Calling

Although it shows some early promise, MindsEye is sunk by a ridiculous story, inconsistent writing, poorly designed mission scenarios, and utterly atrocious combat.

You might not believe it based on the score, but I was fully in MindsEye’s corner during the runup to launch. There was a time when cover shooters and city-sized driving games were wearyingly common, but at a time when every action game is a soulslike, a roguelite, a live-service multiplayer shooter, or Doom, the good old fashioned GTA clone is a rare treat indeed.

MindsEye review

• Developer: Build a Rocket Boy
• Publisher: IO Interactive Partners
• Platform: Played on PC
• Availability: Out now on PC (Steam, Epic), PS5, Xbox Series X/S

So there’s room in my life for a bit of cars wot gun fast, and I was hoping Build A Rocket Boy’s debut game would defy all the pre-release doubters, revealing itself as a thrilling tribute to a bygone era. Sadly, if anything the sceptics were too charitable. MindsEye is an unmitigated disaster, with flaws that run so much deeper than the technical hitches and deformed digital faces doing the rounds online that you’d need some sort of pressure-resistant submersible to pull them out.

Yet as I polish the size 12 steel toecaps for the booting that is to come, I would like to highlight some things I like about MindsEye. For all it does wrong, there are fragments of talent and artistry here, glimmers of the game it might have been had it been given more time.

One such thing is how it starts. MindsEye’s story revolves around Jacob Diaz, a military drone pilot who we meet in the desert on a mission to explore an ancient underground structure (the game has a running joke over whether this is a pyramid or a ziggurat, which isn’t remotely funny and a detail most of its characters would not believably care about in the slightest, but I’m supposed to be being nice right now, so let’s leave that be). Diaz’s drone, which he can control mentally via the ‘MindsEye’ implant in his neck, descends into the structure and encounters a bunch of strange glowing symbols on a door. The drone is zapped by a mysterious energy, Diaz collapses, cut to black.

Here’s a spot of MindsEye gameplay for you.Watch on YouTube

It’s a tight, tantalising prologue that lightly subverts your expectations at seeing dusty military men on screen. It’s also directed with the kind of cinematic flair you’d expect from a studio descended from Rockstar North. That flair continues through the prologue, and indeed, through much of the game. Discharged from the military and disconnected from his MindsEye drone, Diaz arrives in futuristic Las Vegas analogue Redrock city, moving in with a friend who has nabbed him a job as a security guard at Silva Industries. But Diaz has an ulterior motive. Silva Industries, owned and operated by tech mogul Marco Silva, manufactured Diaz’s MindsEye chip, and Diaz wants to fill the gaping holes in his memory left by the operation that separated him from his drone.

It may seem like damning with faint praise to point to the cutscenes as one of the best parts of a video game, but I always enjoyed watching MindsEye, even in its stupidest, most baffling moments. They aren’t quite the highlight, though. That would be MindsEye’s vehicles. Its electric array of sports cars, SUVs and offroad 4x4s are all sleekly designed, fit well with the near-future setting, and are generally fun to scoot around in. The driving model leans slightly more arcadey than modern Grand Theft Auto, but there’s still enough simulated weight to convince you that you’re dragging two tonnes of metal around every street corner.

1. Give us a kiss or the girl gets it. 2. There are some interesting mission concepts in MindsEye, but few of them are well executed. 3. Forget bungee jumping, Humvee jumping is where it’s at. 4. The symbolism of a minigame in which you dig your own grave feels a bit too on the nose.
| Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

MindsEye occasionally puts its cars to good use too. An early sequence throws you into a car chase in the middle of a sandstorm, one which recalls the centrepiece action scene of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. The long, winding route through the city is carefully orchestrated so you can barrel through backstreets and building yards to cut down the distance between you and your quarry. Perhaps it’s desperation talking, but there’s the tiniest hint of Uncharted 4’s jeep sequence here, and I briefly hoped MindsEye might be an entire game of similarly adaptive pursuits.

Unfortunately, car chases comprise only a small portion of MindsEye’s running time, and none of the others are as good as this one. Instead, vehicles are mainly used to travel between a handful of key locations in Redrock. This in itself could be entertaining in a more leisurely fashion, were it not for the fact that MindsEye seems reluctant to let you spend any time absorbing its atmosphere. When travelling to the next set-piece, characters constantly call you and aggressively demand you hurry up, get a move on, stop dawdling. It’s a bizarre reversal of Grand Theft Auto IV’s phone calls. Instead of friendly cousin Roman asking you to go bowling, you get verbally abused by your computer.

