![[REVIEW] MindsEye](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgvPa6IUht8dE38rVqyoKhmCPzI0UjhzUyBIz2qqsV-wwOV7i2lOSExTG8ajB_QOPaQFLK_thPnZHcVJqMeJFzNLsvg_JyurD4sTEiTAMqe66g9LEXBtMcWhJU18Mj1L-3mH6OT5nF-OJKOzSiSXywerZpREAoRxGV5amQ0X7WooJDX9y-1J6eEqNXo8pQ=w640-h360-rw "[REVIEW] MindsEye")
MindsEye, hyped like GTA, is a poorly executed action-adventure game with a bleak mission design, glitch-ridden performance, and uninspired open world, highlighting missed potential.
MindsEye, an action-adventure game, may appear like an exciting GTA-adjacent game in short clips and GIFs. However, upon playing through to the end of its story, it becomes clear that the project is overly ambitious, plagued by performance problems, making little use of its open world, and crippled by unconvincing combat and dull mission design.
MindsEye is more akin to the Mafia series in terms of its tightly linear, single-player story, where the open world largely exists as a backdrop for players to drive from mission to mission. The game follows Jacob Diaz, a former soldier and drone operator who has been railroaded out of the military after a botched mission. After securing a security job at Silva Corp in Redrock, Diaz is embroiled in an AI-gone-bad, robots-gone-wild adventure that starts slow, gets more intriguing a few hours in, and ends like someone's yanked the plug out of the wall.
The game has style and a near-future setting that fuses locations like normal homes and strip malls with the proliferation of high-tech robotics and drones. It also includes an impressive fleet of vehicles that look like real cars from five to 10 years in the future. However, the handling is genuinely good in a way open-world action games rarely manage, with the cars being weighty and loving to be whipped into high-speed handbrake turns through the realistically thick traffic.
MindsEye is a 10-hour open-world action game that features a series of simple missions. The first mission involves shooting four robots that are barely able to fire back, while the second requires tracking a slow-moving thief by monitoring a security console and switching cameras. The combat against bot types and human soldiers is mostly plain, and dud enemy AI doesn't make for particularly satisfying shootouts. Humans are the least sensible, sometimes taking cover or walking towards you, waiting to get shot.
The game features plenty of guns, but it mostly just chucks them into your arsenal with so little fanfare that you usually don't notice. The action improves towards the back end of the story, as Diaz gets access to all his partner drone's special perks. The ability to zap an enemy robot and turn it into an instant ally gives the action some zest that it absolutely lacks out of the gate. Your drone's grenade ability is also neat for a while, but it might be a bit too effective at clearing out enemies ahead.
The primary problem with MindsEye is its drastically uneven performance on my high-end PC (RTX 4080, Intel Core Ultra 9 185H). While the auto settings placed the bulk of the configurable options at 'High' and capped the frame rate at 60 fps, my playthrough was rife with issues. It's regularly blurry and choppy when panning, and the frame rate would flutter and sometimes hang. During one car chase performance, it chugged to a crawl and was only barely playable. Sometimes even the cutscenes would stutter and display ghosting. Experimenting with lowering the settings hasn't yielded much in the way of positive results.
There are moments in MindsEye when it looks quite stunning. Explosions are excellent, and the sunlight piercing through Redrock's glitzy hotels is seriously snazzy. The sheer scale and complexity of the Silva factory's rocket loader and, at one point, the metallic sheen of a parked jet in the desert glare stopped me in my tracks. When it runs well and looks good, it's very good. However, performance optimization won't solve MindsEye's myriad other issues, as many of these are just baked into how it's designed.
MindsEye has some good ideas, such as an effective stealth mission midway and some unexpected puzzles late in the piece. However, it relegates the rest of them to its roughly two hours of cutscenes and wastes their potential. Even apparent bosses die in cutscenes, and in an unforgivable transgression, if there's a way to skip them (even when replaying missions and watching them a second time), I couldn't find it.
MindsEye is a 10-hour campaign that leaves the reader unsatisfied due to its lack of original ideas and underdeveloped story threads. The ending is vague and unearned, making it feel like the writer was out of fresh paper. The story is left dangling, and questions remain unanswered. After the finale, the player is tossed back into the open world as a random weirdo in a crop top, with no explanation of how anything works, direction, or purpose.
The player leaves the building in search of a vehicle but finds it difficult to enter and interact with the characters. They shoot at bystanders and soldiers, but no armed response occurs. The player then returns to a small hatchback, which remains the only vehicle they can interact with. They drive to an icon that looks like a chess piece, and the action takes another significant nosedive as they arrive.
The free-roaming mode is pointless, scrappy, and a complete waste of time. It is not remotely close to finished. When its performance is stable and players blast through robots, MindsEye can masquerade as a serviceable action shooter for a few minutes at a time. However, its flashy graphics and cinematics cannot hide its distinct lack of substance.
High on ambition but low on original ideas, MindsEye's rigid mission design renders its open world largely pointless. The vanilla combat, janky AI enemies, and sloppy frame rate along with bugs undermine the experience of its open world. The insultingly unfinished free-roaming component makes it clear that MindsEye was not ready to be released.
About the Writer
Jenny, the tech wiz behind Jenny's Online Blog, loves diving deep into the latest technology trends, uncovering hidden gems in the gaming world, and analyzing the newest movies. When she's not glued to her screen, you might find her tinkering with gadgets or obsessing over the latest sci-fi release.What do you think of this blog? Write down at the COMMENT section below.
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