MindsEye’s June 2025 launch was a disaster, but you know that by now — it was a landmark event that made anyone fairly assume it was a lost cause. Fast forward to 2026, and you’d be wrong: its creator is still fixing the game, and made an incredibly bold claim this month.
At the start of February, Build a Rocket Boy announced that its debut title had received its “most significant post-launch update yet, achieving the studio’s vision for quality and setting the stage for exciting future content updates.” It promised to be a “reset for the brand and the title in 2026,” specifically focusing on “smoothing campaign flow, making objectives easier to follow, enhancing AI behavior, and much more,” ahead of DLC plans later this year.
I figured it was a good chance to give other newcomers an honest heads-up of MindsEye in its current state — a review-lite. A few months ago, I probably wouldn’t have bothered, but after suffering through Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s story mode — easily the worst and most cynical AAA single-player campaign I’ve attempted to play in the last five years (and the polar opposite of the low-key masterpiece that was Black Ops 6) — surely it couldn’t be worse than that?
Well, it isn’t (low bar, TBH), and I didn’t feel like I wasted 13 hours completing it. MindsEye, in 2026, isn’t that bad — but all things considered, it’s not that great either, and another seven patches won’t fix its biggest problems.
More than meets the eye?
MindsEye doesn’t exactly inspire you when you first land on its menu, but that’s because the main story is part of Build a Rocket Boy’s wider Everywhere-inspired hub, giving you the base campaign alongside a load of MW2 Spec Ops-style challenges. We’re here for the headliner, though, and these smaller distractions are splashed through the wider experience as optional side-quests.
If you’ve somehow dodged MindsEye’s core storyline, it’s pretty straightforward: you’re Jacob Diaz, a tech-enhanced ex-soldier, who takes a job in security three years after he survived a weird, tomb-and-tech-related mishap. You’re tasked with figuring out why robots made by Silva Corp — MindsEye’s pseudo-Tesla equivalent — are going mad, while getting answers about your own past on the sly.
It’s intriguing to say the least, but the world of Redrock City — a rather sterile and surprisingly lifeless take on Las Vegas — is uninspiring from the start. I wasn’t exactly expecting Night City, especially as MindsEye aims to offer a believable, near-future setting, but it quickly becomes clear that the game relies heavily on a strong voice cast to do the heavy lifting.
Vocal harmony
Despite the script occasionally doing leading lad Jacob Diaz (Alex Hernandez) dirty (the line “and we… ARE THE CROP” should live in infamy), he’s a genuine, believable character, if not particularly relatable. The real star of the show is Morrison (Dominic Burgess), a lovably bananas scientist whose own genius turns him into a conspiracy theorist.
Other stand-outs include Trumpian mayor Shiva Vega, played by Anjali Bhimani — who also voiced the excellent Yatzli in the excellent Avowed — a believable, nuanced character who juggles politics, ambition, and personal grievances. General Lamrie (game VG veteran Kirk Thornton) dances a great line between antagonist and anti-hero. Marco Silva (Jake Thomas) is as believable as tech bros get in gaming, even if he’s surprisingly likable.
If only they were given more chances to shine in cut-scenes. One of MindsEye’s biggest frustrations is how it tells large sections of the story over filler — or, perhaps, trying to make its driving more interesting by adding dialogue.
The navigation narration station
Driving in MindsEye is surprisingly tight and enjoyable, which is fortunate, since most of it serves as a distraction during story exposition. Handling is tight, and it has one of the most delicious handbrake turn mechanics in an open-world game.
I died around six times in my campaign run, and three of them were from car crashes. It’s surprisingly easy to do, but only because wrecks are realistic — at least, in the modern open-world game sense, where cars are essentially shields until they catch fire. However, gravity doesn’t feel accurate at all, slowing you to a crawl on uphill sections but turning you into an unstoppable force on descents.
MindsEye’s cars also sound like diesel-powered V8s, even though they’re all electric. This is explained away by a loading screen that says the mayor’s husband was killed by a silent EV, so she made it the law to add sound effects — a bit weird, since there’s no mention of it anywhere else. Every standard car also wheelspins when accelerating and reversing. Maybe the mayor also mandated racing-wet tires?
One saving grace, especially for those who don’t care for the plot, is that you can skip to the next destination if your drive is for low-level exposition only, but it comes at a cost: if you can’t jump to the location, you know your ride will be interrupted by something big, making things all the more predictable.
MindsEye tries but fails to hide how Redrock City is mostly empty and underused, with no opportunities or incentives for real exploration. You’re only able to get into certain cars or open specific doors, which only leads to confusion when you’re trying to find a way out of somewhere, and only one door is interactive.
Even in the moments you can go off the beaten track, there’s no reason to — you see everything the city has to offer in its semi-regular point-to-point drone flights that only really exist to unravel the narrative, as you listlessly hold accelerate and forward to the dot on your minimap for either story or combat.
