Busted

MindsEye is the first new game from longtime Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies and his studio Build A Rocket Boy, and it’s not going well. After tons of pre-launch red flags, the techno thriller shooter is now out in the wild and suffering all the day-one woes: bugs, poor optimization on PC, and underlying gameplay that early players say is barely passable for a big release in 2025. “Build A Rocket Boy, I genuinely wanted you to pull this off,” wrote one Steam user. “Sadly, this game plays like crap.”

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With fewer than 1,000 reviews on Steam and only 40 percent of them positive, MindsEye, is already facing an uphill battle as developers race to push out patches on console and PC that might address some of the biggest issues. Issues like facial animation glitches, unresponsive NPCs, and full game crashes. The game has peaked at around 3,000 concurrent on Steam so far, which is where Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was less than a month after launch. “I refuse to believe this game went through actual playtesting,” wrote another Steam user. “It’s not possible.”

MindsEye follows ex-soldier Jacob Diaz, a man with a mysterious implant who’s losing his mind. He heads to the Vegas-inspired near-future city of Redrock to unravel what’s happening to him and engage in all sorts of intrigue, action, and open-world driving. Despite obvious comparisons to Grand Theft Auto, given the large map and third-person view, its more akin to a Mafia game in that if you go off the beaten path you will not actually encounter all that much. It’s a big world but an empty one, propelled by a cutscene-heavy story campaign that takes up to 15 hours.

Many were hoping MindsEye would end up being an AA shooter that punched above its weight. In reality, players feel like it was rushed out. Some are getting refunds and wondering if MindsEye will become another Cyberpunk 2077 situation, where PlayStation removes it from the store until its fixed. The official Discord temporarily shut down emoji reactions to corral some of the negativity, while people are sharing clips of the game’s almost mesmerizingly bonkers car chases. One sponsored streamer who was paid to promote the game kept breaking down laughing, even when trying to read the outro telling viewers where they could download it.

The day-one disaster comes with day-one reviews, because neither Build A Rocket Boy nor publishing partner IO Interactive provided advance review code to press or content creators. Build A Rocket Boy’s co-CEO Mark Gerhard blamed pre-launch leaks and negativity on social media bots that he heavily implied were paid for by Rockstar Games. Chief Legal Officer Riley Graebner and Chief Financial Officer Paul Bland announced they were leaving the company on LinkedIn just days before the game was coming out. Meanwhile Benzies, the game’s director, gave an interview where he talked about a 10 year plan revolving around user-created content that would make MindsEye just the first piece of a sprawling, hyper-realistic Roblox-like community.

That boardroom-tested marketing pitch seems more imperiled then ever, even if some players maintain that MindsEye itself could be turned into a somewhat decent game with enough post-launch patches. Now all eyes are on update 3, which the developers have promised to provide more details about soon. “Our engineering team are working around the clock to improve performance on mainstream hardware as well as consoles by integrating the performance improvements in Unreal Engine V5.6,” a message on the subreddit reads. “We will provide patch 3 update timing, including these improvements, within the next 24 hours.”

Some in the game’s Discord don’t seem entirely convinced. “Everyone I know on console refunded. They will regret not waiting for update 3!” wrote one. Although not all are so pessimistic. Says another, “Update 3 is COMING at a rapid rate, the haters are scared of GTA getting competition again. Mindseye will Succeed where Saints Row failed.”

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