MindsEye review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

To start off by addressing the obvious: I know we’re a little late to the MindsEye party, seeing as it came out last June, but out of nowhere I got offered the chance to review it and I figured, why not? Any time you get a chance to play the worst game of the year, I feel like you have to take it, if only to see if things are truly as dire as they were made out to be.

From that perspective, I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed. While I’m not about to pretend that MindsEye is secretly a masterpiece, I think saying that it’s one of the worst games ever made is stretching it a little far. I know we’re in an age where everything has to be either one extreme or another, but there’s a massive range in between those two poles, and MindsEye fits somewhere along that spectrum.

In fact, I’d probably say that it’s about as close to the midpoint as you can possibly get. For a game about which so much has been said and written, it’s astounding how completely and utterly unremarkable MindsEye is.

That doesn’t mean it’s not ambitious. MindsEye certainly aims to do a lot. It gives you a decent-sized story mode, and when you’re done that, you can create as much as you want with the game’s creation tool, or you can just focus on races and challenges and puzzles designed by other players. If content were all you were after, without any regard whatsoever for the quality, there are lots of games that offer a lot less.

The problem is, the content doesn’t really do anything interesting. The story – in which your character is trying to get to the bottom of a conspiracy involving evil corporations – is about as generic as it comes, and it’s matched with gameplay that feels like it could’ve come out of any number of GTA-inspired games over the last 20 years. There’s nothing here that’s likely to grab you or show you something you haven’t seen before. Just like another of the games that featured prominently on Metacritic’s Worst Games of 2025 list, Blood of Mehran (which, weirdly, I also reviewed just a few weeks ago, MindsEye feels like a refugee from a very specific era in PS360 gaming.

And truth be told, I don’t hate it. Those were some of my favourite gaming years, so part of me likes being able to drive around, shooting at bad guys and not having to think very hard about the story. It’s not the most incredible-looking game I’ve ever seen, and literally everything about it is as generic as you could imagine, but within its limited scope, it’s not that bad. I suspect that if MindsEye hadn’t been backed by some grandiose promises, it may have had a somewhat better reception.

But, obviously, “I dunno, it’s…fine?” is hardly the way anyone wants to talk about a game like this. But months after MindsEye’s first came out, it’s hard not to think that it was the victim of a pile-on that was only partially justified by the hubris that surrounded its release. If you can find it on sale for a deep discount and don’t mind playing a generic action game, you may find it perfectly acceptable.

IOI Partners provided us with a MindsEye PC code for review purposes.