MindsEye Review - MidEye

At this point, MindsEye has had one of the most bizarre tales in the industry. Originally announced in 2022 as part of "Everywhere", a make-your-own game-style tool like Dreams or Roblox. It was then reannounced in 2023 as a standalone episodic game where each episode would take place in a different time period and link together to an overarching story. Then, IO Interactive picked it up, and it was reannounced again in 2024, this time as a Grand Theft Auto styled open world game. That's what it finally launched as. Did all these reworks amount to anything, or is this MindsEye rather mid?

The Worst First Day Known To Man

You play as Jacob Diaz, a soldier who has gone through a mysterious traumatic event and is left with an implant that he doesn't know anything about, and most of his memories are missing. He arrives in the city of Redrock and crashes on the couch of his best friend Seb. At the same time, he also gets a security job working for Silva Corp, a company that I'd joke is "Evil Tesla," but Tesla is already Evil Tesla, so I guess it's just... normal Tesla.

During Jacob's first shift, he puts down a robot rebellion, stalks an employee, discovers his implant was made by Silva Corp, and then guns down a bunch of highly trained mercenaries. This starts a rolling mystery where Jacob tries to find out more about his implant, while also getting tangled up in each of these groups.

This may sound interesting, but the sheer amount of plot strings involved in this game means some are going to be left behind. What I didn't expect is that nearly every single one of these threads got abandoned. A former member of Jacob's military unit blackmailing him to commit crimes? Forgotten. The mayor's reelection campaign is based on taking control away from Silva Corp? Who cares. The celebrity who may be manipulating the owner of Silva Corp to steal robots? The owner's personal assistant working for a mysterious person who wants Jacob dead? Literally anything involving Seb after the first couple of missions? All of them were forgotten shortly after they started. It's like playing the first quest in a chain of side quests and then never bothering to revisit them.

I want to take a moment to note that the game has characters that are all clear parodies of Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Donald Trump. However, it has nothing to say about any of these people. They're just here.

The only plot line given any substantial time of day is the robot rebellion one, but there's nothing about it that was really that intriguing. If you've seen any sci-fi game, movie, or book in the last 20 years, then you likely know all of the twists in advance. All MindsEye really has to offer is a chain of cliches, none of which are done well enough to really stand out.

MindsEye is also full of bizarre line reads. None of the actors are bad, but there are several times when the tone of the read doesn't fit the situation at all. Its clear lines were edited into the wrong place, or the actors weren't given the right context for the scenes. While chasing a car in a sandstorm, Jacob is told to bring in a hacker alive, and he responds with a "copy that" that sounds like he's in tears that doesn't fit the tone of the dialogue before or after at all. At other times, lines felt chopped up, like at one point when a character responds with "that's [...] news," but if it was good or bad news is unsure because the word in the middle was clearly and poorly cut from the line.

Never Before Have We Been Asked "What If a Company Was Evil?"

So if the plot is generic and forgettable, the gameplay shouldn't be, right? Well, bad news there too. MindsEye is one of the most basic third-person shooters I've ever played, and channels all the memories of a generic mid-2000s cover shooter. Not like the Uncharteds and Gears of Wars, which felt good and provided memorable and unique moments. This is closer to something like Damnation, Quantum Theory, or Inversion: forgettable games that brought nothing special to the table, swinging at the king and missing.

The only real attempt to switch up the shooter gameplay comes in the form of your drone. You get it about a quarter of the way into the game, and can either command it to perform actions, or take direct control of it and do these yourself. At first, all you can do is use it as a taser to stun humans and shut off robots. Later, you also gain the ability to hack robots to turn them friendly, and shoot grenades.

The grenade stands out because it's just so much better than anything else you can do that I don't know why you'd use the others once you have it. However, even with all that, none of this makes the drone anything other than a small list of abilities that don't do anything you haven't seen before.

While the majority of gameplay is shooting, you are sometimes pulled away for something else. There are quite a few scenes of watching people slowly walk around and talk through cameras, which isn't much fun. Sometimes you do quick time events to perform CPR or dig a hole. There's a single stealth segment that's so easy there isn't really anything to think about.

Not like you'll be doing much playing. Before and after every gameplay segment you'll often be placed in 10+ minutes of cutscenes. It doesn't help that a lot of these times the gameplay segments are "walk/drive from point A to B." This makes MindsEye's pace sluggish, with the game really drawing out how long it can take.

Take "Meeting Marco Silva", the game's ninth story mission, for example. First, you take a five-minute drive from a hotel to Silva's company. Then you get a lengthy cutscene where Jacob is interrogated by his boss before she's called and told he needs to go to Silva's house. Another five-minute drive there. Another lengthy cutscene where you meet Silva company owner, Marco Silva. Then another five-minute drive to a party, followed by another lengthy cutscene to meet two more characters. Only after that do you finally get into gameplay.

