MindsEye’s a great example of believing in something and going for a second chance. When it landed back in June, it became shorthand for how not to launch a AAA action-adventure. Ambition hung heavy over its dusty near-future desert city of Redrock – a place where rogue AI, corporate greed, and fractured memories promised a techno-thriller on par with the big cinematic adventures of the genre – but the reality that greeted players was far more prosaic and, frankly, broken. Build A Rocket Boy, a studio helmed by industry veterans, looked as if it had delivered a triple-A spectacle on paper, yet what slipped out the door was a product beset by stuttering performance, glitchy AI, and missions that felt lifted from a decade-old template. Critical and player sentiment was deeply negative in the weeks after release…
That sour start, however, isn’t the whole story today. After a torrent of technical fixes, wide-ranging stability work, and iterative design patches culminating in the “brand reset” that was Update 7, MindsEye on PS5 presents something much closer to the game that should have shipped. The visceral drag of frame drops and unresponsive controls – especially on consoles locked to console-tier performance caps – has been significantly tamped down through months of optimization and bug sweeps, smoothing out major rough edges that once made traversal and firefights feel like a chore. This isn’t to say the game hums like a well-oiled shooter now, but the worst of the technical headaches that defined launch – crashes, jarring pop-in, incoherent enemy reactions – have been forcibly tamed.
Narratively, MindsEye still sits in a curious middle ground. Its core campaign – following former soldier Jacob Diaz as he chases fractured memories and a conspiracy that threatens Redrock – has enough cinematic polish to captivate when it hits its beats, with well-staged cutscenes and competent voice performances anchoring moments that would feel script-worthy in a higher-end action film. On occasion, the pacing settles into something genuinely compelling, aided by solid motion work and a story that, at its best, leans into the dystopian interplay between man and machine. Yet these peaks are interspersed with stretches of unimaginative design, where mission structure feels rigid and linear – a pattern of driving to markers, watching cinema, and engaging in cover-based shooting that, even after updates, rarely evolves into something genuinely memorable. There’s polish here, and if you’ve waited until post-patch to dive in you’ll likely appreciate the smoother flow, but MindsEye still stumbles over its own ambitions when the plot’s weight should be carried by interactivity rather than exposition.
Gameplay mechanics are a mixed bag that reflect this dual personality. The driving remains serviceable, with vehicles responding crisply to inputs and chases through the desert or urban sprawl delivering enough momentum to be satisfying when they work. Combat, too, has improved thanks to AI refinements that reduce erratic behavior and mission-specific tuning that curtails the unfair fail conditions. Yet even with these corrections, encounters still lack the depth and tactical richness expected in modern action shooters; enemy behavior doesn’t always adapt in a believable way, and the loop of cover shooting mixed with drone-assisted hacking and fire support can grow repetitive over long sessions. The companion drone – a neat narrative and mechanical conceit – occasionally feels underleveraged, a tool that should feel central but remains peripheral to the core combat rhythm.
Visually, the game retains many of the strengths that originally drew eyes to its trailers: a neon-tinted Redrock skyline, polished character models, and atmospheric lighting that nods to the cyberpunk influences in its DNA. On the PS5, the world often gleams when the camera is setting the stage, and cutscenes sing with cinematic quality. Sound design, too, is strong – ambient effects and music cues fill gaps, even if the weapon audio and vehicle acoustics never quite hit the punchy satisfaction that genre peers manage with ease. Where once bugs and glitches consistently dragged visuals below their potential, the latest patches have at least given MindsEye the chance to show off what it can do, even if the sheen still occasionally peels away in open-world moments.
For all this progress, though, MindsEye remains a testament to how far ambition must be married to execution from day one. Even with its evolution, the title still struggles with a sense of identity: is it a linear action thriller dressed in open-world clothing, or an open sandbox that never quite learned to breathe on its own? Patches have introduced more guidance in missions and more forgiving pacing, but they probably cannot fully erase the legacy of frustration left in players’ minds by the initial experience. The game has undeniably become a more approachable and in some cases genuinely enjoyable game, and the developers have indicated they’re not done.
In that light, MindsEye on PS5 today is an improved adventure that now deserves a second look. The cinematic promise at its heart is real, and with each substantive update the world of Redrock becomes a little less hostile to its players. But the road from here to a truly great game – whether through future expansions, deeper systems, or broader replay hooks – remains long and uncertain, a journey that will test both the studio’s commitment and the players’ patience in equal measure. Still, for fans of the genre, it’s already well worth checking out.
Score: 7.2/10
Press Play Media 