MindsEye Review

MindsEye may look like an exciting, GTA-adjacent action-adventure in short clips and GIFs, but actually playing it through to the end of its story has revealed an unfinished, overly ambitious project that’s plagued with performance problems, makes precious little use of its open world, and is crippled by unconvincing combat and dull mission design.

While it’s natural to draw comparisons with GTA, in basic terms MindsEye is more akin to the Mafia series. That is, it’s a tightly linear, single-player story where the open world largely exists as a backdrop for you to drive from mission to mission. That doesn’t end up serving it very well. Mafia is great. MindsEye is not.

You are Jacob Diaz, a former soldier and drone operator who has been railroaded out of the military after a botched mission, albeit with an extremely rare piece of tech still embedded in his neck. He’s a pretty thinly drawn amnesiac hero overall, with no especially memorable characteristics beyond his ability to follow instructions. After securing a security job at mega-company Silva Corp in the Las Vegas-inspired city of Redrock, Diaz is quickly embroiled in an AI-gone-bad, robots-gone-wild adventure that starts slow, gets a little more intriguing a few hours in, and then ends like someone’s yanked the plug out of the wall.

Credit where it’s due, MindsEye does have style, and its near-future setting is accomplished and credible. It fuses locations like normal homes and strip malls that wouldn’t look out of place in the present day with the proliferation of high-tech robotics and drones. The result is a world that appears appropriately futuristic, but doesn’t feel alien or unrecognisable. From an aesthetic perspective, it really does appear a few years from now in a well-executed way.

It also includes a genuinely impressive fleet of vehicles – and there’s a practicality to them that makes them look like real cars from, say, five to 10 years in the future. It basically takes modern trends – like today’s massive, chunkily-accented pick-up trucks, teardrop-shaped electric sedans, and battery-powered retromods – and successfully projects a decade of tweaks onto them. More importantly, the handling is actually genuinely good in a way open-world action games rarely manage. The cars you actually get to drive are weighty and really love to be whipped into high-speed handbrake turns through the realistically thick traffic. There’s none of that stickiness that’s typical of GTA clones like Sleeping Dogs (which I love regardless) or Saints Row (which I do not). You know, the kind of superficial handling that feels like you’re turning the world under the car, rather than the car itself.

Unfortunately, this is largely where the praise stops.

Mind Over Matter

The very first mission is a short drive into the desert to shoot four robots who barely have the vigour to fire back, and the second requires you to track a slow-moving thief by monitoring a security console and… switching cameras. It’s not exactly an explosive opening stanza, but things don’t get that much better when the bullets really start flying. It’s around 10 hours of the most boringly straightforward missions from the past decades of open-world action games.

Combat against the handful of bot types and human soldiers is mostly just plain, and dud enemy AI doesn’t make for particularly satisfying shootouts. Humans are the least sensible. Sometimes they take cover; sometimes they just walk towards you waiting to get shot. Run out to meet them and they’re confusingly slow to react (not that this is a particularly strong tactic, as there is no melee attack).

It’s just janky. On the one hand, you can actually shoot individual pieces – including weapons – off the bots. That’s nice. On the other, put a round into a human standing behind some scenery and they’ll often blink back into cover with no linking animation whatsoever. That’s shoddy.

It’s not due to a lack of firepower, because MindsEye does feature plenty of guns, although it mostly just chucks them into your arsenal with so little fanfare I usually didn’t notice. I’d just spot something new in my weapon wheel, like another assault rifle, or some kind of energy blaster. It’s rarely clear about what you should be using at any given moment, and it doesn’t seem to matter much.

The action does improve 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’s probably a bit too effective at clearing out enemies ahead. I spent most of the late game missions as my drone, dropping endless grenades on soldiers and robots from high above. It made what turned out to be the penultimate battle into one of the easiest because the bad guys just have no defense against this.

The primary problem I had with MindsEye, though, was 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 60fps – 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 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. It’s in really rough shape technically.

