MindsEye Review

MindsEye arrives with the kind of pedigree that usually sells itself. Leslie Benzies ran Rockstar North through the biggest years of Grand Theft Auto, his new studio raised money on an ambition that reached well past a single game, and a respected publishing label put its name on the box. What shipped in June is the worst reviewed release of its year by a distance. Jacob Diaz is a soldier with a neural implant and a hole in his memory, walking into a desert city built by a tech billionaire, and the plot goes precisely where the opening ten minutes say it will.

The missions are the failure. Almost everything is a drive to a marker followed by a shootout inside a cordon, and the tailing and escort jobs recur so often that they stop reading as design and start reading as filler. Gunplay has no weight, enemies stand still long enough to be embarrassing, and the drone tools are the only idea in here with a pulse. Technically it was not finished.

Reviewers hit crashes, broken checkpoints, traffic driving through the world and frame rates that came apart on consoles, and refund requests started before the first weekend ended. Redrock itself is the one thing worth defending, a decent looking city with real lighting and nothing to do in it. Patches followed, then layoffs. Neither changes what the release was.