MindsEye is a game that certainly didn’t put its best foot forward. Between a frankly terrible marketing campaign that makes the game seem either AI generated or a scam, comments from devs attacking negative comments, and a slow and dull tutorial, MindsEye doesn’t immediately pop.
While slow to get started, once I got stuck into MindsEye, I found there was a lot of stuff to be liked albeit with what feels like a lack of quality control. There has been a lot of discourse about the game, particularly regarding its performance on consoles; I’ve played MindsEye on a base PS5 and honestly… it’s not bad.
Graphics & performance
MindsEye looks fantastic, fully utilizing the capability of Unreal 5 to provide a high level of detail to the world that is really impressive, despite the detail and photo-realism at times creeping into the uncanny valley. While the level of detail is impressive, bolstered by some generally excellent lighting and model work, and phenomenal motion capture and animations, there are noticeable compromises that have been made in order to squeeze better performance out of the PS5.
The most noticeable and often distracting instance of this is in the widespread use of depth of field blur. Blur begins a fairly short distance away from you, leaving everything the mid to far distance, what could be no more than 50 – 100ft in front of you, slightly blurred. The widespread use depth of field blur caused a significant impact on performance. On Day 3 of release, a patch released adding the option to remove depth of field blur. Not only does this massively improve the look of the game making the game look sharper, but it also smoothed out the small drops in framerate I was noticing during driving and shooting segments, though not eliminating them entirely.
Where the game perhaps struggles most graphically, is with anti-aliasing on thin objects such as fencing and specular highlights along the edges of background buildings. I would frequently see things like wires and fencing shimmer and shift as the game struggled to smooth the lines out and keep them crisp.
Overall, I have been pleasantly surprised with performance. There have been reports of big performance issues and bugs for MindsEye but my experience was minimal and non-disruptive. Drops in framerate commonly occurred during combat and driving, but they weren’t particularly sharp drops, and I haven’t experienced many drops that have been disruptive to my gameplay experience.
While bugs have also been relatively few and far between, they were more noticeable than performance and grew in number as I progressed through the story. Most prominent has been instances of bugs in NPC behaviors, commonly seen as a vehicle stuck driving into a wall or lamp post, usually when a scripted section of the story has created some disruption. The bugs I did encounter, were only minor and had little to no impact on the overall experience. Though I would prefer my game to be bug free, in instances like this where it barely affected my experience, I am not inclined to rake MindsEye through the coals for it, especially as overall my experience was a fairly stable one.
Is it a Ziggurat or Pyramid?
MindsEye’s story, while not the “immersive experience with a mind-bending complex narrative” the games store page promises, was fairly decent overall. You play as Jacob Diaz, an ex-special forces soldier who after a mission that went horribly wrong, takes up a job at Silvo Corporation in a search for answers about his past. Before long Diaz is caught in a series of events that lead to not only the answers he seeks but grave consequences for humanity.
Diaz himself, while not entirely generic, is a cookie-cutter protagonist serving the narrative and the player role well. MindsEye offers a strong supporting cast that are well acted both in voice and in mocap and animation work. Each character is a likable, worthwhile addition to the narrative, and has a meaningful dynamic and most importantly chemistry, with Diaz. These are characters I would be more than happy to see again.
MindsEye’s narrative starts off slow and does something many games do, wasting much of its opening couple of hours boring the player to death with cutscenes, exposition and brief, dull snippets of gameplay. What MindsEye does do well is sprinkling in teases of what is to come in a way that keeps the opening sections intriguing. The pace and excitement do pick up, but it’s not until near the halfway mark that the games reap the seeds it has sown and get interesting.
There is a lot I enjoyed about the narrative and its themes, touching on government corruption, pervasive technology throughout society, multi-dimensional entities and a robot/AI uprising, but MindsEye fails to explore these concepts in any kind of meaningful way, instead leaning these as either set dressing or minor plot elements to push the narrative forward.
While it doesn’t exactly squander a solid premise, the short campaign at roughly 20 hours means its story often boils down to generic elements, never fully embracing the interesting concepts present nor quite able to live up to the thought-provoking insight it attempts to contribute around its themes. Coupled with gameplay that often lacks depth, and it ultimately feels quite shallow.
I particularly felt this in the ending. Despite MindsEye flaw, I had been increasingly enjoying the story as the stakes intensified and events played out, but the short length and inability to fully explore the interesting characters and concepts present left me unsatisfied with an abrupt end.
The issue with the narrative is a reflection of the issues present throughout every aspect of MindsEye; everything feels not quite there yet. Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) had all the makings of the thought-provoking and challenging narrative they were hoping to craft and another at least 10 hours with the story, the chance to explore the game’s characters and themes, particularly those centered around the AI sub-plot, could have been enough to elevate it to that level.
GTA Clone?
I attempt to go into any review as blind as possible, preferring to judge a game on its merits, but it’s impossible to avoid the comparisons to the acclaimed Grand Theft Auto series. In part this is due to BARB founder Leslie Benzie’s prior connection to the franchise. MindsEye is not GTA, but GTA’s influence can be strongly felt. MindsEye’s combat and driving are reminiscent of GTA V, having a strong core that, like much of MindsEye, feels undercooked.
