure out why I crashed non-stop, and it’s likely what you might have faced as well.  It turns out, there are some oddities and instability introduced when capturing the game in any way.  OBS, a card, NVIDIA’s capture system, and any other things I tried caused it to crash within 15 to 20 minutes every time, so I just stopped trying.  After that point I was able to play the rest of the game without a single lockup or crash.  Here it just means I won’t have footage to share with you.  Ultimately, the game is gorgeous, but clearly there are optimizations needed.

The storyline of MindsEye revolves around a veteran named Jacob who recently took a position at Elon Musk…er…I mean Marco Silva’s Tesla Gigafactory…er…I mean, his robot and car factory.  His friend has let Jacob move in and live with him while he gets himself established.  I say “his friend” but given that you almost never see him again, and since there’s no reason to go home (no clothing choices, missions happening there, nothing), you really don’t need to invest much into learning Seb’s name.  I know his name for a different reason we’ll get to later.  The Silva factory sits just outside the city of Las Vegas…er…I mean Redrock.  Redrock has banned gambling with the Families First act.  This act banned the need to ever enter the interior of any of these casinos that have now become non-interactive and non-specific buildings with little purpose but to look pretty.  

Jacob has a device tucked behind his ear that allows him to control a drone, and when paired with his contact lens called “Lenz”, it can scan for foes, take phone calls, and more. Jacob’s device is different from other models, however.  Dubbed MindsEye, it seems to be linked to a mysterious technology that will carry him into completely crazy directions involving aliens, governmental overreach, rogue AI, corporate greed, and an overarching conspiracy that branches in all directions.  

Ok, I'm probably overselling it. It’s more accurate to say that the game’s story is equal parts predictable, tonally inconsistent, and full of whiplash moments that will have you saying “Wait, I thought this guy betrayed us last scene.  Why are we buddies again?” like it was written in two different rooms and by two different people.  It’s not awful, but there are some illogical leaps or just downright nonsensical moments over the course of 35 gorgeous cutscenes and about 15 hours of storyline.  We need to talk about the ending (without ruining it) later, but let’s talk about the glue that holds it all together – gameplay.  

Before we dive into gameplay, I do have to commend the team on an absolutely incredible soundtrack.  It’s not stuffed with licensed tracks, instead focusing on just making fantastic driving beats.  I know I’m not overselling it when I say that the soundtrack is a confident 10 out of 10.  

I’m going to do my best to quantify this next section without being mean.  I get it – there are folks on a development team on the other end of this game, and I don’t want to be disrespectful to them, but I also need to be very clear.  

MindsEye is, in a word, reminiscent of a time long past. Game Director Leslie Benzies worked for Rockstar North for longer than they’ve been called Rockstar North.  He left there after Grand Theft Auto 5, having worked on several GTA games before co-founding developer Build a Rocket Boy and creating MindsEye as that studio’s first game.  I mention this not to demonstrate his pedigree, but to cite some very specific feedback.

Think back to GTA 3 and 4 and remember how missions went.  In GTA 5 you could conceivably plan ahead and do something to short circuit the way a designer intended you to solve a mission, and the game would take that into account.  In 3 and 4 you were to proceed exactly as the designer built it, doing only what you’re expected to do, and precisely the way they intended.  You couldn’t stray from that critical path in any way, meaning if the team wanted you to chase somebody down on a motorcycle, you couldn’t just snipe that person off the bike.  So it goes with MindsEye.  Nowhere is that more easily demonstrated than a chase scene that happens about halfway through the game.  

During this sequence you have to pursue your quarry through the city.  She’s driving a little sedan, but was able to brush back three semi trucks with trailers like they were made of papier mâché.  Similarly, when I managed to catch up and T-boned her, causing her to roll and come to rest on her hood, I wasn’t able to get out and stop the chase.  Nope, she simply disappeared and materialized down the road, still talking.  If you manage to chase her down and try to run her off the road, it won’t work – this will happen exactly as the team built it, without deviation, and playing the same voiceover over and over until you do.  Unbelievably, that’s actually not the biggest problem.

