"MindsEye definitely needed a delay": GTA 5 veteran's new action game is here with 'Mixed' Steam reviews and "bugs galore," as players share spaghettified NPCs and cars with lives of their own

MindsEye, the new single-player action game from GTA 5 veteran Leslie Benzies' studio, Build a Rocket Boy, is finally here, but it's unfortunately not off to a fantastic start.

Since its launch yesterday, MindsEye accumulated a peak of 3,302 concurrent players on Steam (thanks, SteamDB), which isn't exactly great for a day-one performance. What's more, it sounds like most of the people who have played it on PC aren't happy – currently, only 42% of its 827 reviews are positive, making for a "Mixed" overall rating as players criticize its "incredibly poor performance," and say its "gunplay is buggy and the game feels clunky to play."

Another says that "the story is somewhat interesting, but the gameplay is just unplayable, it's nowhere near optimized," while one declares "bugs galore! One second I'm in a cinematic, the next my car decides it's in orbit. [...] Performance so shaky you'll question humanity."

Meanwhile, players across social media have been sharing clips and screenshots of bugs and general chaos. "MindsEye is not looking too good," one writes, sharing a terrifying image of a character whose eyes appear to have escaped their head, protruding from their melting face a bit like a snail.

"OH DEAR GOD," another says, with a clip showing them running over a character in a vehicle, only for it to stretch each of the poor guy's limbs into a horrifying, spaghettified mess as he goes flying. "Seb is dead," the game then proclaims.

Elsewhere, another player laments that "MindsEye definitely needed a delay," sharing a clip of NPCs running through the air, vehicles suddenly jumping up, and another poor dude phasing through the bottom of his car after being shot, all within the span of 55 seconds.

Developer Build a Rocket Boy hasn't directly addressed the bugs, but it has posted a statement on Reddit noting that "we understand that the current minimum spec requirements are very high, but 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." We should be getting more information about "patch 3 update timing, including these improvements" very soon.

The studio had previously advised anyone with early copies of the game to wait for MindsEye's day-one patch yesterday for some "key improvements." It had also been stated that the Xbox Series X|S day-one patch would be arriving "as soon as possible," seemingly delayed "due to varied platform certification," but that ended up arriving on time anyway. Even so, the patch clearly hasn't been able to solve all the game's problems.

I've seen one post from a player claiming to have received a refund on PlayStation after having complained about MindsEye's performance, but it's not clear how widespread a situation this is yet. There's little doubt Build a Rocket Boy will have further things to say on the matter soon.

MindsEye continues to project confidence: ex-GTA 5 lead's new game is available physically, but the devs ask folks to delay streams until official launch time – meanwhile a 7-hour "100% walkthrough" is already on YouTube.