When just about every modern single-player game feels under the pressure to cram in an abundance of features and content to match the impossible bar of a Rockstar game, it's almost refreshing that MindsEye, directed by former Rockstar dev Leslie Benzies and his new studio Build A Rocket Boy, is unabashedly stripped back as a no-nonsense 360-era throwback ten-hour single-player campaign with a singular story to tell – all without getting bogged down in menus and RPG-style upgrade trees.
Unfortunately, that's where the praise ends, because rather than riding on the wave of AA's comeback, MindsEye feels like a hollow shell of a game. After all, it was initially envisioned as a showcase for the studio's more ambitious game creation platform Everywhere, which itself seems to have been scaled back so that this is now a headlining standalone release published by IOI Partners (the game creation aspect, currently in beta, is also limited to PC, so PS5 and Xbox Series X/S players are essentially just buying MindsEye for that campaign, which is the focus of this review).
