In short clips and GIFs, MindsEye may appear to be an exciting action-adventure that is similar to Grand Theft Auto, but when the game is played through to the end, it is shown to be an unfinished, overly ambitious project that suffers from performance issues, uses its open world sparingly, and is hampered by unconvincing combat and boring mission design.
Although similarities to Grand Theft Auto are inevitable, MindsEye is more like the Mafia series in essence. In other words, it’s a single-player, strictly linear game in which you drive from mission to mission through the open globe. That doesn’t work out too well in the end. Mafia is fantastic. MindsEye isn’t. Despite having a very rare piece of technology still in his neck, you are Jacob Diaz, a former soldier and drone operator who was railroaded out of the military following a failed mission.
Overall, he is a somewhat lightly portrayed amnesiac hero who lacks any particularly noteworthy traits other than his capacity for obedience. Like landing a security position at the massive corporation Silva Corp. in the city of Redrock, which is modeled like Las Vegas, Diaz finds himself enmeshed in an AI-gone-bad, robots-gone-wild journey that begins slowly, picks up steam after a few hours, and then ends as if someone has pulled the plug.
MindsEye’s near-future environment is realistic and well-executed, and it does have style.
Give credit where credit is due: MindsEye has style, and its realistic and well-executed near-future environment is impressive. With the widespread usage of high-tech robotics and drones nowadays, it blends in places like typical residences and strip malls that wouldn’t seem out of place. As a result, the world seems suitably futuristic without feeling strange or unrecognizable. From an aesthetic point of view, it does seem extremely nicely done after a few years.
Additionally, it has a rather outstanding fleet of automobiles, and they have a certain pragmatism that makes them appear to be actual cars from, perhaps, five to ten years in the future. In essence, it successfully projects ten years’ worth of changes onto contemporary trends, such as the enormous, chunkily-accented pick-up trucks of today, the teardrop-shaped electric sedans, and the battery-powered retromods. More significantly, the handling is genuinely fantastic, which is uncommon in open-world action games.
The automobiles you get to drive are heavy and enjoy being smashed into fast corners with handbrakes in the realistically congested traffic. There’s none of the stickiness that characterizes GTA clones like Saints Row (which I don’t enjoy) or Sleeping Dogs (which I love nevertheless). You know, the sort of careless handling that makes it seem more like you’re turning the world beneath the automobile than the vehicle itself.
Mind Over Matter
In the first task, you have to travel a short distance into the desert to shoot four robots who are barely strong enough to shoot back. In the second mission, you have to trace a burglar who is going slowly by keeping an eye on a security panel and… switching cameras. Although the initial stanza isn’t particularly explosive, when the bullets start flying, things don’t get much better. It consists of almost ten hours of the most monotonously simple missions from previous open-world action game decades.
Dude, the enemy AI doesn’t make for very enjoyable shootouts, and combat against the few bot kinds and human infantry is essentially pretty basic. The least sane people are humans. Sometimes they hide, and other times they directly approach you in the hopes of being shot. They react bewilderingly slowly when you run out to meet them (not that this is a particularly strong technique, considering there is no melee attack).
Shootouts aren’t made very enjoyable by bad enemy AI.
It’s simply janky. On the one hand, you can fire the bots individually, including their weaponry. That’s good. However, if you shoot a human standing behind some scenery, they will frequently blink back into cover without any kind of connection animation. That is subpar. The lack of firepower isn’t the reason; MindsEye has a lot of firearms, but they’re thrown into your arsenal with so little fanfare that I typically didn’t notice. I would simply see something new in my weapon wheel, such as an energy blaster or another assault rifle.
What you should be utilizing at any particular time is rarely obvious, and it doesn’t appear to make much of a difference. As Diaz gains access to all of his partner drone’s exclusive benefits, the action does pick up towards the end of the narrative. The ability to instantly transform an enemy robot into an ally by zapping it adds zest to the action that it lacks from the start. For a while, your drone’s grenade ability is also cool, although it’s perhaps a little too good at eliminating adversaries up front. I played as my drone for the majority of the late game scenarios, dropping countless grenades from above on robots and soldiers.
