MindsEye review: an unfinished review for an unfinished game

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Imagine that you’re a food critic. You’re assigned to review a hot new American bistro downtown. You’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about it before its grand opening, with the owners even throwing around the word “revolutionary.” You get there, sit down at a table, and order a simple hamburger. A simple order, but a baseline test to see how well the restaurant has mastered the fundamentals. The waiter comes back 15 minutes later with a plate of raw ground beef.

That’s what I feel like as I try to review MindsEye.

The debut game from Build a Rocket Boy, a new studio formed by Rockstar veteran Leslie Benzies, has a basic recipe. It’s a third-person cover-based shooter with a cinematic sci-fi story. It adds a few extra spices in with the salt and pepper – a dash of gadgetry here, a heavy portion of driving there — but it’s a hamburger. Or it would be, at least, had the studio been able to finish cooking it. I couldn’t even take my first bite of it before pink meat spilled out of the bun. Check please!

I don’t know what purpose a traditional review of something as transparently unfinished as MindsEye serves. Sure, there are a few good pieces lying in the scrap heap, but it doesn’t make much sense for me to tell you about the car those parts dream to become one day. Rather than spending hours painstakingly dissecting it in carefully considered prose, I feel that it’s only right to match MindsEye’s sorry state with my own raw, unorganized thoughts. I can’t give you a proper review; I can only offer you ground beef.

Story

• Mindseye opens with a cutscene of a drone flying around some vague ruins. Then “Three years later” flashes on screen as if something of note happened.
• I’ll give some credit to the world here. Redrock, the Las Vegas inspired city where the story goes down, is a fertile ground for technosatire. Rogue AI workers terrorize the streets. A Tesla-like company tries to assert its power over local politicians. Authoritarianism runs rampant. It could have been a perfect game for the moment if it didn’t eventually divert from all that weighty commentary to talk about magical orbs.
• Our hero is Jacob Diaz. Bro has the widest stance I’ve ever seen, and his mouth is always open.
• A lot of video games strive to be movies, but that’s usually a narrow endgame. Most just want to be Star Wars or The Avengers. MindsEye’s ambitions are that of a straight to DVD sequel of an early 2000s action movie. Jacob is like the B-list WWE wrestler in a vehicle made to unsuccessfully launch his acting career. I kind of respect that about it.
• At the very least, it goes all-in on presentation. There are some suitably cinematic cutscenes, a thumping sci-fi soundtrack, and some enjoyably campy acting from a cast that largely seems to get the game it’s in.
• Anyways, Jacob takes a security job at a big tech company so he can figure out the secret of a pyramid that gave him tech superpowers.
• I have no idea what Jacob’s supposed superpowers are. He mostly just shoots guns.

Gameplay

• The shooting is fine. 
• Look, what do you want me to say? It’s hard to totally screw up shooting in a video game these days. You point a reticle at a guy’s head, pull the right trigger, he dies. It’s unremarkable, but snappy enough to fire off some endorphins.
• There are, like, five enemy types in total, if I’m being generous: human, human in some armor, robot, humanoid robot, slightly taller humanoid robot.
• I can’t really make out what I’m shooting at when things get dark, which is often. My reticle doesn’t change to let me know that I’m hovering over someone. I have to rely on a scan tool that places a big red arrow over my enemies’ heads instead.
• There’s a cover system that works about as well as any cover system you’d find in an Xbox 360 game.
• If there’s any highlight here, it’s Jacob’s drone controllable pal. I can fly it around while I’m in cover and use it to stun enemies or hack robots. The lifeless combat comes together a bit more in the final stretch of the story once I can send it out and blow enemies up with grenades. It’s too little too late, but it’s something.

• Enough of that, though: I’d say that 75% of the game is actually just spent driving cars and helicopters to the next objective, often miles away, while characters spout exposition.
• The cars are “self-driving” but I still have to control it, so I am canonically the AI, I think.
• Despite being a lawful security guard, Jacob’s car has a feature where it tells him how long it’s expected to get to a destination and encourages him to speed up to beat that time. There is no consequence for not doing that and no reward for doing it.
• But you can not steal a car that is not yours, so don’t even think about it bucko.
• You can not explore Redrock while driving. If you do not stay within the undefined bounds of the mission area while driving, you will get a game over screen.
• One time I got a game over screen because I was apparently doing an escort mission and walked too far away from the people I didn’t know I was supposed to be protecting, because I was never given an objective.
• I’d say that I got game over screens on most missions for similar reasons.
• There’s a minimap that shows where objectives are, but it only displays roads and most of the action happens in and around buildings, so the minimap is largely blank during actual missions.
• There is other gameplay too. And I mean that as a threat.
• There’s an instant fail stealth mission where you have to sneak into a facility while avoiding wandering robot guards. I had to restart it after a robot got stuck on a fence, making it impossible to get around its cone of vision.
• Another has me flying a drone into someone’s apartment and looking for clues, but I have to make sure it doesn’t take too much damage. Slightly brushing up on a wall gently counts as damage and most of the mission is spent in a very tight air vent.
• I really do respect the fact that Build a Rocket Boy worked a lot of variety into its story and doesn’t repeat any of its missions. It’s a much needed change of pace from the completely monotonous driving interludes and the repetitive shootouts, even if it leans heavily on cliché mission tropes.
• That said, this is the kind of game where every time it introduces a new minigame, you will become conditioned to say “oh no.”

