MindsEye review: an unfinished review for an unfinished game

By Giovanni Colantonio Published June 16, 2025

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Imagine that you’re a food critic. You’re assigned to review a hot new American bistro downtown. You’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about it before its grand opening, with the owners even throwing around the word “revolutionary.” You get there, sit down at a table, and order a simple hamburger. A simple order, but a baseline test to see how well the restaurant has mastered the fundamentals. The waiter comes back 15 minutes later with a plate of raw ground beef.

That’s what I feel like as I try to review MindsEye.

The debut game from Build a Rocket Boy, a new studio formed by Rockstar veteran Leslie Benzies, has a basic recipe. It’s a third-person cover-based shooter with a cinematic sci-fi story. It adds a few extra spices in with the salt and pepper – a dash of gadgetry here, a heavy portion of driving there — but it’s a hamburger. Or it would be, at least, had the studio been able to finish cooking it. I couldn’t even take my first bite of it before pink meat spilled out of the bun. Check please!

I don’t know what purpose a traditional review of something as transparently unfinished as MindsEye serves. Sure, there are a few good pieces lying in the scrap heap, but it doesn’t make much sense for me to tell you about the car those parts dream to become one day. Rather than spending hours painstakingly dissecting it in carefully considered prose, I feel that it’s only right to match MindsEye’s sorry state with my own raw, unorganized thoughts. I can’t give you a proper review; I can only offer you ground beef.

Look, I could keep going here. Pop over to YouTube or Reddit and you’ll find no shortage of bug reels that show you just how busted MindsEye is. Jacob falling through the map, NPCs exploding into a mess of spaghetti limbs, you name it. There’s a whole culture in gaming built around turning games like this into fascinations. MindsEye feels destined to be 2025’s entry into the “bad game hall of fame.” Is that such a terrible fate? Ironic success stories like The Room prove that it’s sometimes better to be a memorable misfire than a decent slog.

I’m sure that’s not an outcome that the team at Build a Rocket Boy will be happy about owning. There’s palpable ambition fueling MindsEye, but I can feel where it likely clashed with business decisions that forced the project out of the oven prematurely. It’s the kind of game that you can only pity, holding some empathy for the artists watching an unrealized dream tumble away like a self-driving truck down a crater. No chef wants to serve you uncooked beef.

MindsEye was reviewed on PS5 Pro.