For a long time, I have argued the value of Nicolas Cage in films. I think it is tired to hate him, and a bit lame to even just enjoy his work ‘ironically’. Someone said (and I am paraphrasing) that to have Cage in your film is to hold up a mirror to your own abilities as a director, if he is bad in your film it is because your vision for what you wanted him to do was bad.
It is a nice thought. Not completely antithetical to my own take: his good performances are great, his “bad” performances are sublime. The only true failures in Cage’s repertoire are the boring ones.
MindsEye is a wild game. The main discourse around it is its developer’s history and the circus around its release. Build A Rocket Boy exploded in size thanks to an influx of investor money and a big name in Leslie Benzies. Benzies is most famous for being the producer on GTA.
I knew this was going to be a bit of a mess when, after years of promising Everywhere and 300 million dollars of investment, MindsEye emerged with a trailer.
Things got more intriguing as the publisher dedicated 30 seconds to MindsEye and a full 15 minutes to a new piece of DLC for Hitman.
With everything that has happened people are ready to hate this game and nothing the team are doing is going to stop them. This is the same kind of blowback films like Don’t Worry Darling and Waterworld got during their time – the quality of their product was entirely secondary to the public entertainment. I’ve talked to people that haven’t played the game delighting in its terribleness.
MindsEye isn’t a video game anymore, it is an event that everyone is enjoying kicking.
The sad truth is that there is a game in there somewhere. It isn’t a complete disaster, but it isn’t some unpolished gem either.
The start of the game opens up with a pretty decent cinematic; set in a sandstorm during a military operation, it centres on Jacob Diaz as he controls a drone that discovers a tomb. The tomb is some kind of ancient, high-tech shrine and it infects Diaz through the chip in his brain. There is a slash cut and Diaz is now back in civilian life and looking to start working for Silva corporations.
Silva corporations is a stand in for the Musk industries – they build robots, spaceships and brain chips. Almost as soon as Diaz starts work, the robots start malfunctioning and from there the plot thickens.
What this means for the gameplay is that Jacob spends a lot of time walking around, pressing buttons, occasionally taking cover and shooting stuff. Later he gets a drone that gives him some special powers. But basically, each mission is the exact same thing.
The game engine itself finds this endeavour pushes it to its limits. Simply driving from point A to point B causes the framerate to turn choppy, the atmospheric lighting and slick textures seem to threaten instability at every moment.
There are hints of a bigger vision here; on completion, it unlocks the full world to explore, but in the main missions the player is locked into a set course. Walking, or driving, off the beaten path will result in a mission failed.
This is the worst kind of GTA mission design. The developers forcing the player’s hand with very little opportunity for experimentation. There are a couple of moments where it shows promise. When Diaz gets into a facility roamed by robots, he is able to disable them with a drone blast and then take them out with a machinegun. There is placement and intent, as well as a real rhythm to the fight. The rest of the time it is pedestrian.
I don’t blame the team for this, I think everyone worked to the best of their abilities. What I think Build A Rocket Boy did is hold a mirror up to Leslie’s direction and found it to be rehashed mechanics from a 20 year-old formula, and a story line where billionaires are misunderstood geniuses.
This isn’t a delightful misstep like Gene Rain where nothing works, but something wild emerges from the chaos. It is not even close to Mindjack (apologies to my editor, I’ve been holding in references to Mindjack for over 3 years) where it was a mess but the ideas it played with were unique and interesting.
MindsEye is a bad Nicolas Cage performance – because there is nothing to feel here, except boredom.
Conclusion
MindsEye is the worst kind of failure, a soporific one.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