I can’t tell whether this is a poor attempt at maintaining tension, or if such urging exists because MindsEye doesn’t want you to stop and look at its world for any length of time. At first glance, Redrock is an impressive space, particularly its glittering downtown area complete with a Las Vegas-ish sphere displaying colourful, fictional advertisements. But its artifice becomes clearer the longer you spend in it. Viewed from above, you can see the tile-based manner in which its pieces are laid out, and the divisions between downtown and suburbia, suburbia and desert are all too clean. You also don’t spend a vast amount of time inside the city itself, primarily driving between locations on its fringes, like Silva’s factory and an abandoned mine.

1. Redrock certainly looks nice, but it’s more of a set than a simulated city. 2. Jacob discovers a new atmospheric layer, the cat-o-sphere. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

This isn’t necessarily a fatal flaw – Redrock wasn’t built to sustain a simulated life in the way Los Santos or Night City was. It is a set for a specific story BARB wants to tell, and it serves that function well enough. Problem is, the story Redrock has been built for is simply not very good.

It starts out promisingly, setting itself up as a politically charged techno-thriller. Soon after joining Silva Industries, Diaz becomes directly involved with Marco Silva himself, acting as a blend of fixer and personal bodyguard. There’s a mildly intriguing tension here, as Diaz forms an uneasy friendship with Silva while searching for clues to his past. For a moment – and this may have been another bout of culturally-starved mania – I wondered if it might go the way of The Night Manager, replacing Hugh Laurie’s arms dealer with an Elon Musk archetype to explore the unchecked influence tech billionaires have over social and government policy.

Nope! Instead, MindsEye basically handwaves Silva’s billionaire status. It acknowledges he’s a selfish arsehole, but clearly doesn’t want to portray him as a villain, and as such ends up not really knowing what to do with him. Instead, the main antagonist is Diaz’ scenery chewing former commanding officer, who leads a military coup of Redrock aided by a cyborg Elias Toufexis. At this point, any thematic substance the story had evaporates. And it isn’t even the silliest turn the plot takes. The latter third of the story takes MindsEye from a vaguely plausible depiction of the near-future to weapons-grade sci-fi shlock.

The driving is great, shame the game seems to so often hate you doing it. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

Any writer would struggle to mesh these elements together, so it isn’t surprising that the script’s tone is wildly inconsistent. Notionally, MindsEye is supposed to be a more serious affair than Grand Theft Auto, shorn of its misanthropic satire and abrasive caricatures. But once it introduces Charlie, Diaz’s quirky female hacker pal, it increasingly shifts to the kind glib, quippy dialogue that fell out of vogue circa Avengers: Endgame. “Is that gunfire I’m hearing?” one character asks Diaz over the radio during a firefight, to which he responds “Well, it ain’t popcorn!”.

None of this, though, is what ultimately sinks MindsEye. The biggest problem is the combat, which is the worst I’ve encountered in a big-budget game in at least a decade. Let’s start with the fact that Diaz, in himself, is one of the least capable action heroes I have ever played as. His four combat skills are sprinting, crouching, taking cover, and shooting. He can’t dodge. He can’t throw grenades. He can’t use his weapons while driving. He doesn’t have a melee attack. Hell, he can’t even get into a car through the passenger door, instead running around the vehicle to the driver’s seat in a way that got me killed more than once.

The only thing that distinguishes Diaz in any way is his drone, which is unlocked a short way into the campaign. In combat, the drone is mainly used to stun enemies and hack robots, which are useful abilities, but not especially fun or interesting. Oh and toward the end of the game, the drone unlocks the ability to launch grenades. This spices up combat slightly, in the same way that a sandwich is “spiced up” by adding bread.