To be fair, there are definitely moments in MindsEye when it looks quite stunning. Explosions are excellent. The sunlight piercing through Redrock’s glitzy hotels is seriously snazzy. I liked 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 looks very good. But six months ago I played through Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on this machine and it performed fabulously. MindsEye does not. It’s like Steven Seagal circa 1990: Looks cool – just doesn’t know how to run properly.

Performance optimisation won’t solve MindsEye’s myriad other issues, though. A lot of these are really just baked into how it’s designed. Too often, the missions are simply restrictive and dull. All you can do is drive a pre-assigned vehicle to a marker. That triggers a cutscene. Then you shoot everything. Then drive somewhere else. It’s all so rigid and leaves no room for the kind of goofing around or antics you can get into in comparable games, and there’s certainly none of the emergent fun you constantly get in something like GTA. MindsEye rarely trusts us to even park at a mission marker; it generally just splutters into a cutscene when you get close enough.

It doesn’t help that there are no radio stations or songs to listen to as you’re commuting between missions. Travel time from A to B mostly seems to exist to feed you phone calls to prod the story along a little further. Exploration is actively disencouraged, and you’ll be constantly scolded for not heading directly to your destination, or failed out. There’s no reason to explore anyhow, as it isn’t the sort of living world you might have expected. Police don’t even respond to Diaz’s crimes, so what’s even the point?

And there’s not really anything out there to find. Hunting for a cool vehicle to use? Don’t bother. Other vehicles are off-limits. Wreck the car you were assigned? That’s a mission fail. You won’t even be able to get out of it if it’s burning. It’s a baffling choice for a game like this – the entire genre is built around stealing cars.

MindsEye has some good ideas. An effective stealth mission mid-way is a positive change of pace, and there are some unexpected puzzles late in the piece that gave me a break from blasting. But it relegates the rest of them to its roughly two hours of cutscenes and wastes their potential. At one point a squad of robots are set sprinting after my car at highway speeds. While I was preparing myself for a potentially thrilling chase, the robots caught the car and destroyed it before the cinematic finished. This kind of thing is a real rug pull in a game that, a few hours earlier, made me play through a frustrating, one-off CPR minigame that could’ve just been a cutscene.

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.

Bots on Your Mind

The kicker is, even if you get swept up in the sunk-cost fallacy of finishing this 10-hour campaign just to see how the story pans out, the ending itself is a colossal anticlimax. I’ll obviously refrain from spilling the specifics of the final moment, but it’s impossible to complete any assessment of MindsEye’s defects without explaining how deeply and desperately unsatisfying I found it. Story threads are left dangling and reams of questions remain unanswered. It’s not an artistic cliffhanger; it’s just vague and unearned. It’s an ending that feels like the writer was out of fresh paper and this was the only thing that would fit on the last line of the script’s final page. Picture Ghostbusters crashing to credits a few seconds after they cross the streams and you’re about there. There’s a PS after the unskippable credits, but it only makes things worse.

Well, until what happens after the finale, that is. After the story wrapped I was simply tossed back into the open world as… some random weirdo in a crop top. He has some kind of… base? With things in it I can interact with that do… nothing? There’s no explanation of how anything works, no direction, and no purpose.

Confused, I left the building in search of a vehicle, but even here you can’t carjack civilians, and you can’t steal parked cars. I got in the only one that would allow me to enter and drove to an icon that looked like the Hamburglar stealing a car. There was another car there, glowing, but I couldn’t enter it. I shot at the bystanders, and I shot at the soldiers. The soldiers popped out of their 4X4s like waffles from an overzealous toaster. Nothing else happened. No armed response.

I got back in the small hatchback I arrived in, which remained the only vehicle I could interact with. I drove to an icon that looked like a chess piece. The performance took another significant nosedive as I arrived. There were some soldiers there, spread throughout a multi-story parking lot. I shot at them until I got bored, which happened almost instantly because the action is restricted to basic third-person blasting. Chubby crop top man has none of the entertaining drone attacks that Diaz has.

This, it appears, is MindsEye’s free-roaming mode. It’s separate from the main campaign, but I have no idea what we’re intended to do in it. It’s pointless, scrappy, and a complete waste of time in this state. It just isn’t remotely close to finished.

But I am.