Introduction
After this introduction you will find categories about The Good, The Bad, General Thoughts & Feature Requests, and Final Thoughts.
I think it was the game director that described MindsEye as a cinematic experience. He also added some stupid overhype but whatever, it totally is a kickass cinematic action experience. It's like a mix between Uncharted and Watch Dogs which is great. It's also comparable to GTA of course but even with the many hours I've played of GTAIV and V, I just don't give them much thought. They're not my favorites is all. I tend to compare games to my favorites. It also reminds me of games like Max Payne. If you enjoy action movies and haven't seen "6 Underground," go check it out, it's great.
I like the sci-fi and fantasy side of MindsEye's story but I don't like the nonsensical rich guy fighting against a corrupt politician aspect. It's ludicrous. What's especially funny is how the entire story is about AI controlling everything, DNA altering, chips in brains, and robots being police, military, and the normal "workers" of society but at some point they briefly act like AI surveillance is a bad thing. They're running the whole "2030 agenda" while pretending they're the good guys; which is true enough to life I suppose. We can call that funny. They also of course push the whole "anybody that isn't the government with a gun is a terrorist." The writing is a bit whacky and sometimes dumb or complete bullcrap but overall I found the story to be very entertaining and the voice acting all around is excellent.
You'll always see streamers or youtubers making montages of a random ass bug and act like it's the whole game and then their idiot sheeple followers just start repeating the same exact crap all over the internet without actually trying the game themselves. And even if they do try the game themselves, they've already convinced themselves that they have to hate it no matter what then brag about how they refunded it so it just doesn't matter. They are all very, very stupid. It sucks when a bug happens but a bug doesn't make a game suck.
I almost never used the scan feature that highlights enemies. Kept forgetting it even existed and prefer not using it anyways. It does help for the more difficult missions.
The Good
The music in MindsEye is excellent. The gameplay is action packed with epic car chases along with the normal on foot combat. I like that the ammo clip is infinite in the car chases. I'm sure some people don't like that but I do. There's a few car tailing missions I enjoyed as well. One specific tailing mission was a bit more difficult cuz the AI was a whole lot faster but it was doable and not that much of a problem, it was just noticeably a bit more difficult and odd.
There are some very horrible checkpoints when you die and you can't skip cinematics so you are forced to re-watch them when reloading specific checkpoints which sucks but overall most of the checkpoints felt well balanced. They weren't so often that I'd feel like it doesn't matter when I die but they were also not too far apart in most cases so I wasn't having to re-do too much of a mission.
I like that Jacob becomes visibly bloody as you lose health. Of course it also disappears as you regain health so it's a bit on the magical side and some people might complain about "realism" or whatever but I thought that was cool. That said, often times I couldn't tell how low my health was mid-combat. I don't stop to look at the health bar, I'm used to having the edges of the screen be full of blood or something in most games to indicate my health. I don't know if this one is sometimes buggy but it was annoying when I'd find myself dead and had no clue I was dying. Some weapons the enemies have seem to do a lot more damage than others and I couldn't ever really predict that. You do run with low health in general though so running and gunning in the open is not really an option. This is a cover based shooter.
While driving, there is a decent variety of camera angles. I enjoyed the environments and most of the level design. I played on mouse and keyboard and found everything to feel smooth and great. Analog control with the thumbsticks is always gonna be better for more precise movements but I like and prefer being able to play well on a mouse and keyboard. A couple of the mini-games like the CPR one were a little rough but I think that's just cuz they were designed a little more sensitive when it comes to the motions. You just have to be a little more slow with your movement and it works just fine. I'm wondering if they might patch a sensitivity change for those few parts. (It's patched now but I dunno how different it is yet.) I loved the brief tiny arcade mission, it was super cute and fun. I won't say more cuz I think of it as a baby spoiler.
The loading times in MindsEye impressed me. I can't remember many times where it took longer than ten seconds to load up, thirty seconds max. The open world itself is seamless, you only load when dying as far as I can remember which is also awesome.
