Mindseye PS5 Review 4/10 [POST 2026 UPDATE 7] "Not quite as catastrophic as you might have heard" 👁️

Here are the first ten minutes of Mindseye.

After a slick cinematic establishing our hero, Jacob Diaz, you begin a new job at a sprawling military-tech corporation. Your superior takes you on a guided tour of the pristine facility in a small buggy, explaining the company’s grand ambitions.

You can absolutely floor this buggy and plough into every NPC in sight.

It’s like the parking garage in Dead Rising, bodies ragdolling across the place, your buggy skidding over their motionless corpses. No one meaningfully reacts to this. They don’t move out of the way, and aside from a few yelps they don't say anything.

At one point I flipped the vehicle completely. My boss, still seated beside me, calmly continued her monologue while Jacob nodded along, upside down, as if this were standard onboarding procedure.

This was the most fun I had playing Mindseye.

Developed by Build a Rocket Boy and directed by former Rockstar North head Leslie Benzies, Mindseye arrived carrying expectation which was quickly undone by its disastrous launch last year. For disclosure, I am playing it for the first time following Update 7 and while I haven't experienced all the bugs that plagued that opening week, it's clear that even looking its best, Mindseye was never going to be much to write home about. In fact it makes the familiar sin of doing little except copy (or homage) what came before but doing it much, much worse.

The aforementioned Diaz is a combat veteran in a not too distant future, who is suffering from amnesia and a case of "mysterious computer chip in head". He travels to the fictional desert city of Red Rock, with its neon towers and host of colourful characters, in search of answers.

If that sounds like Grand Theft Auto and Cyberpunk 2077 had a little baby then that's because that's what this is and in its attempt to be both Mindseye becomes neither.Thanks Stephen 

The story and world isn't interesting enough to support the lacklustre gameplay and the lacklustre gameplay isn't enough to support the story. Combat is heavy and oddly inert. Weapons lack snap; encounters lack invention or diversity. The missions ape the most bog standard Rockstar missions of travel here, do this/get ambushed, travel back. A deployable drone appears partway through, allowing you to zap enemies from a distance, but it feels more like a quickly added gimmick than a meaningful expansion of the sandbox.

Driving, to be fair, is decent. Vehicles handle well. There’s weight and traction and a pleasing sense of speed. But it’s all in service of an open world that rarely justifies its existence.

Red Rock, a fictional Las Vegas, is nicely designed. Neon lit streets, clean sightlines, sun-bleached outskirts but it's entirely lifeless. Like the game itself It wants to be Night City, it wants to be San Andreas but it comes close to neither.

Even the story, nicely presented though it is, struggles to distinguish itself. Corporate intrigue. Military secrets. A protagonist with amnesia. It moves forward at a snail’s pace, hinting at depth while rarely committing to it.

Jacob Diaz, like the game, is handsome, overly serious, and blank (except in combat where he starts quipping like he's auditioning for Spider-Man). His missing memories are clearly meant to be offer intrigue, but in practice they leave him feeling less like a mystery and more like an absence. There's never a sense of urgency to Diaz or the plot. At least the chip in V's head was killing her (and voiced by Keanu Reeves).

Mindseye is ambitious, which makes it hard to dismiss entirely. It hasn't been slapped together, it's clear how much work went into it and it clearly wants to be more than the sum of its parts.

But it improves on nothing it borrows from. Its systems don’t meaningfully react, its world doesn’t quite need to be open and its protagonist doesn’t quite need to exist.

SUMMARY
Not quite as catastrophic as you might have heard but Mindseye is that most unforgivable type of game. 

An incredibly boring one.

4/10

💦MELTED💦