MindsEye | |||
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Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
MindsEye is a new third-person action-adventure game where you follow Jacob Diaz’s exploits to find the truth of the titular implant. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
MindsEye Review Overview
What is MindsEye?
MindsEye is a single-player, story-driven, action-adventure game developed by Build A Rocket Boy and published by IO Interactive. Set in the fictional near-future city of Redrock, the game explores themes of artificial intelligence, corporate espionage, and political corruption.
Players assume the role of Jacob Diaz, a former elite soldier fitted with a mysterious neural implant known as the MindsEye, which haunts him with fragmented memories of a covert mission that altered his life. The game also features a unique free-play mode where you can play developer or community-created missions.
MindsEye features:
⚫︎ Third-Person Action Adventure
⚫︎ Classic Cover Shooter Gameplay
⚫︎ Near-Futuristic Theme
⚫︎ Sandbox Mode
⚫︎ Developer and Community-Created Missions
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about MindsEye’s gameplay and story.
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MindsEye Pros & Cons
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MindsEye Overall - 46/100
MindsEye is a generic third-person action-adventure game that somehow has worse shooting and driving than its predecessors in the same genre decades ago. It could've been a decent game given its story and presentation. But with generic cover-shooter mechanics, awful voice acting, uninteresting character tropes, and a plague of performance issues, what we got instead was a rushed game that has too many things that anchor it to be what the developers envisioned it to be.
MindsEye Story - 6/10
The story of MindsEye is what you’d call generic, given the media we’re used to seeing with the same futuristic themes. It’s a fairly decent plot to begin with, seeing that all the trailers have already explained the story from the start, but the execution is good enough to help keep you going. However, there are a lot of things that pull it down, though, such as the horrible pacing, dialogue, and uninteresting characters. An example is that there are events that you wish could’ve been spread a little more instead of them happening one after another, which shows how much they rushed the release.
MindsEye Gameplay - 4/10
If GTA and Cyberpunk 2077 had a baby that inherited all of its problems without giving itself its own identity, then this is the result. Not only is the gunplay dreadful, since you’ll find way better third-person action-adventure cover shooters that were released a decade ago, but also the driving is horrendous. To add to this, it somehow has a worse mission design and gameplay loop than its comparisons, which puts into perspective just how bad the gameplay is.
The whole game is a straightforward campaign where it’s a continuous stream of mission after mission, which might help its case since there’s barely anything to do in the city anyway. To top it all off, the frequent crashes, frame drops, and bugs that happen make it a lot worse to play than it already is.
MindsEye Visuals - 5/10
Seeing that the setting is maybe a lot less flashy than the actual city of Las Vegas, it’s a very bleak landscape. It’s an accurate representation of what it would look like had it removed all the glitz and glamour and embraced technological research instead. The characters look decent enough, as you could obviously tell the actors look very much like their character counterparts. Other than that, it’s a generic-looking Unreal Engine 5 game that is riddled with problems.
MindsEye Audio - 4/10
The audio design of the game is an absolute miss. The voice acting is hard to listen to, paired with the horrible dialogue, as both the delivery of the lines and the dialogue itself are cringeworthy. To add to that racket, the sound effects are also pretty bad; it doesn’t sound like the quality you’d expect from something that wants to be a AAA game.
MindsEye Value for Money - 4/10
For $59.99, MindsEye is a mess that you should avoid for the time being. The horrible pacing, cringeworthy dialogue and voice acting, and extremely simplistic gameplay make it a weak contender in either the sandbox or action-adventure genre. The story and visuals are the only bright spots in the game at the moment, and that’s stretching it. We recommend waiting for a sale if you really want to experience this dumpster fire, or just avoid it entirely.
MindsEye Review: Bad for the Eyes, Even Worse for the Mind
In a time where action RPGs are thriving, we have to remember that third-person action adventure shooters were the thing a few years back. I’ve sorely missed playing something like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and even Saints Row. It feels as if it’s a genre that’s been left behind and needs something to revitalize it to bring it back to the mainstream.