The evil guys just had no defense against this, thus what ended up being the penultimate battle became one of the easiest. My main issue with MindsEye, however, was that it performed wildly inconsistently on my powerful computer (RTX 4080, Intel Core Ultra 9 185H). My playthrough was plagued by problems, even though the auto settings put most of the adjustable options to “High” and restricted the frame rate at 60 frames per second. The frame rate would flutter and occasionally hang, and it is frequently choppy and fuzzy when panning.
It was scarcely playable and chugged to a crawl during one car chase performance. Even the cutscenes occasionally stumbled and showed ghosting. Lowering the parameters hasn’t had many beneficial outcomes from my experiments. Technically, it’s in terrible shape. In all honesty, there are times when MindsEye appears beautiful. Explosions are great. Incredibly gorgeous sunlight shines through Redrock’s opulent hotels.
The rocket loader at the Silva facility was impressive in its size and intricacy, and at one point, I was stopped cold by the metallic sheen of a parked jet in the glare of the desert. It looks fantastic when it functions properly. However, I used this machine to play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle six months ago, and it did a fantastic job. MindsEye doesn’t. It reminds me of Steven Seagal in about 1990: It looks great, however, it’s not operating correctly.
It reminds me of Steven Seagal in about 1990: It looks great, however, it’s not operating correctly.
However, optimizing performance won’t address MindsEye’s several other problems. Many of these are built right into the design. All too frequently, the objectives are just boring and constrictive. Driving a pre-assigned vehicle to a marker is your only option. A cutscene is triggered by that. After that, you shoot everything. Then choose a different route. There isn’t any of the emergent enjoyment you consistently experience in games like Grand Theft Auto, and it’s all quite regimented, leaving no space for the kind of pranks or playing around you can do in similar titles.
When you get close enough, MindsEye usually just splutters into a cutscene; it rarely trusts us to even park at a mission sign. The lack of music or radio stations to listen to while traveling between missions isn’t helpful. The main purpose of the time spent traveling from point A to point B appears to be to feed you phone calls that advance the plot a bit. Exploration is deliberately discouraged, and you will be continuously reprimanded for failing to reach your destination. Since it’s not the kind of living environment you might have anticipated, there’s no motivation to investigate anyhow.
What’s the point when the police don’t even respond to Diaz’s crimes? Furthermore, there isn’t much to be found outside. Are you looking for a cool car to drive? Do not bother. No other cars are allowed. Destroy the vehicle you were given? That is a failure of mission. If it’s burning, you won’t even be able to escape. For a game like this, when the whole genre revolves around automobile theft, it’s a perplexing decision. MindsEye contains some clever concepts. There are some surprising riddles late in the piece that provided me a respite from blasting, and an efficient stealth mission halfway through is a welcome change of pace.
However, it squanders their potential and confines the remaining ones to its approximately two hours of cutscenes. A group of robots is shown running at great speeds after my car at one point. The robots captured the car and destroyed it before the movie ended, as I was bracing myself for what could have been an exciting chase. In a game that forced me to endure a painful, one-off CPR minigame that might have been a cutscene just hours ago, this kind of behavior is a genuine rug pull.
Verdict
High on ambition but low on original ideas, MindsEye’s rigid mission design renders its open world largely pointless, and it’s consistently undermined by vanilla combat, janky AI enemies, and its sloppy frame rate and bugs. Throw in its insultingly unfinished free-roaming component, and it’s clear it was simply not ready to be released. If you had your sights set on MindsEye, think again.
MindsEye’s open world is essentially useless due to its rigid mission design, which is high on ambition but poor on innovative ideas. Additionally, the game is constantly weakened by clumsy AI foes, sloppy frame rate, glitches, and vanilla gameplay. It wasn’t ready for release when you consider its incredibly incomplete free-roaming feature. You should reconsider whether MindsEye was your target.