The game is absolutely gorgeous. The amount of detail is impressive, especially with how far you can see. The dense traffic is also pretty cool. The performance for me was mostly solid even when alt-tabbing. I played with graphics maxed out in 1080p with a 60fps limit.
The Bad
MindsEye does have some graphical issues with small glitches here and there, pop-ins, and what seems like antialising issues. I don't know the technical details, I just see the odd effects. I also do not use the AI settings that do dynamic changes and whatever. I have no interest in those. I like the idea that they can help but I've never actually experienced them helping so I always disable them. I had almost no major issues while playing the game. I have a pretty good PC though, 3080ti and I9 somethin. I don't like to share the details cuz I'll likely never be able to afford something like that ever again and I shouldn't have gotten it.
At first, I didn't like the low amount of health I have in the game. Maybe it's not the amount of health but how much damage is done. Either way, you can die very quickly and I do prefer to be able to run and gun out in the open but I also enjoy games like this as well. I had noted this as a bad thing just cuz it's not my favorite style of health management.
There's no melee combat at all in MindsEye. It's not an extreme loss to me but I do think it would have added a bit more depth and of course fun options for combat itself. It would have been especially better if you could have melee'd enemies around cover and such. So, while I do not think melee is needed, it certainly is missed.
There is no cover blindfire which kind of sucks, blindfire is always fun to do. Like melee combat, it's not necessary but it is missed. There's also no shoulder swap option either. Enemy AI can be stupid sometimes but overall it was decent. This is one of my bad notes just cuz while the enemies were generally good, it's always noticeable when they act stupid and bad. Some of them even like to run backwards or into walls, typical bug stuff and funny but definitely can ruin immersion.
As mentioned earlier, you cannot skip the cut scenes in MindsEye. That just plain sucks. It doesn't suck cuz I want to skip the story or anything. It sucks when you're forced to re-watch them after dying at certain checkpoints. I hope they patch an option to skip them in and if they do, please remember to not leave the "Skip" prompt on the screen at all times. That is so nasty.
The non-humanoid ground robots are lame. They're enemies but they basically just stand there and don't move while shooting at you. I dunno if that's a bug or what, I would think so. They're boring to "fight." There are a couple of stealth missions where the pacing is too slow because the robots you have to avoid move extremely slowly. That could use a bit of pace adjustment.
Some of the missions mid-game and closer to the end could use a little more balancing. Maybe it's just me but there were a few missions that I had died anywhere from five to ten times from stupid crap that was just annoying. I can't be more specific, they were just annoyingly harder for no obvious reason. Not too big of a deal, I just would improve it if I could is all.
The SMG seemingly does less damage than the pistol so it's pretty much useless and the only reason to use it is if I'm just in the mood to. The reload also seems a bit long for an smg so there's just no benefit at all to using it here. It's not a big deal cuz there's enough weapon variety to play with but it doesn't make sense.
The cover system could use a little fixing. When there's an L-shape style of two pieces of cover right next to each other but are not connected you do not naturally transition from one piece of cover to the next, you have to come out of cover and then go back into it to switch spots. This rarely happens but is very noticeable when it does.
You are assigned a main car as you play through the campaign which means you are unable to jump into any car on the street during any mission so if something major or whacky happens and you can't get back in your car, you'll end up having to restart the mission. It's an odd design choice to me. The cars that you can drive in the game are really nice, though!
There's a weird Score system in MindsEye but it only comes up in very few missions and it doesn't seem to matter at all. The scores themselves just felt pointless. I'll see how I feel more about it after doing more side missions and user created content if there is any but I don't expect the score system to be something I care about as it is now. The only thing I like about it so far is the global leaderboard for Time completion. That's neat. Although, for the non-racing missions, it seems like you can just run straight through the shooting sections directly to the end and complete it without even really fighting which is lame.
I do hope players will use the Build feature which is sadly only available on PC. I'm planning to give it a try but I dunno how attached I'll get to it. Depending on how that goes, I may be back to write about it. I think they mentioned the Build feature might be added to console platforms as well but I don't remember for sure and that would likely depend on how popular the game ends up being. As of now, the brainless trash sheeple of the internet have already "killed" it, right? What do you think? I love that the developers posted video Tutorials for this feature.
