Our motto at WayTooManyGames is that we “review the good, the bad, and the so bad it’s good”. At times, playing a truly terrible game feels borderline entertaining, as you’ve noticed in the past with our reviews of Fast & Furious Crossroads and The Quiet Man. They are even worthy of a (massively heavily discounted) ironic playthrough, if you ask me. But there are some games that aren’t just bad, but aren’t so bad they’re good, either. They’re, simply put, truly terrible in an infuriating way. Today, I’m going to talk about such an example. More than just a terrible game, a cautionary tale on hubris and how not to handle a so-called AAA project, let me introduce you to MindsEye.

This is just a still pic, but the game wasn’t running much faster than it anyway.

My colleagues at WTMG were looking at MindsEye for a while. They were following news regarding its bizarre development, and some of the pre-release rants stemming from its highly defensive producer, Leslie Benzies. For the unaware, Benzies is better known as a former producer at Rockstar North, one of the most important staff members at the company, responsible for writing and producing pretty much every single Grand Theft Auto game up until V. He helped develop the world of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and write the truly magnificent story seen in Grand Theft Auto IV. A new IP from such a notable industry figure was something work looking forward to, but MindsEye‘s pre-release period was, well, shaky at best.

At first, the game was going to be called Everywhere, and it was supposed to be a sandbox MMO / creation tool hybrid. A while later, Everywhere became MindsEye, initially envisioned as an episodic action game, set in “different time periods and parts of the universe” (whatever the hell that means), with everything connected by a central thread, not unlike what Eternal Darkness did back in the GameCube era. Finally, prior to release, MindsEye was relabeled as a more straightforward story-focused action-adventure. Pre-release coverage and reception was lukewarm at best, with the development team even claiming people were “being paid” to trash on it. The cojones to come up with such statement, I swear…

So, I guess I need to clarify I haven’t been paid by anyone in order to write this review. No hard feelings, buddy? We good? Alright then… this game sucks.

“What if robots were bad?” Yeah buddy, that’s called “The Terminator”.

MindsEye is one of those games in which you start off thinking people were just overreacting on what’s apparently just downright mediocre, only for its incompetence to slowly grow with time. The first few cutscenes, at the very least, looked alright. Granted, they looked like they were using vastly better assets than the game itself, and were probably prerecorded clips, but felt like an honest attempt at building a world revolving around a generic, yet interesting plot.

You play as Jacob Diaz, a former soldier who starts off the story by being blasted by a mysterious machine’s attack when controlling his drone via neurolink. He passes out, and loses a good chunk of his memory. The story then fast-forwards to a few years later, with Jacob moving to the city of Redrock (basically the lovechild of Las Vegas and Austin), accepting a job in the security department at Silva, one of the biggest companies in the world, specialized in electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and… it’s Tesla. We get it. He works at Tesla. This is not subtle not smart.

Driving around in MindsEye isn’t fun. Driving in a sandstorm is even less fun.

Not wanting to dive further into MindsEye‘s plot, as it is basically the only moderately average thing it has to offer, the overall premise is all about “what if big techs were bad”, and “what if AI rebelled”. The latter has already been tackled more than forty years ago when a guy named James Cameron made a little indie film called The Terminator, you may have heard of it before. The former, well, ain’t impressive either. I don’t think anyone with two functioning braincells and access to the news will consider a plot about big techs being evil as groundbreaking storytelling. Again, look at goddamn Tesla or Meta. None of it feels novel. If MindsEye was meant to be social commentary, then it actually feels more tame than the social commentary happening in the world right now.

But sure, let’s give the game the benefit of the doubt. Back in 2022-ish, when this story was probably initially conceived, big techs were scummy, but not as pathetically evil as they have been since last year’s American election. The issue lies in the script. It is shockingly poor, and completely disjointed. Characters show up for a few chapters, dump exposition, then disappear. The voice actors aren’t even bad, they actually try their hardest, but there’s no way you can deliver a good performance when you have such a weak script at your disposal. Furthermore, the editing feels off-putting, as if voice snippets from other dialogue sections have been cut and recycled in other, totally tonally-inappropriate sections.

Quick-time events in the year of our Lord, 2025? For real?

But this is meant to be a third-person action game, a revolutionary take on the genre, so how does MindsEye play and perform? The answer is pretty straightforward: poorly. I would have loved to use Angry Video Game Nerd-styled hyperboles to properly explain how bad the presentation and gameplay are, but I want to keep this review as civil as possible. Let’s just stick to “poorly”, alright?

Where to even begin? After waiting for what felt like forever for the shaders to be compiled, and after enduring a very long and unskippable introductory cutscene, I was finally able to control Jacob in a scripted corridor section, where he was only able to walk, not run. Halfway through this section, the framerate tanked to single digits, and just a few seconds later, the game crashed. It took less than a minute of gameplay for me to witness my first bug.

