MindsEye Review: Beautiful Vegas Inspired World Wasted on Boring Missions

MindsEye from Build a Rocket Boy poses perhaps an interesting question: What if you opened a build your own ice cream shop, and only sold vanilla ice cream cones? The action-adventure game where players take on the role of Jacob Diaz, a former soldier, implanted with neural technology known as the MindsEye. Jacob suffers from memory loss as part of an encounter during his years in the service and comes to the desert city of Red Rock looking for an answer.

MindsEye does a great job building this magnificent world of Red Rock. The city feels alive, with an impressive skyline, NPCs who chatter as Jacob walks past and gives you a sense that the world is its own little thriving pocket of the desert. The only problem is, the majority of the world essentially does not exist.

Building a World for No One to Enjoy

Early on in the story, Jacob is asked to fly across Red Rock, and from the sky you truly see just how massive the city is, as an ode to Las Vegas, complete with the now iconic sphere, and several hotels that are nods to the area the city looks amazing. The problem is, for the purpose of the game, 90% of the city is not real. Missions ask Diaz to go from point A to point B, and the majority of them do not let you exit your vehicle in any place besides your destination.

The entire time I was running around Red Rock, I kept convincing myself, after this mission surely I'd get to explore the world, and every time I was disappointed. Not to mention in the few missions you do get to actually leave your vehicle at will, the NPC you are working with will constantly call you and ask if you are there yet, like an 8-year-old on a road trip to Disneyland. Except only one of the missions has an actual time limit, the rest just create this artificial sense of agency that does not really matter.

Hope You Have Unlimited Minutes

One of the new pieces of technology in MindsEye is the Lenz, a contact lens that essentially acts as a smartphone; it's how Diaz gets his directions and makes his phone calls to relevant NPCs during his missions. Hopefully, he purchased the unlimited minutes plan, because you are constantly on the phone. Nearly every single mission starts the same: Someone calls you and tells you to get in a vehicle and go to this pin. Once you get into the vehicle, you get directions thanks to your Lenz, and then you have a phone call with the NPC with some decent exposition on the story, with some random quips asking you to hurry up before hanging up.

The problem is, once Diaz gets close to his destination, he calls the person back to tell them he is close and to progress on the story, which often can result in this weird interaction of having a minute-long conversation, hanging up, and then 30 seconds later, calling that person back to say you are at the location. Of course, because the car lacks any sort of radio function, the constant chatter does at least help prevent any long silent car rides.

Enjoy The Journey or Skip It

While the open world in MindsEye becomes a lot more empty once you realize it's mainly just for decoration, the environment of Red Rock is still fun to drive around, with different styles, from the grand hotels, to the off-the-grid trailer parks, except the game does not want you to see it. Every single mission once you start driving, you get a pop-up, reminding you that at the press of a button you can be instantly teleported to your final destination.

They do let you know you might miss some background story information. I think it's an okay feature if you are in a hurry or speed up running this game for some reason, but I do not want to see it every single time, it felt like the game did not want me to enjoy the view. Though I will admit being asked to drive across town, only to then be told to go back to where I just came from after sixty seconds of talking to someone did make me realize why this feature probably got added in.

Great Story That Gets Drowned In the Same Missions

I quite enjoyed the story in MindsEye. Diaz, a former soldier, struggles with memory issues as a result of his technological implant that went haywire during a mission. The problem is that nearly every mission ends up playing out the exact same way. It starts to ruin an otherwise interesting plot. A vast majority of the time, Diaz drives to his location, stealths around with the help of his companion robot, shoots some enemies, and then follows someone either in a car or via drone to discover the next location.

The game does eventually add some fun puzzle elements, but they are one-offs before Diaz is once again asked to go Rambo against roughly 30+ enemies, who spawn in convenient waves based on your check point on the route, making it very easy to find yourself ambushed by someone from a corner you just checked.

I will admit that MindsEye, for once, does make enemies feel right. Nothing is too bullet spongey, besides a few high-tech enemies, which helps add a bit of fairness to the fight. Some of the missions do get a bit frustrating with very unfriendly respawn locations should you fail to successfully defeat the endless enemy assault.

The Game Wants To Be Great, I Can Feel It

One saying that kept echoing in my mind every time I hopped on MindsEyes was from the movie Ford vs Ferrari, when Ken Miles, after ending a test run of a new Ford, gets out of the car and exclaims, “This car wants to go faster. I can feel it.” It is the same feeling I got in MindsEye. The game has all the making of a fantastic open world game that gives the players the freedom to do what they want, with an interesting story along the way to help show off the world.

Except the game just stopped after building the world and did not flesh it out. Of course, any open world adventure immediately draws comparisons to the GTA series and with a new entry coming soon, it's tough to get your game to stand out in that genre. At the same time, going through all this trouble to breathe a lot of life into the world, just to leave it unused for the most part, hurts even more.

Build a Rocket Boy, even tries to somewhat emulate GTA with a minigame section that they say is constantly updated, with not only their creations, but also those of player creators. I imagine chasing the success of the ever popular GTA custom maps' scene. Apart from all the Build a Rocket Boy games, they are just bland, several of them are called ‘races’ but are just single-player time trials and I could not find one player-created mode on the main screen.

At the end of the day, MindsEye has all the fixings on display for an excellent and fun open world game in a city paying homage to Las Vegas, except when it comes time to eat, all you get is another plain Vanilla game with a linear story and the illusion of player freedom.