MindsEye review: "An uninspired and forgettable sci-fi action adventure that feels like a Netflix movie you watch while on your phone"

When just about every modern single-player game feels under the pressure to cram in an abundance of features and content to match the impossible bar of a Rockstar game, it's almost refreshing that MindsEye, directed by former Rockstar dev Leslie Benzies and his new studio Build A Rocket Boy, is unabashedly stripped back as a no-nonsense 360-era throwback ten-hour single-player campaign with a singular story to tell – all without getting bogged down in menus and RPG-style upgrade trees.

Unfortunately, that's where the praise ends, because rather than riding on the wave of AA's comeback, MindsEye feels like a hollow shell of a game. After all, it was initially envisioned as a showcase for the studio's more ambitious game creation platform Everywhere, which itself seems to have been scaled back so that this is now a headlining standalone release published by IOI Partners (the game creation aspect, currently in beta, is also limited to PC, so PS5 and Xbox Series X/S players are essentially just buying MindsEye for that campaign, which is the focus of this review).

As a point of comparison, you might say that MindsEye is supposed to be for Everywhere what Art's Dreams was for Media Molecules' Dreams, an introductory and inspiring springboard of what its game creation tools can achieve. The former is however powered by Unreal 5 rather than a bespoke engine, and rather than inspire, the art direction has all the shallowness of a cyberpunk tech demo that may boast photorealism but lacks any imaginative rocket fuel to make it stand out on its own.

High fidelity visuals also don't mean much if a game is rife with bugs that result in hilariously cursed glitches, as has been widely reported since the game's launch. I personally didn't encounter the most egregious graphical issues on PC, although I experienced annoying screen tearing that nothing in the settings of the game or my monitor could rectify. But even without these getting in the way, they're the least of MindsEye's problems.

What happens in Redrock

Set in the fictional Redrock City, a desert city that's reminiscent of Las Vegas albeit in a future where gambling has been outlawed, you play as Jacob Diaz, a former soldier suffering from memory loss who takes up an entry-level security job at the tech giant Silva Corp.

The job is however just an excuse for him to snoop around the company as he tries to uncover the secrets of a strange neural implant, the titular MindsEye, that he came to have during a military operation three years ago. It's the central mystery that the game opens with, and which we're treated to occasional flashbacks of, which also causes Diaz to black out. That goes in tandem with a plot where big tech clashes with government and zeitgeisty themes on AI and robots and what happens if something or someone were to use them against us.

Black Mirror however this is not, even though it does feature a moody pulsing score from Rival Consoles, who previously scored that dystopian anthology's excellent 'Striking Vipers' episode. Instead, MindsEye has all the energy of a forgettable Netflix film that you put in the background while scrolling on your phone. From a generic best friend who's also sporting the dreadedly overused Killmonger cut to an obnoxious tech bro billionaire that you're actually supposed to help, there's little to the cast to engage you on an emotional level – the closest we get is a strained attempt at flirty banter with a hacker known as Robin Hood.

A weak plot could perhaps be overlooked if there was something juicier in the premise to sink your teeth into, but the MindsEye itself is largely a macguffin that occasionally causes weird things to happen rather than a gameplay mechanic. The main piece of tech you make use of is a Lenz, essentially a futuristic comms device that fits on your eye like a single contact lens.

In execution, it's nothing more than a diegetic explanation for bog-standard game UI like a mini-map that includes objective markers, and of course making calls to other characters, with off-screen dialogue the preferred method of delivering narrative over cinematic cutscenes.

But aside from being able to scan for nearby enemies, it's disappointing that your Lenz does nothing more to aid you in combat. Whether you're up against militia gangs or killer robots, MindsEye plays like a barebones third-person cover shooter that's perhaps mildly better than GTA's worst moments, if only because GTA's gunplay has never been especially outstanding. It's passable but with no extra sauce that you'd expect a futuristic sci-fi setting would afford you. I would've taken x-ray vision or even bullet time.

You do at least eventually have access to a diminutive drone companion that gives you a few more tools, such as a shock charge that can open some security-locked doors and also stun (but not fully incapacitate) nearby enemies. When taken out, it hovers near you a bit like a cute BD-1 from Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and can even be manually controlled in first-person, which comes in useful for a couple of stealth infiltration missions that does add a bit of flavor. It also unlocks a few more functions as the story develops, such as being able to hack other robots to fight for you or even launch grenades.

BARB wire

While there are also attempts to insert some minigame sequences to add some variety, the majority of your missions are either spent as a cover shooter or driving from A to B (more often than not then driving back from B to A). It's not too different from the most rote of GTA missions where the time on the road is an excuse for characters to dump exposition, with the occasional car chase sequence, including one car that would just speed away so impossibly far that the slightest error would result in a mission failure, a reminder of the worst GTA missions from the PS2 era.

Unlike GTA however, Redrock City is a 'faux-pen' world that is meant to be no more than set dressing. But even after the dialogue has played out, there's still a long way to reach your destination, with little in this lifeless desert city to help pass the time. It's telling that you only have a mini-map but no ability to bring up a whole map of the city, while taking the slightest shortcut or driving on the wrong lane results in your sat-nav going absolutely haywire.

Naturally, I can't help but see what happens when I encounter pedestrians and decide to plough into them. Do this a few times and you'll simply insta-fail and have to restart from your last checkpoint, but it's still hilarious that you can get away with at least one murder in broad daylight and get little more than a mild rebuke from your boss. I may not have been expecting a full simulation with a wanted system, but even then the mechanics still feel so basic and limited.

If you're being shot at, you can't fire back while driving, you can't exit a vehicle until it comes to a complete stop, and you can't even get into any vehicle that's not yours until much later (on the bright side, no matter how banged up your company car gets, they do at least magic up one as good as new next time you need it). That same restriction is felt in combat when at one point I tried to sneak up on an enemy with their back to me, only to realize melee or takedowns don't exist and I'd just have to use my loud guns that alert everyone else.

The lack of a compelling hook and the incessant to-ing and fro-ing around the city that largely retreads the same few locations means that even as a 8-10 hour campaign, MindsEye feels longer than it needs to be. That it doesn't even end on a satisfying note makes the journey even less worthwhile, as it teases a cliffhanger that I'm not sure BARB has any intention of following through with.

That's because the game is still meant as a starting point for players to fill with user-generated content, and so Redrock could be seen as this empty canvas for you to craft your own experiences with. Some of this is demonstrated through the official developer-created side missions you can jump into, a few showing up as weird unexplained portals during the campaign, but which can also be accessed in the menu screen, confusingly named 'Play', while you continue the campaign with 'Resume'.

The first of these hint that these missions could act as a way to flesh out the world, such as a mission where you play as Diaz in a counter-terrorist op back from his military days, while some other shooting scenarios actually cast you as different enemy factions. Others meanwhile are checkpoint races or drone races, and while this is content that everyone can access, PC players will also be able to build their own. From the examples BARB has created so far, it's more like superfluous activities that feel divorced from the campaign, apart from the same ropey mechanics. If anything, it just takes you out of MindsEye even more as you realize there's nothing here to really invest yourself in because at the end of the day it's all just content for you to mindlessly consume, so you can take it or leave it.

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