MindsEye review – calling it outdated is an insult to old action games

You might not believe it based on the score, but I was fully in MindsEye’s corner during the runup to launch. There was a time when cover shooters and city-sized driving games were wearyingly common, but at a time when every action game is a soulslike, a roguelite, a live-service multiplayer shooter, or Doom, the good old fashioned GTA clone is a rare treat indeed.

MindsEye reviewDeveloper: Build a Rocket BoyPublisher: IO Interactive PartnersPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam, Epic), PS5, Xbox Series X/S

So there’s room in my life for a bit of cars wot gun fast, and I was hoping Build A Rocket Boy’s debut game would defy all the pre-release doubters, revealing itself as a thrilling tribute to a bygone era. Sadly, if anything the sceptics were charitable. MindsEye is an unmitigated disaster, with flaws that run so much deeper than the technical hitches and deformed digital faces doing the rounds online that you’d need some sort of pressure-resistant submersible to pull them out.

Yet as I polish the size 12 steel toecaps for the booting that is to come, I would like to highlight some things I like about MindsEye. For all it does wrong, there are fragments of talent and artistry here, glimmers of the game it might have been had it been given more time.

One such thing is how it starts. MindsEye’s story revolves around Jacob Diaz, a military drone pilot who we meet in the desert on a mission to explore an ancient underground structure (the game has a running joke over whether this is a pyramid or a ziggurat, which isn’t remotely funny and a detail most of its characters would not believably care about in the slightest, but I’m supposed to be being nice right now, so let’s leave that be). Diaz’s drone, which he can control mentally via the ‘MindsEye’ implant in his neck, descends into the structure and encounters a bunch of strange glowing symbols on a door. The drone is zapped by a mysterious energy, Diaz collapses, cut to black.

MindsEye Review – Ridiculous, Inconsistent And Utterly Atrocious Watch on YouTube

It’s a tight, tantalising prologue that lightly subverts your expectations at seeing dusty military men on screen. It’s also directed with the kind of cinematic flair you’d expect from a studio descended from Rockstar North. That flair continues through the prologue, and indeed, through much of the game. Discharged from the military and disconnected from his MindsEye drone, Diaz arrives in futuristic Las Vegas analogue Redrock city, moving in with a friend who has nabbed him a job as a security guard at Silva Industries. But Diaz has an ulterior motive. Silva Industries, owned and operated by tech mogul Marco Silva, manufactured Diaz’s MindsEye chip, and Diaz wants to fill the gaping holes in his memory left by the operation that separated him from his drone.