Cliff Notes – MindsEye review – the worst game of 2025 is a shockingly bad GTA clone
-
Unfinished Product: MindsEye is released prematurely, suffering from numerous technical issues and a lack of engaging gameplay, making it hard to envision a successful future for the game.
-
Linear Gameplay: Despite its open-world setting, the game is highly restrictive and linear, with repetitive missions that often involve tedious driving and uninspired combat mechanics.
- Disappointing Narrative: The story fails to engage with timely themes, featuring forgettable characters and a bland plot that lacks depth, leading to an overall unsatisfactory gaming experience.
MindsEye review – the worst game of 2025 is a shockingly bad GTA clone
MindsEye – we forget the protagonist’s name, you will too (IO Interactive Partners)
From the producer of GTA 5 comes one of the most badly made video games of all time, that’s somehow even worse than its reputation suggests.
Most games these days would love to be compared to Cyberpunk 2077, given it’s now completed its redemption arc and is regarded as a modern classic. Unfortunately for MindsEye, the similarities between the two games – including Sony offering owners a full refund – are based purely on Cyberpunk’s original release, when it was a broken, unplayable disaster.
Unlike Cyberpunk 2077, it’s very hard to imagine MindsEye ever being set right. More importantly, while the issues with Cyberpunk were almost solely technical, that’s only a small part of the problem when it comes to MindsEye.
MindsEye has a long and complicated history, that we don’t want to get into too much here, not least because the juicier details are likely to come out over the next few months. But in short, it was originally intended to be part of the heavily delayed Everywhere game creation tool, that was being positioned as a sort of adult version of Roblox. Things started to go wrong though and so MindsEye was released first.
Exactly what happened with Everywhere is still unclear, but considering it was first announced in 2017 the answer seems to be ‘a lot.’ There’s been talk of sky high budgets, with investors attracted by the fact that the director is Leslie Benzies, the unsung hero behind Grand Theft Auto – who acted as producer on everything from GTA 3 onwards but left Rockstar Games in 2016, under acrimonious circumstances.
One of the main problems for MindsEye is the fact that it’s clearly been released long before it’s finished. We imagine there was some sort of financial deadline that had to be met but after all this time its release date couldn’t have been more poorly chosen, coming right in the middle of the Switch 2 launch and Summer Game Fest week.
Needless to say, the reason this review is so late, is because copies were not sent out to press ahead of time. That left many wondering if the game’s failures had been exaggerated but we’re here to tell you that’s not the case at all.
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
MindsEye is what GTA would be if it still took place in an open world city, but the game itself was entirely linear. That means it’s essentially a third person shooter, with a lot of driving missions and other asides. Despite what you might imagine, the story is pure sci-fi shlock, as you play an amnesiac former soldier who discovers a planet-threatening conspiracy that we suppose we shouldn’t spoil – for those of you that are perverse enough to seek the game out, despite everyone telling you not to.
Set in the near future, the game touches upon themes like unchecked military and police powers, as well as AI being relied upon for life and death decision making, but the story never engages with these ideas, which seems all the more disappointing given how timely it could have been. The characters are deeply disappointing, given Benzies’ background, with no one, including the protagonist, making any kind of impression – positive or otherwise.
Rather than GTA, the game we kept being reminded of is the original Driver from 1999. Not in terms of any of the positives of that game, or the absurd difficulty of some of its missions, but how linear and restrictive it was, despite the pretence of being open world. MindsEye doesn’t let you explore its off-brand version of Las Vegas until you’ve beaten the game and so instead almost every mission involves just driving somewhere (in a car you don’t get to pick) and if you dare to start exploring the mission fails.
As an extra bonus, the driving is awful, with no sense of weight to the cars, as if their tyres are filled with helium. It’s better than the cover-based combat though, which is ruined by clearly broken AI, which has no idea what’s going on most of the time. The animation system for enemies is completely broken and often has them firing in a different direction to the way they’re facing, with bullets that move so slowly you can literally walk between them.
The car handling makes GTA 4 look good (IO Interactive Partners)
On PlayStation 5, the game is capped at 30fps but rarely even gets that high, so all the impressive looking screenshots you see here are turned into a stuttering sideshow in real life. There’s also a weird blurriness to everything that may be some sort of upscaling effect but whatever it is, it’s distracting and ugly.
We assume none of this is supposed to be how the game works but there are other baffling issues that are part of the intended design, including the complete lack of melee combat or any kind of dodge or roll. The broken AI and awful frame rate are bad enough, but in terms of design the game feels decades out of date.
The missions are uniformly bland, as you spend longer driving to gun battles than you do taking part in them. Sometimes you have to drive somewhere just to trigger a cinematic, as if you’re a taxi service for cut scenes.
There is some minor variation, with an early 2000s style stealth sequence and a few goes with a drone, but every new idea only seems to make things worse, including such banalities as a safe cracking minigame.
There’s also a breed of non-story mission that is the remaining vestige of the Everywhere concept. The original idea was that you were supposed to be able to design these yourself but while that option isn’t available in the console version the examples included here, of bare bones shooting galleries and checkpoint races, are so utterly banal it beggars’ belief.
MindsEye is only around 10 hours long, but for obvious reasons we’re not going to count that as a negative, even though the asking price is outrageous for a game with absolutely no replay value at all. The short length is because the game was originally intended as episodic content (another old-fashioned idea) but we’re going to take a wild guess and imagine the story is not going to be continued.
It certainly has been a busy few weeks for gaming, but we never expected we’d be reviewing another game so soon, that was even worse than Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. And yet here we are. MindsEye is a terrible game. But it’s not so bad it’s good, it’s so bad it’s insulting.
MindsEye review summary
In Short: One of the worst video games of the modern era, that clearly isn’t finished – but just as clearly wouldn’t be worth even a moment of your time if it was.
Pros: The open world design is okay, even though there’s nothing in it. The graphics would probably be quite good if they worked properly.
Cons: Old-fashioned, linear, and highly repetitive mission design married to terrible third person combat and tedious driving. Terrible performance problem, banal story, and it feels overly long at 10 hours.
Score: 2/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £54.99
Publisher: IO Interactive Partners
Developer: Build a Rocket Boy
Release Date: 10th June 2025
Age Rating: 18
One of the most notable game releases of the year (IO Interactive Partners)
Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.