MindsEye Review: Broken AI, Mission Lock-ins, and a Lifeless Open World Undercut Visual Ambition

After spending over ten hours with MindsEye, I can say without hesitation that it is one of the most frustrating, incomplete, and outdated games I’ve played in years. It tries to be a cinematic sci-fi shooter in a high-tech world, but it's built on mechanics and mission design that feel over a decade old. And that’s without even mentioning the bugs.

You play as Jacob Diaz, a former military drone operator who’s been kicked out of the service after a mission gone wrong. He’s been implanted with a piece of tech called the “MindsEye,” which has damaged his memory. Diaz ends up working security for Silva Corp, a powerful tech company in the fictional city of Redrock. The setting is clearly based on Las Vegas, you can spot landmarks like a pyramid that mirrors the Luxor, Allegiant Stadium, and a version of the Sphere.

The game starts slow, to say the least. One of the first missions has you using a drone to follow a car through the city—the idea being you must stay close enough to track the vehicle without being seen. The moment I realized I could fly high above everything to avoid detection, the tension disappeared, which is just the outdated tailing mission open-world games moved past years ago. Looking back, the mission turned out to be a clear sign of what was coming: predictable design and mechanics that hadn’t been updated to meet today’s standards.

As you move through the story, MindsEye introduces themes about artificial intelligence taking over public safety, robots being used by corporations and the military, and the dangers of unchecked tech power. But none of these ideas go anywhere, as they’re simply part of the background—flashes of an interesting world that the game never actually explores. What could have been a compelling look at a tech-run dystopia becomes a by-the-numbers sci-fi plot with no depth.

Diaz is a flat protagonist. He has no real personality. He follows orders and reacts to things; that’s about it. The game leans on his memory loss to drive the story, but it doesn’t make him more interesting. The rest of the characters are also thin. Everyone you meet says exactly what they are—there are no surprises, no character development, and no tension. Even the villains are handled poorly. Instead of giving the player boss fights or major turning points, enemies are often killed off in cutscenes with no interaction.

Redrock, the city you play in, looks great at first. It’s a believable version of the near future, with drones in the sky, billboards advertising electric vehicles, and architecture that blends today’s strip malls and condos with more futuristic towers. The cars fit the setting—large pickups and smooth electric sedans that look like they’ve been designed 5 to 10 years ahead. Driving them feels pretty good, too, with its responsive controls, and the cars don’t feel overly sticky to the road. You can pull off clean handbrake turns and weave through traffic.

But once you start trying to interact with the world, the cracks appear. MindsEye looks like an open-world game, but it’s not. The game gives you one vehicle per mission, and you’re not allowed to exit it, even if it’s burning. Other cars can’t be entered. If you stray too far from your assigned route, the mission will fail. The city might look alive, but there’s no system underneath it. You can drive through pedestrians or crash into traffic, and nothing will happen. The police don’t respond, and Redrock doesn’t react to anything you do.

Combat is the weakest part of the game, by far. You spend a lot of time in cover-based shooting sections, but the system is broken. Enemies behave strangely—they walk toward you without shooting, run in the wrong direction while firing, or teleport between cover with no animations. Bullet speed is so slow you can step aside to avoid getting hit. There’s no melee system, no dodge mechanics, and no blind fire. You don’t even get grenades until near the end of the game, and using them means switching to your drone to aim, which slows everything down.

The enemy AI is terrible, and that makes firefights boring. I played through on medium and then tried hard, and there was, virtually, no difference in how enemies behaved; they still reacted slowly and missed often. The weapons themselves don’t help, either. New guns quietly appear in your inventory without any notice. I only found them because I scrolled through the weapon wheel during a mission. Plus, shooting doesn’t feel impactful since the sound design is muted, and enemies barely react when they’re hit.

Late in the campaign, Diaz’s drone companion unlocks special abilities, like turning enemy robots into allies or dropping grenades from the air. These tools do help, but they make combat even easier. For example, in one mission, I stayed in drone mode the whole time, raining down grenades. The enemies had no answer for it, and that just took away the challenge completely.

Most missions in MindsEye follow the same structure. You drive to a marker, trigger a cutscene, shoot enemies, then drive again. That’s the loop. There are occasional missions that try to do something different: a stealth mission has you slowly dodging patrols of extremely slow-moving robots, and another makes you fly a drone into a woman’s apartment to find objects in the environment. Then there’s a sequence that has you digging your own grave and one that makes you perform CPR using a minigame. For some, that could sound like fun, but in reality, they all feel like filler.

There are also strange time-travel-style side missions that drop you into short shootouts. You get a medal based on how fast you finish, but nothing else. No rewards. No story. You can also build your own versions of these missions using in-game tools, which seem like a preview of Build A Rocket Boy’s Everywhere project. But the editor is complicated, and after playing through the campaign, I had no interest in using it.

Once you finish the story—and the ending is so abrupt it feels like the writers ran out of time—you’re thrown into a weird post-game mode. You play as a new character wearing a crop top, with no explanation. You start in a base filled with objects you can interact with, but they don’t do anything. I even drove to an icon shaped like the Hamburglar stealing a car. I tried but couldn’t enter the car; I then shot at the soldiers there, but nothing happened. Then I drove to another icon shaped like a chess piece, which led to a multi-story parking lot with enemies. I shot them, too. But again, there was no reward, no story, and nothing to work toward. This post-game content feels completely unfinished.

Performance is another major issue. I ran the game on a powerful PC with an RTX 4080 and Intel Core Ultra 9 185H. Even with settings on high and the frame rate capped at 60, the game was often blurry and choppy when turning the camera. The frame rate dropped during cutscenes and tanked completely during one car chase. Lowering settings didn’t help. Several players have reported crashes, character models missing their faces, and other major bugs. The developer admitted they’re “heartbroken” about the technical issues and are working on fixes, but right now the game runs poorly even on high-end hardware.

As of now, MindsEye is the lowest-rated game of 2025. It has a Metacritic score of 43, with only 6 critic reviews. Its user score is 2.5 out of 10, based on 269 reviews. On Steam, only 38% of the 1,600 user reviews are positive. It ranks lower than Captain Blood (50) and Ambulance Life (44).