This can work, lord knows Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption have similar formats, but it works because the writing and acting in those games are top-notch. MindsEye barely has half the budget or talent, and it shows. The characters are not as well acted or interesting, and having extended cutscenes or driving segments with them is far more painful and boring.

I noticed at one point that any time a vehicle's driver dies, the car will explode no matter what. This can be really hilarious if all it's doing is sitting still or slowly rolling forward.

It doesn't help that the driving segments usually end their conversations before you get wherever you're going and promptly become filled with generic and repetitive "go faster" and "why aren't we there yet?" barks.

But at least there's the open world, right? if you get bored of those cutscenes and conversations, you can go wander off and do side quests or other activities? Well, there's MindsEye's secret. Despite looking like an open-world game, and featuring the entirety of the fictional Redrock City, this isn't an open-world game at all. You just move from story mission to story mission, having to drive through the city without interacting with it in any way.

Want to explore? Once you deviate too far from the path to the next mission you get a game over. Don't like your car? Too bad, you can't steal or take any. The game has assigned you a specific vehicle for this mission and that is the vehicle you get. Think you can get assigned a new vehicle? Blowing up your vehicle is almost always a game over, even if you're not near it or don't need it for the mission anymore. You will look at MindsEye's world, go "shame I can't be there", and then play the game the way it demands you play it.

In total fairness, there is actually a free roam mode that you unlock once you beat the game. When I loaded into it I was assigned the character model of an old man wearing a gas mask, a bra, gym shorts, and with the words "Can't drink dust" painted on his stomach. I could not figure out how to change this character model. I was also assigned a car, much like the campaign, and I could not change it. There's no map, so who knows what's out there in the city. I found a single-checkpoint race, but that was it.

I also had a pre-made house that I could "interact" with stuff in, but that meant playing a canned animation while nothing happened, like a Grand Theft Auto roleplaying experience but without the other players to actually roleplay with.

It's a real shame because I actually would like to look around Redrock City. In one of the few positives I have to say about the game, Redrock itself is quite pretty and well-made. Sure, it's just Las Vegas, but it really nails that entertainment city vibe, with holograms, drone shows, a big sphere, tons of hotels, and more. I want to explore this city, just the game will not let me nor does it have interest in it.

Nothing, Nowhere, At No Time

In what feels like a leftover from when MindsEye was part of Everywhere, there is also a system that lets you build out missions and share them with people. In-game this means you sometimes see a portal and, when you go through it, you are automatically loaded into one of the 25 side missions the developer made at launch. Don't want to wait for the portal? Then you can pause the game, hit a button that says "play", and hop into a mission of your choice at any time. 

The first side mission I got loaded into was set in the past during Jacob's army days. It opened with him giving a monologue declaring that covert ops has changed, before declaring that covert ops never changes. Then it plays sad country music while you shoot people.

The end result, however, is a bunch of generic side missions that often have nothing to actually do with the plot of the game and usually can't be more complicated than a checkpoint race or rolling firefight.

It's all the disadvantages of user-made content, such as canned animations, soundtracks that don't fit, and having to stick to some very specific archetypes, without the endless amount of content that actually makes these missions worth it. It's wild that each one is marked with "made by Build a Rocket Boy" like this is a crowning achievement.

This is also assuming the game works. I played MindsEye on a PlayStation 5, and it was constantly struggling to keep up with the game. It seemed like every time a quest took me into the city, the game's framerate would chug. MindsEye also crashed several times during my playthrough, sometimes during cutscenes, sometimes during firefights, and sometimes when I had the game paused while I took notes for this review. 

That isn't even getting into some of the weirder glitches I saw. At one point, I had to chase a car, but the car hit a curb and flipped over. It then just sat there for a minute, me hanging around confused, before it just teleported to where I needed to chase it, causing me to fail the mission because I was too far behind. At another point, two cars pulled up full of soldiers that I think were supposed to get out and shoot me. The doors opened, and all eight soldiers dropped dead on the spot, me not having interacted with them in any way.

Over the course of the game, I saw other strange things like random limbs ragdolling on living enemies, my drone not listening to my commands, random vehicles exploding for no reason, and more.

However, I really don't want people to think there's some hidden gem buried under MindsEye that some patches can help unearth. MindsEye is, simply, fundamentally, a poorly designed, boring game. You can't patch it better without at least a year+ of reworks. Everything is fundamentally busted from the ground up, glitches or no.

MindsEye Review | Final Thoughts

MindsEye is so monumentally bad that I have a lot of questions about what happens from here. I can't imagine Build a Rocket Boy continues to exist. It certainly feels like IO Interactive is going to step away from publishing. This is probably the end of Grand Theft Auto producer/designer Leslie Benzies' career. I don't see Everywhere coming out after this mess. If nothing else, MindsEye will at least serve for some fantastic behind the scenes stories down the line.

MindsEye was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a copy purchased by the reviewer over the course of 20 hours - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.