I’m not saying that it could’ve been MindsEye, but the developers of Build A Rocket Boy were ambitious enough to garner my interest to see what they could come up with. They were hyping the game up with its futuristic story and mind-blowing gameplay that boasts to be a bigger sandbox than any other game. What we got instead was a bug-riddled and uninteresting shooter that doesn’t live up to its hype or even its non-existent competitors.
The Good: OK Visuals and Decent Story
Before I move on to the things that make MindsEye a mess, let’s talk about the things it did right, at least. In terms of visuals and presentation, it’s decent. If you were to imagine Vegas without casinos and make it embrace military technology with robot cops going around, then they hit it right on the mark. It’s explained in the game that Redrock abolished gambling and casinos, and the in-game mayor moved to other technological pursuits to make the city thrive.
It does well to some extent, at least aesthetically, but it’s annoyingly barren and has nothing interesting going on when you’re playing. The characters also look good; they’re very much modeled after their voice actors, which can obviously be seen. But other than that, the visuals are just okay, and it could very well lean into subpar, but I at least like their take on the city.
The story is quite alright; it could be classified as generic if you’ve seen films or played games with the same theme. If we’re ignoring the characters and the pacing itself, the plot moves in a direction where you think it’s predictable, then it pivots in a way to keep you interested. For context, the main character, Jacob Diaz, takes on an entry-level security job at Silva Corp, the top military factory in the city, with the help of his best friend, Seb.
He has an ulterior motive, however, and it’s to find out the reason why his memories from his time in the military are missing and why he has the MindsEye implant in the first place. Everything I’ve just said already sounds common enough, but at least the game makes it interesting by having little traces of the characters involved create chaos around. It shows that the city itself is very much a battleground of politics, one between the governing body and the head of Silva Corp. I won’t spoil too much of the story, but it’s decent enough if you can separate all the bad that the game has.
Unlikeable Characters, Dialogue, and Voice Acting
Now, there are a ton of issues that plague the otherwise decent plot. First, the characters are such common tropes that it’s laughable. You have the socially-awkward smartest-in-the-room executive with health problems, the quirky bipolar hacker girl, the mysterious man of few words amnesiac protagonist with a military background, and more. So not only are the characters trapped in these tropes, but their dialogue is also another level of uninspired.
They can’t decide on what kind of mood they want to represent during any situation. For example, there’s a dialogue sequence during a car chase where you’re trying to tail the enemies during a sandstorm, and one of the characters starts being sarcastic. Which then leads to the protagonist and the said character throwing passive-aggressive statements at each other. It could be just me misinterpreting the situation, but I feel like there’s a better time and place for these types of lines and deliveries.
Horrible Pacing
The next thing that affects the story the most is the horrendous pacing that it has. The game starts with a cinematic cutscene that shows Jacob’s stint in the military. Without context, it just looks like they failed a mission, and after which it cuts to Jacob going to Redrock meeting his military buddy Seb to get a new lease on life. They meet, talk a bit, and then suddenly, Seb says it's Jacob’s first day at work already.
There was no time for either the player or even the main character to settle in. Right after this, you find suspicious activity, which then leads you to a firefight where you end up taking on a gang of mercenaries alone. The pacing is absolutely mental, and it doesn’t even stop there. If you want an actual scenario that happened in the game, one mission has two bombs explode right in front of Jacob’s face in two separate places, and then he has to shoot his way out at the end of it. Talk about a rough day at work.
If only the game took its time to build the world around it and spaced these events a little more evenly, then it would’ve been a good story to engage in. It’s all action and no context, and it feels weird engaging with the story if you can’t understand the characters in it. I get that the story is all about Jacob piecing together why he has the implant to begin with, but there has to be a better setup to bridge the action and the plot.
Bare-Minimum Third-Person Cover Shooter
The biggest crime about this game is that it’s a very simplistic cover shooter that only covers the bare minimum. It’s not as if those action games that feature third-person cover shooting is extremely in-depth, but come on, you could at least make the gunplay feel better. Most weapons feel like a laser gun, and there are only a couple of weapons that make it feel like there was any recoil included in the game.