Enemy pathfinding is, well, see for yourself. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

Yet even with these abilities, combat has zero sense of style or inherent satisfaction. The weapon selection is fairly broad, and among them are some half-decent guns like the sniper rifle and a late-game laser cannon. But the damage feedback couldn’t be limper if you kicked it in the groin. Incoming fire is designated by a tracer effect so sluggish it sucks all the lethality out of the bullets it’s supposed to highlight. Shooting a human enemy, meanwhile, triggers a pathetic ketchup-bottle squirt of blood, whereupon they flop to the ground like an NPC in Goat Simulator. And humans are the most fun adversaries to fight. The copbots are so slow to move and react, Diaz could probably stop to eat his dinner off them, while the various types of airborne drone you encounter are all prime examples of floating nuisance enemies.

The AI, meanwhile, is haphazard at best. Sometimes it makes a decent stab at flanking you. Other times enemies will stand out in the open waiting to be shot, or run right past you as they home blindly in on some cover. In fairness, their pathfinding is not helped by the sloppy set-piece design. Enemies seem to be sprinkled around combat zones almost at random. Sometimes they’re dispersed over areas that are far too large to make for an exciting fight. Other times they’re clumped together so closely their models begin to overlap.

This sloppiness spoils numerous mission concepts which, designed differently, could be quite memorable. Two missions involve escorting Silva’s rockets to their launchpad, and while one would frankly do, the enormous, caterpillar-tracked rocket carrier is a superb setting for a firefight. But the first of these sequences has no combat on the rocket carrier itself (instead, you fly your drone around to look at the vehicle’s treads – one of numerous missions where the primary mode of interaction is “looking at things”) while the second puts you in a combat VTOL aircraft where you can just wipe the floor with enemy vehicles as they approach.

The best of MindsEye is contained in this screenshot. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

And a lot of the missions are even worse. The most egregious examples of MindsEye’s shoddy game design are its side-missions. These are accessed through portals in the game world, and are ostensibly intended to showcase the power of MindsEye’s building tools, which let you use the game’s assets to create your own activities like races, gunfights and so forth. The toolkit itself is pretty powerful, albeit complex for a layman to do much more than drag and drop a few items without investing some serious time to understand it.

But the first side-mission you come to, which flashes back to a hostage rescue during Diaz’ military days, is shockingly bad, an insipid run and gun affair where you stumble through haphazardly placed enemies in sludgy, unsatisfying combat. There’s no pacing to it, no craft, minimal context, and the whole thing lasts about two minutes.

Other examples see you play as a member of the “Back Niners” gang, who starts the mission immediately surrounded by cops – cops who, it should be noted, don’t appear anywhere else in the game, and a mission where you play as some kind of mercenary clearing out an apartment complex of gangsters by, uh, blowing up all their cars. This mission might even be fun if you had some sort of, oh I dunno, throwable explosive to destroy them with.

1. Normally Jacob can’t use weapons in a vehicle. But there are a few sequences where he rides shotgun. 2. I suppose it’s patriotic to get Limmy to design one of your characters. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

And here we get to why MindsEye’s failure is cataclysmic, because you can’t make an action game with crap action in 2025. You just can’t. If gaming has perfected anything, it’s shooting dudes with a gun, and there are innumerable examples to draw from that show how to get it right. Indeed, there are action games ten, even twenty years older than MindsEye that are infinitely better to play. Max Payne 3, which is thirteen years old and the weakest Max Payne game, is a masterpiece compared to this.

MindsEye accessibility options

Camera shake toggle. Look sensitivity sliders. Separate audio sliders. Subtitles toggle.

More than that, though, if this is the best BARB’s own designers can come up with to showcase the creative potential of MindsEye’s construction tools, why on Earth should players ever want to use them? It’d be like buying bricks off a builder while watching his house fall down. Even assuming the game was great, I’d query where the overlap lies between fans of old-school linear cover shooters and fans of Roblox-style construction platforms. But the game BARB has made doesn’t encourage me to engage with the creative side of things at all.

The reasons for MindsEye’s sorry state will, I’m sure, emerge in due course. But there’s a line from the game, perhaps the sharpest in its messy, wayward script, that has been playing in my head since I heard it. Speaking about Silva’s lifestyle, one character tells Diaz “That’s what corporate billions gets you these days – immunity from reality”.

As I wandered around MindsEye’s empty ‘Free Roam’ mode after the campaign ended – in the shoes of a completely different character dressed like he suffered a parachute failure and landed in the warehouse where Call of Duty stores all its loot-boxes – I could only wonder whether MindsEye struggled with more than a little immunity from reality itself.

A copy of MindsEye was indepentently purchased for review by Eurogamer.

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