Exciting and cinematic car chases are touted as a selling point in MindsEye’s marketing, and while the driving feels great and there is a decent amount of car chases in the campaign, it’s not until the later stages of the game that they start getting a little exciting, albeit held back by a lack of ambition.
Chases in the latter half of the game naturally have some fun to them due to the state of the world injecting a little bit of chaos into the chase. But it’s rare that the game makes any effort to spice the chase up with driving segments either on a relatively straight road with uniform enemies for you to shoot or are simply exercises in following your mini-map satnav until the game tells you you’ve finished.
Sequences where you have to give chase, more prominent in the first half are even worse. Here you are constantly one crash away from failing. Target will always be able to pull ahead straights to maintain a lead that, even at full speed, won’t shrink until reaching a corner. Even a relatively minor crash, one that should be straight forward to catch up from, especially with future tech to track the target car, are likely to cause the mission to fail.
Compiling this is that more often than not, failure will mean restarting the sequence from the beginning. Driving sections last far too long and lack pazazz, no matter how good the driving feels, constantly driving for five minutes between two ends of the map grows tiresome.
Again, there is a solid basis in the combat. The cover-based shooting mechanics generally feel great. Weapons are smooth and responsive, pack a punch and drone abilities, once fully available, add an extra layer to combat that allow for more freedom and can also be quite fun.
Enemy AI is often hit and miss, with foes just as likely to walk directly in front of you as they were to attempt to sneak around and flank your position. The attempts at strategy from the AI were a welcome inclusion at the beginning, as while weapons and drone abilities were limited these moves often forced me to reposition, result in a counter flank on other enemies and was a good way to keep combat more dynamic.
However, as the game progressed and I unlocked new weapons and drone abilities, this was nullified, and combat became trivialized through aggressive use of powerful weapons and over-powered drone abilities. Your drone companion is a useful tool that will gain a handful of new abilities that turn it into a formidable fighting force by itself. Initially your only offensive tool is a stun that will force enemies to lock up so you can quickly follow up with a kill, its effective and feels great. Later you will unlock the ability for it to hack enemy robots to fight for you and drop powerful nano-grenades. At one point your stun will be upgraded and it will become a powerful tool to use.
The combat is fun, particularly once you have all of the Drone abilities at your disposal and some of the powerful late game weaponry. Despite the fun, the combat still feels it’s missing something. There is no ability to melee, nor the ability to dodge or roll – something that would have been useful fighting drones that launch missiles at you. Depending on the location combat would boil down to either aggressively ignoring cover and utilizing drone abilities to overwhelm enemies or, dropping into cover and manually piloting the drone to scout ahead and take down enemies before you get close. Both styles were fun, but the combat always retained a simple and repetitive feel to it.
Finally, there is the open world – or lack of it. MindsEye has an open world that serves only as a backdrop to the game’s narrative. While in story mode, the game tunnel visions the story and you aren’t provided any opportunity to freely explore the map. The Free Roam mode you do get is… odd.
There is side content available throughout the campaign, and it can be accessed through portals you encounter in the world, or through the pause menu. This is the side content you would expect for an open world, with races and shoot-outs, all timed and ranked to compete against yourself.
The side missions are presented as portals during the campaign as you don’t play as Diaz, instead tapping into the memories and experiences of the citizens of Redrock. The content is a bit dull and there isn’t much of a reward for completing them (not even an achievement), but about halfway through the game though you will unlock free roam mode.
Free roam mode is a strange design choice in all honestly. To start with, you can’t choose or create a character, instead being forced to play as a character than can only be described as cringey. A mix of GTA V’s Trevor and an attempt at the quirky characters you might encounter in Saints Row. There is absolutely no context to why you are playing this character.
What is clear, is that free roam is where BARB intend for players to continue the MindsEye story through their future content delivery. It’s akin to a singleplayer version of GTA Online, with frequent story updates and activities to keep players occupied, but MindsEye’s free roam mode offers literally nothing – all of its content is available through the pause menu, there’s no map or way of marking directions to activities and you lose the use of your drone, so no fun abilities and no marking enemies in encounters.
Final Verdict
MindsEye promised a lot, and ultimately it failed to deliver on that promise, but what it did deliver honestly isn’t that bad. If like me, you’re fortunate to experience the game without much of the performance and bug issues being reported by many users, what you have is a serviceable game that probably just needed a little more time in the oven.
Throughout my playthrough, it was clear that Build a Rocket Boy had a lot of ambition for the game but couldn’t capitalize on its most interesting concepts. Whether they needed better direction to ensure the games vision was properly executed, or just more time to cook with what they had, there is the basis of something quite strong here.
In its current state MindsEye certainly isn’t anything special, but if you are willing to take a risk on something that has a solid foundation, oodles of potential but might just end up leave you a little dissatisfied with the final result, MindsEye is worth a try – but maybe wait until its performance is ironed out.
The Review
FAIR