General Thoughts & Feature Requests
MindsEye being a "cinematic experience" does have quite a long story; compared to a movie anyways. It is short for a video game at twelve to fifteen hours but it does have the potential for infinite replay value. Fortunately, the combat balance is mostly well done throughout the campaign. There is a lot of sitting around watching the story but there's also plenty of action in-between those cinematics. A lot of story dialogue is also done while driving. Those drives tend to be long enough to get the full dialogue out so some thought went into that balance as well which is cool to see. A lot of games have the driving dialgoue get cut off if you drive somewhere too fast for it to finish. Also, in a lot of games I don't like hearing the story while driving because it can be distracting depending on traffic and if there's any random enemies that decide to engage you but because they clearly thought of this, I enjoyed the driving parts with that dialogue.
There's an extra cosmetic skin available at the main screen if you use a QR code. I can't stand this crap, man. At least give us an option that doesn't require a QR code. I'd rather use an email or something, you know? Just more of that forced "2030 agenda" trash. Believe what you want, that agenda is real and has been in the works for our whole lives and it will continue to 2050 and so on. Welcome to the new normal. Stop it. Kill it with fire! Anyways, I won't be grabbing that stupid cosmetic as long as it forces a QR code scan.
The actor from Severance referring to "lumen lights" made me laugh. That link is to my vlog about the ending of season two.
It would be nice if MindsEye had more HUD options. We can only have it on or off and even while it's off the flying vehicles still show the longitude and latitude annoying bar things that I never have any care for. Options to disable specifically the weapons or the drone abilities and other such things on the HUD would be nice to have.
The very first thing I noticed when starting the game was that the campaign started right away without allowing me to adjust any game settings such as graphics/display or audio. This is never a good experience. We should always be able to change these settings before starting the campaign. It would be nice if that could be patched in. I can understand the perspective of wanting to give the player an immediate gaming experience but that's not gonna work if someone can't lower the graphics settings and then the game can't load or function properly for them as one example.
Along with the missing shoulder cam switch which would be nice to have, a Toggle Aim option would be nice as well. I would also really love to see a Photo Mode added to this game! There's no need for a New Game Plus since it already has the option to replay story missions and there's no skill tree or anything. Minor update: your drone does get upgrades so being able to replay the earlier missions with those unlocked would be cool, making a new game plus type thing wanted.
Final Thoughts
MindsEye can easily be viewed as a "generic" third-person shooter but that doesn't mean it's not a good one. This game is badass. The story is decent, the action is epic, the environments are pretty awesome, the graphics are beautifully detailed, and the music is really good. When we get into "worth," that's gonna come down to how much money you have, plain and simple. Are you poor, middle-class, rich? That determines "worth," nothing more. I do not enjoy spending $60 on a short game but I also do not regret buying this game for that price. It's epic, man, and the potential replay value is infinite in just this one game because of how it's designed and has the Build mode. I want to look forward to the future with this game but I've seen the sheeplenet kill amazing games such as Anthem and Forspoken. I also enjoyed Redfall but I wouldn't call it amazing. These brainless zombie f**ks ruin good things but can't tell the difference between a boy and a girl and think their vote matters.
I'd really love to see a sequel but I also hope that this game somehow makes it past the brainless sheeplenet and continues to be an evolving world as planned cuz it deserves it and it's awesome. I don't expect it, I'd just really like to see that happen.
I would not be surprised if there were "shady" things going on behind-the-scenes when it comes to business and a "toxic workplace" or whatever and that can suck but that doesn't stop the game from being good. Leslie Benzies might be an ahole. I assume he is just cuz he's rich. I don't know and I don't care. I liked the game a lot, it's a new favorite, and most people are morons. Below is my VLOG about my excitement and thoughts on the game before it came out.
All of these screenshots were taken by me. Thanks for reading. Game on.
I love this game i think it has a bright future
ReplyDeleteAwesome. I'm worried about the future but I would like to see it grow.
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