Shooting blanks
Combat in MindsEye could still be much better — it’s one of the few things that further updates would work wonders on. Its Gears-style hide-and-fire approach is familiar but wholly unpredictable, and latching onto cover is as much about luck as skill.
Aiming and firing is dependable enough — accuracy is forgiving, especially for headshots, but the reticle doesn’t go red on enemies, which isn’t ideal when you’re in a firefight with non-hostiles. Weapons don’t feel particularly weighty, either; my kingdom for a bit of ragdolling on a shotgun kill.
You unlock weapons along the way by picking them up; you can alternate between guns within the same class from your weapon wheel. You’d think this is a simple menu, but it’s frustratingly unresponsive.
The Deluxe Edition (which I received as a review copy) gives you the Thorn & Kepler Yellowjacket from the start: a three-shot burst rifle that outperforms every other weapon in the game by a long way. It’s more accurate than the sniper rifle, with less fuss. After an hour of waltzing through early firefights — even if the game kept defaulting to the pistol — I made a point of never using it, as it’s easily the most OP weapon I’ve used in a third-person shooter for years.
You also get a drone, which can zap enemies, explore your surroundings, convert bots into allies, and open new paths. It’s a strangely cute tool that you develop a bond with, but one that inevitably becomes completely overpowered by the end of the game, like the gravity gun in the last act of Half-Life 2, or Grace Armstrong throughout Far Cry 5.
It’s still a bit of a mess
For all its updates, MindsEye still has plenty of odd glitches, and you’ll question if they’re all meant to be scripted. NPC cars have a habit of turning onto roads that aren’t there. In its weird Arcadia challenges, friendly AI is super dumb, standing in place as enemies listlessly shoot at them. Bins and cars explode onto the road. Random civilians get into shootouts for no apparent reason.
There’s still a notable lack of polish, too. Low framerate aside, delayed pop-in is mostly unproblematic, but at its worst, it undermines big moments. I often watched Jacob grow a beard in three stages, going from clean-shaven to stubbly to hairy over a couple of seconds. Sniper mechanics are undermined by a bullet trail travelling from the bottom left of the scope, like you’re still in third-person mode. Shadows appear to be optional. You can run into NPCs and push them around like they’re standing on ice. When getting in a car, even in plenty of space, you sometimes freeze in place before teleporting into the driver’s seat.
My only true “game-breaking” bug occurred in the lead-up to the final sequence, as I repeatedly died whenever I exited a drone copter. After a console restart, the autosave took me back three hours, but I could thankfully reload the mission. That still didn’t fix the problem the first time; I needed a full Xbox power cycle to get me on the straight and narrow.
Most notably, the audio balance is terrible, especially when playing without subtitles. Voices are drowned out by engine noise or combat, and it isn’t particularly easy to get a good balance — you’re best off sacrificing master volume just to hear the conversations, but even that takes time to get right.
One last thing MindsEye completely mishandles is its puzzle and quick-time elements, and it’s down to three reasons:
- It chooses its applications badly (e.g., a game where you give someone CPR… really?);
- They’re not very well explained (e.g., moving ancient crystals for… something?); and
- They’re not a consistent enough focus of the wider experience, like they are in, say Black Ops 6.
No bang, but no whimper
MindsEye’s story ends on a duff note. Without trying to spoil a game that’s been pored over for eight months, its storytelling doesn’t back up the final scene — it just happens. It feels like a sequel was always the next step; maybe the planned post-ending DLC will deliver the Mass Effect 3 treatment (albeit without any choice) and help it go out on a higher note.
Despite everything, I completed MindsEye without ever feeling genuinely bored or frustrated. Part of me still wonders if it’s because of its reputation — that I was waiting for something stupid to happen — but it proved quite the opposite. If anything, MindsEye lacks standout moments, aside from one particularly insane scene with an unconventional battering ram, which, like a few good concepts, doesn’t really come to anything.
It’s a common issue with the game: there could’ve been so much more. There are some interesting ideas, but the highs never feel capitalized upon, and the lows can be filed under “tick-box exercises (misc)”. You’ll find yourself comparing some of MindsEye’s pivotal plot points to movies like Leave the World Behind or games like Horizon Zero Dawn, which handled them better, even passively.
Would I recommend you try this? All things considered, yes — but only if you’re still MindsEye-curious (Mi-curious?), and you get it on sale. In its Update 7 “fixed” state, and if you’re willing to overlook the unsolvable issues put up by its occasionally lackluster story, travel-assisted narrative, and underdeveloped world, it’s worth a go, if only to feel part of one of gaming’s bigger stories in the last couple of years.
It’s impossible to see a No Man’s Sky-level turnaround here. More is on the horizon, and if Build a Rocket Boy can bring Redrock City to life — or at least do something with it beyond making it pretty — and make more of its Arcadia system’s storytelling beyond “kill cops” or “rescue random hostage,” this could hit “that 7/10 game” status. Until then, MindsEye is an odd thing to play, but something I don’t regret trying.