Extra content

• Before the MindsEye released, Build a Rocket Boy talked a big game about the project including some kind of creative tool that would let fans build and share their own gameplay experiences. That mode does not appear to exist on consoles yet.
• What is in the game is a “play” menu, which features a handful of side missions created by Build a Rocket Boy no doubt using the tool. A good chunk of them are very bland “race through the checkpoint” driving minigames.
• There is no tangible reward for doing any of them.

• Sometimes I find portals that contain side missions, not unlike Split Fiction. They supposedly let me live random people’s memories. I think maybe that’s Jacob’s superpower?
• In one mission, I get to see what it’s like to be a criminal. I shoot a bunch of cops with a shotgun while a character I know nothing about barks lines like “In it to win it!”
• It lasts about a minute and there’s no reward for doing it. A portal to the cop killing dimension now just looms in Jacob’s dining room.
• Another mission tasks me with blowing up cars belonging to some “gangbangers.” I quit it after I’m killed when a car phases through another and plows into me. “These are real people’s experiences,” Jacob muses.
• That happens less than halfway through the story. I never find another portal again.
• When I beat the game, I’m dropped into “free roam mode” where I can explore Redrock to my heart’s content. There is seemingly nothing to do in the world except do the few missions in the “play” menu.
• In this mode, I inexplicably control a grey-haired character I have never seen before. He is wearing a bright blue tube top and a gas mask. He has a tattoo on his stomach that says “Can’t drink dust.”
• I am never told who this man is and I am not allowed to change a single thing about him. He is my hero.
• I think this is all summed up best by the fact that I get a splash screen when beating the game that tells me to enjoy the additional gameplay experiences, but the word “additional” is misspelled.

Pasta salad recipe

• I made a really good pasta salad after my first play session.
• Okay, so get a little bowl and pour in half a cup of olive oil, half a cup of lime juice. Throw in just a little bit of honey. Finely chop up some chiles in adobo sauce and mix all that together.
• Get a pot of water boiling on the stove and cook some bowtie pasta.
• While that’s happening, get some ground beef or turkey going in a pan. Salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, chile powder, garlic powder, onion powder. Cook it all through.
• Now get to chopping. Slice up a pint of cherry tomatoes. Dice a red onion. Chop a red pepper. Open up a can of corn and a can of black beans.
• Now get a salad bowl and combine everything. Pasta, meat, vegetables, corn, beef, and the dressing to top it off. Get some tongs and mix all that together.
• Top it all off with some scallions and Monterey Jack cheese. Delicious stuff.
• This cost me around $35 to make and I got multiple meals out of it.
• MindsEye costs $60.

Performance and bugs

• Sigh.
• MindsEye feels like a video game released in its alpha state. It is completely unoptimized and even the PS5 Pro’s extra power can’t save it.
• It runs at a poor framerate that feels like a new number invented for the game.
• The constant asset pop-in and jagged shadows make it feel like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet trying to sneak into an Unreal Engine social mixer in a trench coat.
• Game crashes? You betcha!

• Sometimes you will shoot at an enemy and they will vanish into cover instantly.
• Sometimes an entire squad will just suddenly appear around you.
• When they are not doing magic tricks, they are often milling around aiming at nothing.
• One mission had me sniping enemies while stuck in a hole, but then the enemies that were supposed to spawn stopped coming. You can not exit a sniper scope view in this scene, but I realized that you could still open up the weapon wheel and switch to another gun to return to third-person, though Jacob is permanently stuck in aiming stance. I did that and managed to clip my way out of the hole to finish the mission.
• Every driver on the streets has a death wish and is constantly crashing.
• One time, I watched a self-driving truck go tumbling down a hill into a crater. Another time, I watched one very slowly inch into a tree and then explode into a fiery blaze. In some way, MindsEye is the most accurate Tesla simulator ever.
• I posted a video of that tree crash explosion and someone on Bluesky said it reminded them of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force gag where everything explodes when it’s thrown at the ground. That’s a pretty accurate description of MindsEye as a whole.

Look, I could keep going here. Pop over to YouTube or Reddit and you’ll find no shortage of bug reels that show you just how busted MindsEye is. Jacob falling through the map, NPCs exploding into a mess of spaghetti limbs, you name it. There’s a whole culture in gaming built around turning games like this into fascinations. MindsEye feels destined to be 2025’s entry into the “bad game hall of fame.” Is that such a terrible fate? Ironic success stories like The Room prove that it’s sometimes better to be a memorable misfire than a decent slog.

I’m sure that’s not an outcome that the team at Build a Rocket Boy will be happy about owning. There’s palpable ambition fueling MindsEye, but I can feel where it likely clashed with business decisions that forced the project out of the oven prematurely. It’s the kind of game that you can only pity, holding some empathy for the artists watching an unrealized dream tumble away like a self-driving truck down a crater. No chef wants to serve you uncooked beef.

MindsEye was reviewed on PS5 Pro.