To make things worse, there’s no stealth in the game. This makes everything a guns-blazing scenario any time there’s a firefight. Combat in this game is the bare minimum to be considered a third-person cover shooter, and it’s funny because you’ll find much more entertaining mechanics from games you’ll find decades ago. No blindfire, no melee, virtually unlimited ammo, what more can I say?
Also, failing a mission in this game is horrible. If there was a long cutscene or chain of events, there is no skip function. To give you a representation of this, there’s one mission with a CPR minigame, and failing this right at the end of it will restart the whole thing until you get it right. Now, this could be a skill issue on my part, but there was absolutely no tutorial or guide whatsoever to help you before this happened.
Bugs, Performance Issues, and More
The skepticism surrounding this game was already high due to it having no review copies before launch, the claims made by the CEO about the negative reviews, and other controversial news that affected the developers weeks and months before the game's release. So it’s not surprising that the game launched with this many problems and bugs, mainly on the performance side.
For one, the console versions run on a locked 30 FPS, even on the PS5 Pro. There are no ways to change this, as there doesn’t even seem to be an option for a performance mode in-game. The PC version, on the other hand, has needed an extremely high-end setup just to have a stable 60 FPS. It’s undoubtedly an optimization issue with Unreal Engine 5, but this should’ve been a sign that the release should have been delayed already.
The problems don’t stop there. There have been issues with colliding with other NPCs in the game, and it frequently crashes on all platforms. The silver lining is that this can be patched and improved upon within the coming months. However, time is of the essence. Especially if they want to pursue their goal of being a never-ending content delivery system of gameplay.
Priorities, Priorities
Ambition is a tricky thing, especially if you want to pursue both a great single-player experience and a replayable one. Build A Rocket Boy wanted to make MindsEye as a replayable game where you can play unlimited missions through its builder and online services. This, however, stunted what could’ve been a decent single-player game that already has a good plot to begin with. With the reputation of Leslie Benzies on the line, it doesn’t make sense why they would rush this release.
It sucks because it has a skeleton you can work with, but they needed a lot more polish to make it a great game. Regardless, MindsEye has a lot of things that could be improved, but even then, this might just be a dumpster fire that’ll never be put out.
Is MindsEye Worth It?
Not Unless It Miraculously Improves Overnight
MindsEye is a dumpster fire, no doubt about it. While it was to be expected given its ridiculous time frame of being announced and being released, this is a game that might’ve been big if it had gotten a little more time to cook. The story is decent and interesting enough while having a common theme, which is hard to do, and the visuals are good enough to be in that $60 price range. There are a lot of problems that need to be fixed, performance and frame rate issues being the most critical, especially since it crashes regularly during gameplay.
Additionally, the gameplay loop and actual gunplay mechanics need a lot of improvement to become a good contender in the third-person action shooter space. We recommend avoiding it until significant improvements have been made to address the performance issues, and even then, wait for a sale to at least not regret buying this rushed mess.
Digital Storefronts | |||||
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$59.99 |
MindsEye FAQ
What are the System Requirements for PC to play MindsEye?
The System Requirements as listed on Steam are as follows:
Specifications | Minimum | Recommended |
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OS | Windows 10/11 with the latest updates | |
Processor | Intel Core i5-12400F / AMD Ryzen 5 5600X | Intel Core i7-13700K / AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D |
Memory | 16GB RAM | |
Graphics | 6GB VRAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 / AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT | 8GB VRAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 / AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT |
Storage | 70GB | |
Additional Specs | Direct X12 | SSD required |
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MindsEye Product Information
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Title | MINDSEYE |
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Release Date | June 10, 2025 |
Developer | Build A Rocket Boy |
Publisher | IO Interactive Partners A/S |
Supported Platforms | PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S |
Genre | Action, Adventure, Shooting |
Number of Players | 1 |
ESRB Rating | M 17+ |
Official Website | MindsEye Official Website |
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