MindsEye - Slack Mirror (Review)

MindsEye

Released: June 10th, 2025

Developer: Build A Rocket Boy

Publisher: IO Interactive

Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox X/S

What a horrible game.

What a creatively deficient, mechanically defective, horribly horrible game. 

MindsEye is a dismal failure on pretty much every level. Problems become apparent mere seconds after the opening cutscene - performance immediately tanks, surrounding NPCs jitter around, and one look at the settings menu reveals a notable lack of settings. 

“Notably lacking” might as well be this game’s motto. 

It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Somehow, not even a dreadful first impression does enough to telegraph exactly what a miserable time awaits players. It’s a clumsy action game fumbling around in a sandbox that’s all box and no sand, it’s riddled with bugs, it has no ideas of its own, and the gameplay is downright pathetic. 

I started playing this before I learned how arrogant the developer’s CEO is, and experiencing the game first makes his temerity all the more shocking. To claim MindsEye’s negative reception is the result of a bankrolled conspiracy despite MindsEye looking and playing like fucking MindsEye is almost terrifyingly delusional. 

If we’re throwing claims like that around, let’s make them credible - exactly how much is the government paying Mark Gerhard to make a laughing stock of Build A Rocket Boy? 

I've tried to use the most flattering screenshots possible.

Anyway, it's a bloody awful videogame. 

I don’t even know why it’s an “open world” game, but I know why I've used quotation marks. More than perhaps any other entry in the genre, MindsEye’s play space feels pointless. There are no activities to be found in the world, and the campaign constantly chivvies you from one location to the next with no time reserved - or required - for exploration. 

Truly, this game would have lost nothing by being a linear, level-based shooter. It would be better, in fact, because having to drive from one bit of threadbare gameplay doesn’t enhance the experience, it merely prolongs a player's misery. 

The black car is tailing the white car. The AI kept doing this when I took control of my drone.

MindsEye is a flimsy imitation of Watch Dogs filtered through the brownscale lens of a mediocre seventh-generation game. It’s the kind of uncharismatic fluff that padded out the Xbox 360's library, looking right at home shelved next to Dark Void, Damnation, and especially Mindjack. The protagonist is even called Jacob, one of the classically generic shooterboy names of the late 2000s.

MindsEye has inherited a legacy of pedestrian third-person shooters trying to stand out with gimmicks that are themselves so derivative and mundane they only enhance how crummy the whole thing is. I’m overcome by nostalgia.

Quite appropriate that scanning for enemies throws up so many red flags..

I could barely pay attention to the awful story. There’s this former soldier with Bad Science Stuff in his head, he works for the dumbest tech company in the world, and there are evil army guys or something. Every now and then, a character will spout jargon to try and convince you the game has something to say about modern technology. Naturally, it has no productive statements to make. 

I think the setting is supposed to be near-futuristic, but nothing looks advanced beyond an occasional robot and helicopters shaped like drones. The absolute bare minimum has been done to make the environment look any different from some prefabricated sandbox map asset. Hell, even saying “bare minimum” might be overselling it. 

At one point it’s mentioned all the cars are electric but still make engine noises because regulations said they should. Rather than use its premise to create a unique world, MindsEye uses its premise to justify not creating a unique world. I swear, more effort was put into excusing a lack of effort than is evidenced in any other department. 

A high tech setting in a low texture world.

I truly marvel at how little MindsEye has to offer a player. It’s not only utterly threadbare in terms of content, the paltry amount it does have is stripped down to a point of near-experimental minimalism. 

Jacob doesn’t have a melee attack, or grenades, or a dodge roll, or any combat abilities beyond rudimentary cover shooting. You’re just firing at the same basic enemies over and over again with no variety to be found. Combat is so skeletal you’d have to go as far back as the original PlayStation to find an era in which it might almost be acceptable. 

MindsEye might have gotten away with it if the shooting felt really good, but that’s still expecting too much. Guns pack zero punch, with barely any impact feedback, and their sound effects can best be described as squidgy. They seriously look and sound like toys.

All stun, no fun.

You get a drone eventually, and it’s so bad it barely warrants a mention - imagine the kind of drones you’ve seen in a dozen other action games, but far less functional. Its introductory mission forces you to repeatedly use the thing’s stun gun, which takes ages to recharge with nothing else to do until it’s ready. It perfectly sets up exactly how rubbish it is. 

Your borderline inconsequential drone is good for zapping the occasional dickhead who won’t leave cover, but otherwise you’ll kill them quicker than they can be stunned. It may also hack enemy robots, but of the miniscule assortment you’ll encounter, most bots are too slow and weak to be worth it. 

Pictured: the entire combat system.

Guns eat through ammo in no time and resupplying is 100% reliant on a pittance of bullets dropped by enemies. If you never use the assault rifle, you might save up enough shots for the assault rifle to be useful. Fights almost always boil down to you plinking away with the peashooter handgun you were given at the start, because even though guns are the sole focus of combat, MindsEye does all it can to restrict your use of guns. 

What the fuck is this game’s problem? Like, what is actually going on here? It’s not just a poorly designed game, there’s a rich vein of truly shambolic incompetence running so deep it’s almost not natural. 