In the opening mission I learned that our friend’s name is Seb. I know this because I had to pick him up outside the factory.  As I went to stop to do so, a semi-truck was rear ended by a car, sending that truck directly over Seb’s unassuming body, crushing him into a fine paste.  “Seb was killed” came up with the failure notice and once I stopped laughing, I was able to try again.  The second time around I got him in the buggy, and we started careening down the highway towards some drones that were misbehaving and needed to be checked.  My vehicle is an offroad four seater ATV so I started driving no more than five feet from the paved road to avoid cars.  The red and glitchy “You have abandoned the mission” failure notice immediately popped up.  Baffling, but we were just getting started. 

Directly over a landing spot for my drone while on a mission?  “You have abandoned the mission”.  You sure about that?  During a scripted sequence, my vehicle stopped and Jacob called somebody to move the plot forward.  I hadn’t even regained the ability to move yet and the familiar “You have abandoned the mission” screen again.  You sure about that?!  Next up I was actively running directly at the mission objective, roughly 200 meters away.  I got a new error for that one – my boss shouting “Where are you going? Turn around!” followed by, you guessed it – “You have abandoned the mission”. Flying an air car directly at my next objective, roughly 1.1 miles away from the target?  “You have abandoned the mission”.  Actively fighting enemies in a corridor with nowhere else to go?  “You have abandoned the mission”.  Fighting the enemy in the last sequence in the game’s storyline, again with nowhere else to go?   “You have abandoned your task”.  Hey, at least that was new.  I could point out a great many more instances, but the examples are as endless as they are random and frustrating.  While MindsEye is presented as an open world experience, it’s anything but – this is as linear as it gets, and you test that at your own peril.  It’s also far from the only baffling choice that reinforces this anachronistic approach to gameplay.

You have a minimap in the corner that tells you where you should turn to head to your next driving or flying objective.  There is no larger map.  You are given a timer every time you get in a vehicle, but it serves no purpose beyond having various characters chime in with “What’s the hold up, Diaz?!” or "You're gonna be late!”, “Better speed up!”, “Can’t this car go any faster?”, or other variations in that same vein.  If you don’t make it on time, there’s no penalty behind the incessant whining of whomever is on comms at that time, just like there’s no reward for doing it faster.  There is no economy in the game, so there isn’t even a financial incentive or penalty.  

The physics on the vehicles are beyond floaty, so you can expect to be your own Rocket Boy, spiraling out of control on the slightest bump.  Eventually, your car will give up the ghost and need to be swapped out.  Well…you don’t have any way to do that.  The game doesn’t fail you, surprisingly, but despite being surrounded by vehicles driving around or in parking lots, they are all off limits to you.  You can’t steal one, call for a pickup, or anything other than start walking.  During later sequences you’ll be trying to rescue VIPs from incoming fire, and there are vehicles with turrets on them, or just buggies that would make getting away a lot easier.  Nope – not for you.  You get to walk.  This “you will have precisely the amount of fun I tell you to have, in precisely the way I’ve prescribed it” approach to game design was old two decades ago, and I assure you that nobody misses it. 

Moment to moment gameplay is the very definition of chest-high-wall-shooter.  There is a gun wheel to select from the usual smattering of pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, laser rifle, and so on.  The last section brings you a big heavy gun that would have been more fun in previous levels. There’s enough in here to play with to find something you like, though without an interactive world to buy ammo from, you can find yourself without lead to sling from your favorite weapon.  

Enemies come in a few varieties – armored human, unarmored human, thug, and a handful of robots and drones.  The drones can be chipped apart, taking off their legs, weapons, and heads.  This will stumble them, but in the case of the can-shaped ones, they’ll still be combat effective if you rip off their legs – it's cool.  You have a drone as well. It gets a few upgrades over the course of the game, and frankly it’s my favorite part of MindsEye’s weapon arsenal.  It can stun robots and humans alike, scan an area and mark targets, scout at high speed, hijack (some) robots, and even drop grenades on enemies.  Taking out clusters of foes with heavy ordnance never stops being awesome.  

