Tyler Wilde, US EIC
This week: Aside from not really enjoying two hours of MindsEye, I’ve been working on a preview of another notable upcoming shooter in between Summer Game Fest showcases.
MindsEye doesn’t really look like the kind of game that’d be highly anticipated in 2025—the trailers make me think of 2010s Call of Duty campaigns more than anything—so at first I felt confused by what seemed to be some buzz around it.
I then learned that it has a notable director giving it cachet: Leslie Benzies, who was president of Rockstar North before an unhappy split with the GTA developer in 2016.
Benzies’ big comeback could be going better: MindsEye launched on Steam today and its user reviews are presently “mixed” after starting in “mostly negative” territory. We don’t have a full review yet because we didn’t get an early copy, but I jumped in to play for a couple hours today to get some first impressions.
This is a gut reaction since I’ve only just started the game, but I think the Steam collective had it right back when the reviews were “mostly negative.”
Performance and design
I’ll give MindsEye this: It runs OK on my six-year-old RTX 2070 Super. I was a bit worried that my stubborn refusal to upgrade would finally defeat me, because early negative Steam reviews often come from players who have technical problems, but it’s stable for me, if frequently ugly on the settings I’m using. It’s gone all slideshowy a couple times, but only in narrative moments where it didn’t screw me up. The faces look nice, at least.
As for how it plays, put the GTA connection out of your head, if it’s in there. MindsEye isn’t really an open world game. It does feature a city that seems pretty big, and there’s driving and third-person shooting, but it’s a linear action game: cutscene, action, cutscene, action.
You can drive around the city, but at least at the start, your boss is always yelling at you to get to your next objective, pronto.
At the point I stopped playing, MindsEye introduced me to side missions that appear in portals—there are races and other challenges—which seem to be its version of ‘open world activities.’ There’s also a level building tool that lets you design your own missions and share them, which Benzies recently talked to IGN about.
I’m all for mod tools and level editors, but if the example mission I played is any indication of what these user-created missions will be like, the kids are better off in Fortnite. I was told to place some robots outside of a motel to stop robbers, and then watched through cameras as the robots killed the robbers. They did it. I won. Weird.
Above: I am a master of stealth?
The shooting, when it’s me shooting, is kind of fun, though. Despite having a few guns to choose from in my early encounters, I’ve mostly just used the protagonist’s sidearm. Headshots kill, which I like, and the enemies politely stand still and look confused so that I can pick them off. There’s nothing special about the enemy AI or guns so far, though. Later in the game you can hack robots. Maybe it gets cooler?
The story so far
The action would be passable if it were buoyed by a compelling story, but I ain’t gripped so far.
Everyone in the game feels like they started existing the moment the game started and no sooner.
After a traumatizing spec-ops career that left him with a mysterious brain implant, protagonist Jacob Diaz shows up at an old friend’s house in a desert city called Redrock to get a fresh start. His friend has gotten him a gig at the local evil robot factory where he also works, and they immediately head there to start the day.
It’s obvious that there’s more than meets the eye here—him getting the job is surely all part of a big conspiracy, or it’s all a memory, or a simulation, I dunno—but it’s still funny when the head of security greets Diaz and instantly starts sending him out to battle berserk robots and take out mercenary squads as if he’s the only security employee in the entire, giant factory.
Everyone in the game feels like they started existing the moment the game started and no sooner.
Diaz doesn’t seem to care much about the unusually warm welcome he’s received from his new boss. He’s only really concerned about the brain implant, and that’s fair, but the fixation is affecting his concentration. At one point he’s surprised to discover that Redrock is surrounded by desert despite having arrived in the city by bus that same day.
Diaz’s friend is also unfazed when he comes home covered in blood after killing multiple carloads of mercenaries. I know videogames can be like that and you’ve got to try to suspend disbelief—and again, there is obviously some conspiracy afoot here and maybe his friend is in on it—but it’s just too much dream logic to accept.
I might be more willing to give MindsEye the benefit of the doubt if there were something cool to latch onto so far, but the characters are dull and the deep thoughts are things like this loading screen quote: “In his research Dr. Morrison identified a paradox. A moment where machine learning would evolve past our capabilities of control and spread like a virus.”
Is that a paradox? I don’t see what the contradiction is, but I’m not a doctor.
We’ll have a proper review of MindsEye once one of us has played through it, but I have not so far been convinced that I’m going to find its story about profit-hungry technologists as thought-provoking as promised.
For now, I’ll leave you with this alternative recommendation: The Mind’s I, a 1981 anthology book that I recall being pretty thought-provoking. And if you want to watch a dopey guy have war flashbacks, I’ll also suggest Jacob’s Ladder. Tim Robbins rules in that.