Cool zapper! Can't wait to do it again in half a minute.

When Jacob isn’t firing his glorified squirt guns at enemies who don’t have anywhere near enough character models between them, he’s doing intensely boring shit like spying on someone with a drone, or spying on someone with a different drone.

As if to hammer home how seventh-gen MindsEye is, there’s the odd hacking minigame and an obligatory stealth section for which the existing mechanics aren’t suited. When I was asked to crack a safe by pressing a button when some circles lined up, I almost stood and applauded - videogames are back! 

Most of your time, however, will be spent driving. This is a shame because somehow the cars are worse than the guns! 

The cars suck because MindsEye doesn't have enough... mechanics.

To drive is to wrestle against a wheeled mockery of physics. Vehicles slide and bounce around in a manner at least consistent with those aforementioned late-2000s vibes. I’m reminded of Grand Theft Auto IV with how slippery the vehicles are, except they’re even worse here because of course they are. 

A more accurate comparison may be Mass Effect’s Mako before the remaster overhauled it. Not a lot needs to happen for your car to fly around like it’s a ball of cartoon bubblegum. 

For as much as you’re made to ride around in it, MindsEye’s world is excruciatingly drab. The map is one tiny city surrounded by a large brown desert full of brown rocks that are easy to crash into because the browns and the browns look so uniformly brown. Getting jammed into some scenery is a common risk, and going offroad in general is almost always trouble. 

Who ordered the checkpoint race with 47 checkpoints?

Since vehicles are so floaty, so slidey, and so utterly shitty to use, you can bet your ass MindsEye’s got more than its share of fucking terrible car chase missions. OH BOY! 

I hate the car chases so much. Any vehicle you pursue is set to move at such an unnatural speed you can almost never catch up, and if the game decides you’re too far away for just a few seconds - even if you can still see the car - you’ll be told you lost sight of it. The parameters by which you fail seem completely arbitrary. 

One crash, one delay, and you’ll almost certainly have to start a chase over. If you manage to get close, your prey will suddenly widen the gap as if an unseen mouse cursor is dragging and dropping it away. One might suggest it makes missions more tense, but chasing a distant HUD marker you know you’ll never reach until you’re allowed to is just plain unenjoyable. 

I found that by busting the difficulty down to Easy, chases became dramatically more reasonable, with a challenge level one would actually expect from a game like this instead of the bizarrely punishing slog you get by default. On Normal difficulty, car chases are just plain broken. 

I really don't care for this game.

Regardless of type, pretty much every mission demands you use a single pre-mandated vehicle, and if it gets stuck, hopping into a different car isn’t acceptable. Should you ever stray too far from your predetermined route, you’ll be failed for “abandoning” whatever mission you were on. It will also do this if you take too long to go somewhere, even if the mission isn’t on any sort of visible timer. 

Since you’re never not on a mission, you never get a chance to go off and do your own thing, not that there’s anything you could do if you had the freedom. It doesn’t take too long to figure out that, despite the large space it takes place in, MindsEye is on a distinctly linear track. 

I ask again… why is this an “open world” game? Not only is MindsEye uninterested in its own format, it’s actively hostile to the very notion. Do they think this is how a videogame should be designed? Did nobody try to stop them? 

Safe cracking minigame? Next you'll be telling me Major Nelson has a blog update!

Oh but you haven’t heard the best part! See, there are side missions - a whole bunch, in fact! They’re just offered completely independently of the open world. It’s really stupid. This whole videogame is profoundly fucking stupid. 

At any point during the campaign, you can open up your menu to browse a selection of missions in which Jacob does a Quantum Leap and inhabits the body of some other character, like a gang member trying to escape the cops, or a guy getting attacked by mercs at a construction site because of Some Reasons. 

Most of them are just checkpoint races. Incredibly long and tedious checkpoint races. There isn’t any other type of racing, because why bother designing that when you can stick some blue rings on the road and call it a day? 

I hate waking up to find a Cop Portal in my dining area.

While the main storyline brings Jacob into contact with jpeg-flavored “portals” that take him to one of these missions, they’re all freely accessible from the menu at any time and none of them are required for progress. You don’t even get any rewards for doing them, you’re expected to just play these missions for the fun of it, even though none of them are fun. 

Side missions exist simply to exist, and they don’t even exist as part of the main game. 

Let that sink in - you have an open world game that punishes you for treating it like an open world game and segregates its side content from the open world with no reward for any player who touches it.   

Shoehorned stealth section? I'll notify the fine people at Joystiq right away!

As one last punchline to this incredible joke of a videogame, I must let you know that despite all I’ve said, there is an opportunity to freely explore the map… in a separate “free roam” mode… that is locked until you finish the game. 

Fucking outstanding. 

Poorly made and ineptly designed, MindsEye cosplays as an open world game to its own detriment. The lifeless cardboard realm we could generously label a "world" is aggressively closed off, its sandbox appearance nothing more than desperately shallow dressing for a cover shooter so bereft of features it’s bloody embarrassing. 

Oh but the helicopters look like how drones look like though!!!!!

If MindsEye had released back in the generation that all its ideas come from, not even Codemasters would have touched the fucking thing. 

Not. Even. Codemasters.

2/10