You gotta love the fact the EVs in MindsEye featuring combustion engine noises and shift gears like your 2004 Acura.

I had to restart the game, go through the same long-as-sin shader compilation screen, and load my savefile, only to find out I was unable to skip that cutscene once again. I left the game running, got up, and went to the kitchen to make myself some coffee. Alright then, I tried playing the same section again, and whilst the framerate was still crappy, I was able to complete this arduous 300-yard walk through a hipster-as-hell train station. I then reached Not-Tesla’s factory, and was given the opportunity to drive a buggy for a few minutes.

I’ll be honest and say that the driving felt stiff, but functional. Yet another cutscene, and then an introduction to the game’s basic cover-shooting combat. I actually failed the mission four times as the map marker did not load properly, so I was driving away from the then-unknown objective. Venturing off the path results in an automatic failure. This is when I found out that, despite being a game created by the man behind GTA, and despite featuring an obnoxiously immense map, MindsEye is not an open world game. Well, it does feature a free roaming mode, unlocked after beating the main story, but that requires, y’know, playing it to the very end. And that isn’t something worth doing, even ironically.

Imagine playing a vehicular shootout section at 11 frames per second.

Back to the combat. I was able to figure out where I was supposed to go via sheer luck (I wasn’t going to reload the game and go through shader compilations once again), and realized that the cover shooting is basic, shallow, and boring, with some of the dumbest enemy AI this side of the post-Y2K era, but hey, it works, I guess. With that introduction done, I was given my true first mission, which set the stage for how most MindsEye missions look like: driving for countless minutes to your next destination, whilst being told by your boss you’re being too slow, being barraged with exposition, then reaching an enclosed arena where shenanigans ensue and you have to kill a bunch of people, robots, or a combination of both.

With that out of the way, let me list you some of my favorite issues regarding this inane gameplay loop. First of all, you can’t choose the car you can drive, so you’re mostly stuck to a Tesla knockoff. It’s an electric vehicle, but for reasons beyond me, the car features combustion engine noises and shifts gears like a normal gasoline-powered vehicle. It feels like the dev team had just bought a standard car physics prompt from an asset store and forgot to adapt it to an EV. To make matters worse, the car feels slow and too heavy. If you hit a post, for instance, you’ll come to a halt almost immediately.

I made sure to take a normal PC screenshot, not the Steam one, in order for you to witness the kind of framerate I was dealing with. On the bottom left corner of the screen.

The framerate whilst driving is so bad it’s nauseating. My setup might not be comprised of a state-of-the-art RTX 5090, but it can run pretty much anything at a high setting. In MindsEye‘s case, the framerate was truly terrible, even when dropping the visual settings to PS4 levels. This is not my rig’s fault, it’s just some truly horrendously unoptimized incompetence. Imagine having to drive through a sandstorm with the framerate dropping to literal single digits. Furthermore, imagine having to endure a vehicular shootout section at such framerate. I actually had to pause the game after a while, just to control my nausea. I’m someone who can still play Nintendo 64 games with ease and ignore their framerates, but MindsEye is just something else.

I don’t think I have ever seen such incompetent performance from a so-called AAA game in years. This is the kind of crap you expect from Switch ports of current-gen games, such as Mortal Kombat 1, not a big title running on a PC, with frame generation and DLSS settings turned on. I considered trying to run MindsEye on my ROG Ally just to see how poorly it would perform, but I legit fear the portable would overheat or brick as a result.

It’s not even the most amazing game when it comes to its visuals. Sure, the lighting is fine, and the main characters are well-modelled, but there is a noticeable difference between what’s supposed to be the center of the attention and the rest of the game world. Particles and post-processing effects are very weak, and many assets feel like they came straight out of an asset store. They retain a “generic Unreal Engine 5” look that is becoming tiresomely all the rage nowadays. I would have been able to ignore the usage of generic assets in an Unreal Engine 5 coat of paint if the game performed decently, at least. That is not the case, as MindsEye looks a bit dated whilst still running like a sloth waking up from a coma.

Every now and then, you can play some flashback missions set during Jacob’s days in the Army. They are the “highlight” of an otherwise irredeemable game.

I have no idea what happened for MindsEye to come out at such a pitiful state, but even if it worked as intended, it would have been, at best, a truly mediocre cover shooter with a subpar “what if big techs were bad” story (spoiler alert: they also are in real life). But when you add in the horrendous framerate, poor optimization, braindead enemy AI, and countless bugs, then there’s no way to recommend this trainwreck, even to those looking for an ironic playthrough of a crappy game. Don’t bother with it, there’s plenty of fish in the sea right now. You don’t need to risk your stomach eating one that has eaten too many microplastics over the years.

MindsEye is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.