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MINDSEYE
review | PLAYSTATION 5
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Publisher: IO Interactive Partners.
Developer: Build a Rocket Boy. Released: June 2025. Genre: Sandbox. Other versions: XSX; PC. Posted 1st February 2026. By Shane Battams © 2026 |
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MindsEye garnered pre-launch hype as Leslie Benzies’ first project post-Rockstar North, having played a key role in the success of several series. The game’s ambitions are certainly high, too: introducing the Everywhere creation tool as the first entry in an episodic universe, with the aim of setting up Build a Rocket Boy as a developer worth watching. Unfortunately, the game was instead subjected to extremely negative reviews, along with a raft of refunds requested from digital storefronts, culminating in redundancies impacting the studio. Of course, as is the nature with modern gaming, things could be patched and the experience may look very different even mere months from this review. Needless to say, however, some very heavy lifting will be required to raise this one out of the depths.
Jacob Diaz is an ex-soldier suffering the effects of PTSD, his life haunted by flashbacks and memory loss. Heading to Redrock City, he finds employment with the Silva Corporation, who create robots for daily life. He soon finds his job rather complicated as attempted attacks from a mercenary group see him roped into trouble sharpish. Diaz begins to search for his past while encountering a myriad of people along the way, from stern superior Rigby to outlandish CEO Marco Silva. MindsEye unfortunately stumbles at this hurdle, due to a bloated story that tries to convey too much in too short a runtime. Characters end up either underdeveloped, or caricatures at the expense of genuine personality. Dialogue is cringe-inducing, with tonally deaf jokes landing with a thud, and an ending that proves one of the biggest anti-climaxes in recent memory. Alex Hernandez gives a decent performance as Diaz, but it’s wasted by the poor storytelling.
Sometimes attract, sometimes decidedly rough: MindsEye is all over the place.
MindsEye shuns and embraces modern gaming tropes in equal measure, creating a vast open world in Redrock City, but keeping missions linear to a fault. In essence, the more-than thirty missions see you driving around and partaking in setpieces around the map but not allowing you to freely explore due to stringent mission parameters - giving chase to a person or protecting an NPC, for example. Going outside the confines of this sees you punished with mission failure. You can even fail the initial mission for taking too long to interact with a computer. Very few missions stand out, seeing you either driving between points, partaking in a shootout, or playing basic mini-games along the way. It feels dated, almost like a sixth-generation sandbox game, while rote design offers little room for exploration or experimentation.
It doesn’t help that the game is no fun to play. It’s quite staggering how many features it lacks, elements gamers have come to take for granted. You cannot melee attack, wield grenades, or blind fire from cover. Some shooters from 2008 have more functions than this, and battles become dull and rather static. Shooting doesn’t feel bad, you can certainly pop heads with ease, but there is zero flair or pizzazz to combat even with a mix of human and robotic foes. The only really noteworthy feature is a Drone that can be used in combat. Initially, it can stun foes temporarily, though it gains more functions as you play. Not that you can perform a takedown or any flashy move after it; foes just remain rooted for you to shoot them some more. AI is woeful too, showcasing little in the way of tactics and sometimes just running towards you with careless abandon.
It doesn’t help that the game is no fun to play. It’s quite staggering how many features it lacks, elements gamers have come to take for granted. You cannot melee attack, wield grenades, or blind fire from cover. Some shooters from 2008 have more functions than this, and battles become dull and rather static. Shooting doesn’t feel bad, you can certainly pop heads with ease, but there is zero flair or pizzazz to combat even with a mix of human and robotic foes. The only really noteworthy feature is a Drone that can be used in combat. Initially, it can stun foes temporarily, though it gains more functions as you play. Not that you can perform a takedown or any flashy move after it; foes just remain rooted for you to shoot them some more. AI is woeful too, showcasing little in the way of tactics and sometimes just running towards you with careless abandon.
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The driving is also a mess. Often, you’ll gain access to some speedier sports cars, though some missions call for you to drive bulkier beasts, such as trucks which dispense robots. However, every vehicle is hindered by skiddy handling and floaty physics, so much so that you’ll often have to flip your vehicle over if you dare to get any air miles with your car. You may sometimes shoot from a vehicle while another drives, but this is pretty uneventful. Worse, certain destructible objects can get stuck under your vehicle and cause further issues, even resulting in your vehicle becoming fully stuck and requiring a restart. Despite patches, there are quite a few bugs, ranging from objects floating in the air to cut-scene audio cutting out completely, and these factors further diminish the experience.
It takes around 10 hours to polish off all the story missions, and there’s no real incentive to revisit them. Dotted around are some special side missions, some of which have been added via updates, but they run the gamut of forgettable archetypes from checkpoint races to shooting galleries. Worse is the Free Roam mode, which unlocks a few hours into the game. It’s incredibly barebones: you can only drive a summoned car and cannot hijack others, there’s no world map, you can only partake in the aforementioned side missions which are listed in the Play menu, and there’s nothing in the way of shops or customisation. The lack of roaming NPCs, any semblance of a police system to stop you causing carnage, or even abilities from the campaign render this mode frankly pointless.
It takes around 10 hours to polish off all the story missions, and there’s no real incentive to revisit them. Dotted around are some special side missions, some of which have been added via updates, but they run the gamut of forgettable archetypes from checkpoint races to shooting galleries. Worse is the Free Roam mode, which unlocks a few hours into the game. It’s incredibly barebones: you can only drive a summoned car and cannot hijack others, there’s no world map, you can only partake in the aforementioned side missions which are listed in the Play menu, and there’s nothing in the way of shops or customisation. The lack of roaming NPCs, any semblance of a police system to stop you causing carnage, or even abilities from the campaign render this mode frankly pointless.
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The only real positives you can glean from MindsEye come from elements of its presentation, but this also comes with many woes. Visually, the game looks rather pretty in certain circumstances, but also woefully dated in others. Characters and animations during cut-scenes look pretty good, the lighting is rather fantastic, and some of the open world texture work is good. However, technical issues have a habit of creeping in, such as pop-in during scene transitions, NPCs and vehicles that look rather ugly, and performance woes remaining prevalent, as the game struggles to meet a modest 30FPS target in intense situations. It’s all over the shop. The audio benefits from catchy music from Rival Consoles, with some thumping cyberpunk beats that add some momentum to otherwise humdrum missions. However, the dialogue balancing is off and can make it hard to hear, voicework ranges from tolerable to cringeworthy, while the gunfire and explosions are painfully weak.
While MindsEye is still receiving updates and could one day pull off a redemption arc comparable to the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky, it would likely take some miraculous overhauls as the vast majority of elements here are very poor. The story is comically bad, missions are archaically designed, gunplay and driving are both woeful and a thick layer of jank still blankets the game, even after updates. Even its rare successes are often undercut by bugs. Thus, MindsEye is incredibly difficult to recommend.
While MindsEye is still receiving updates and could one day pull off a redemption arc comparable to the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky, it would likely take some miraculous overhauls as the vast majority of elements here are very poor. The story is comically bad, missions are archaically designed, gunplay and driving are both woeful and a thick layer of jank still blankets the game, even after updates. Even its rare successes are often undercut by bugs. Thus, MindsEye is incredibly difficult to recommend.
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VERDICT
"MindsEye’s story is comically bad, its missions are archaically designed, the gunplay and driving are both woeful, and it’s all covered in a thick layer of jank. Incredibly difficult to recommend." OVERALL: 3/10 |
OTHER OPEN WORLD GAMES REVIEWED
Grand Theft Auto V (2013, PlayStation 3)
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Just Cause 3 (2015, PlayStation 4)
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