Unfortunately, any fun gameplay is buried by a mountain of bugs.  There have been two hotfixes thus far, but these still remain.  The examples are kinda…everywhere.  For example, one early mission that asks you to scan some bots. My bouncy car flipped over the objective marker I was supposed to stop at for said scan, but somehow it didn’t trigger the game to allow me the button to do so.  It’s a soft lock that required me to back up to a previous save.  Similarly, at the end of another mission where I was remotely controlling my drone, it dropped me on top of a massive rocket with no path down other than one leaping to my death.  There are other issues that came up when popping back from drone flying bookended by cutscenes where I was dropped in odd places, but there are other more benignly frustrating bugs as well.  My sniper rifle lens occasionally doesn’t know where to focus, completely smearing the lens in such a heavy Bokeh that it’s unusable. It’ll also, without warning, decide to become completely inaccurate, firing down and to the left instead of dead center in the reticule.  Subtitles and various HUD elements have a surface attribute that causes them to have a reflection of the words below them.  Jacob randomly stands up in the middle of a firefight to reload; enemies pop into existence, as do cars, NPCs and drones.  None of these things are as bad as the random failure states mentioned above, but all of them contribute to a game that can go from fun to frustrating in the blink of an eye.  Combined with the dated approach to mission structure that forces both voice and content repetition and you can see how MindsEye can wear thin.  Beyond all that, I would like to understand why Jabob never learned hand-to-hand combat in the military.  You see, there is no melee key. 

I told you we’d get back to the story’s ending, but without spoiling it. Absolutely bonkers stuff that I’m not quite sure really connects happens, and you find yourself facing an insurmountable force that I’ll purposely leave vague.  You make an obvious choice and the game just ends.  Like, “Don't Stop Believin''” from Journey at the end of the show The Sopranos, fade to black, what the hell just happened sort of ends.  There’s a post-credits stinger but it's just going to land this on some Top 10 list celebrating games that just didn’t know what to do with their own story.  MindsEye ends with more dangling threads than a well-toured grunge sweater.

Beyond the storyline, which I truly enjoyed in bits and pieces, there is what I believe is the real thing behind the thing – the UGC tools.  Throughout the city you’ll find portals that beckon to Jacob to come visit them.  Inside, you’ll find some distraction like jumping into the boots of a gang member to see a cop takedown from their perspective, a sort of tower defense game, a driving sequence, and more.  These are a good distraction, and the intention from the Build A Rocket Boy team is that they’ll be updating these frequently with new ones to experience.  On PC, you have access to a beta version of these tools to create, upload, and share your own scenarios and experiences.  Supposedly these are the tools that the team used to build the game, so everything should be here for you to build out nifty scenarios of your own if you’re so inclined.  

This ties together my final point on MindsEye. After you finish the game, you’re dropped into one of these experiences.  I got placed into the body of an elderly dude wearing a crop top exposing his belly on which was written “can’t drink sand” or something similar.  It’d be a compelling narrative if not for the super tiny pink shorts and gas mask - I don’t see anywhere to change my look or clothes.  This “free roam” mode lets you access a bunch of these minigames throughout Redrock, but it has some of the same limitations as the story.  The car I got was a crummy little hatchback.  As I drove around and played minigames, I found air cars that I couldn’t pilot, better cars, and combat drones that were inaccessible. A jeep full of dudes rolled up and tried to ambush me.  I took them out and tried to take their jeep, but even without an owner any longer, this jeep and every other one remained inaccessible. 

Ultimately, there is a good game somewhere buried deep in here.  It’s one that’s anachronistic of a time in which linearity of the crafted message was more important than player choice in service of fun.  This lens to the past unfortunately will likely condemn MindsEye as a relic to a bygone era, and that’s a shame. It may not have had the best execution for a AAA game, but it’s pretty great for a new studio’s first attempt.  At least, most of the time anyway.

The thing that stings the most about MindsEye (and I hope whichever executive that made this decision is reading this) is that this tangled mess of a launch is a completely unforced error.  Their primary competitor is Grand Theft Auto 6 and that won’t launch for nearly a year.  They could have taken the time to polish the rough edges, make the UGC toolset sing, and delivered a gorgeous and realized world we could be getting lost in for a long time to come with regular content updates and new ways to play.  Instead, I can only hope that they’ve got the trust and financial backing to be able to recover so they can deliver on the promise that lurks just under the surface.