60-euro beta played and crashed: MindsEye as a jerky cut-scene simulator and all-in-one genre shredder

I always buy my games myself, deliberately and without exception. This has the simple advantage that I have no obligations to publishers or PR agencies and don’t have to please anyone. That’s exactly why I can react in the same way as a normal customer who, after buying MindsEye, sits stunned in front of his screen and wonders how you can get so little game and so much frustration for 60 euros. And yes, this frustration has to come out. Not in the form of objectively weighed developer feedback, but just as you would in real life: with a dash of cynicism, a dose of bitter irony and the liberating effect of having said it openly for once. Because it helps. It makes you feel at least a little bit better, even if it doesn’t make the game any better.

I really believed that 60 euros for an ambitious, story-driven game in the year 2025 shouldn’t be too much of a risk anymore. Sure, you become more cautious when a new studio promises a triple-A experience that supposedly wants to revolutionize everything. But what I experienced with MindsEye is not just disappointing, it’s a bitter disillusionment. A waste that exemplifies how broken this industry has become in large parts. You pay full price for a product that feels more like a pretentious prototype than a finished game. And I’m not the only one who sees it that way. The reviews on Steam speak a clear language: refunds, frustration, bugs, massive performance problems. Even the positive reviews seem more like defiant reactions from fans who want to talk themselves out of their investment.

It is an indictment of poverty if you have to rely more on trailers and marketing before buying than on clear technical transparency. With its fancy cutscenes, ray tracing reflections and cinematic camera movements, the game pretends to have a production quality that it cannot deliver by any stretch of the imagination. The hardware requirements are grotesque. Even with an RTX 5090 and a current Ryzen 9 9950 X3D, the game does not run smoothly throughout, but lags from scene to scene. Frame-pacing problems, shader stuttering and occasional, completely unprovoked drops to below 60 FPS, even though you are standing in a seemingly static interior, are not isolated cases. In addition, there are crashes without any recognizable pattern. Sometimes directly after loading a savegame, sometimes in the middle of a dialog. I had to play parts of the story twice several times because the game completely hung up in the next scene and I could then admire the maliciously grinning desktop. But for 60 euros, I expect at least a minimum level of technical stability. MindsEye, on the other hand, looks like an early access version that has been secretly pushed onto the live server because the money has run out and there is an urgent need for more funding.

Unreal right down to the engine

From a technical point of view, MindsEye is based on Unreal Engine 5, which is not necessarily a problem in itself. On the contrary, in theory the engine offers many modern features such as Lumen for global illumination, Nanite for highly detailed geometry and an advanced particle system. However, MindsEye is the best example of how even the most modern technology can be shipwrecked if the implementation is immature and optimization is neglected. Right from the start of the game, it is noticeable that shader compilation and streaming delays are a burden, especially when loading a new game scene for the first time. This would be bearable if it were a one-off process, but these effects return again and again during the course of the game, which is a clear indication of poor resource management.

Nanite, which is actually intended to improve performance through efficient LOD management, is obviously not being used in a targeted manner here. Especially in urban scenes with a lot of geometry, the frame rate drops significantly, even on powerful hardware. Texture streaming does not work reliably, which often results in pop-in effects, even on SSDs with high sequential read performance. Lumen, on the other hand, creates impressive lighting moods, but eats up completely disproportionate resources indoors, especially as there is no gradual adjustability via the options. In addition, ray tracing elements are sometimes forcibly activated, which immediately pushes older RTX cards, such as an RTX 2060 or 2070, to their thermal and performance limits. For AMD users without specialized ray tracing hardware or with weaker DXR performance, the game is virtually impossible to play smoothly, even on medium settings. And my high-end system with an RTX 5090 and the Ryzen 9 9950X3D as well as 128 GB RAM? The game itself is the frame rate limiter, unfortunately.

However, the situation is particularly dramatic on platforms that nominally meet the minimum requirements. A system with a GTX 1660 Super or Radeon RX 580 is still accepted, but de facto overtaxed. Even on the lowest details, the game is little more than a jerky slideshow with muddy textures and visible input latency. And even current mid-range hardware such as an RTX 3060 or RX 6700 XT does not deliver a consistently smooth display at 1080p, unless you do without numerous visual effects. There are no customized presets for weaker configurations, and many controls in the options menu seem like mere token functions without any significant effect. Scalability was obviously not a design goal. The game demands a high-end platform, with no consideration for users with average or older hardware. Yet what MindsEye actually delivers visually would not be objectively impressive enough to justify these exorbitant requirements.

Even more annoying is the fact that modern technologies such as DLSS and FSR were advertised but poorly integrated. DLSS 3, for example, sometimes shows visible ghosting artifacts and leads to unnatural motion blurring, while FSR 2.2 produces strong flickering and edge flickering in motion. Frame Generation has an almost counterproductive effect in combination with shader stuttering and makes the image perception even more unsteady in places. The VRAM load is often over 10 GB, even at 1440p, which quickly pushes mid-range cards to their limits. It is obvious that MindsEye was designed as a showcase for showmanship, without taking into account the actual requirements or optimization possibilities on the target platform. What remains is a technical construction site with pretty screenshots, but miserable implementation.

Story and gameplay. Which Gampelay?

MindsEye is a prime example of a game that desperately wants to be everything at the same time and ends up breaking because of this megalomania. You can literally see how the development team has worked with a huge list of references without ever asking themselves whether they fit together. GTA V is plundered without restraint when it comes to open city backdrops and vehicle theft, spiced up with the moral pathos of Mafia, a little Watch Dogs techno feel sprinkled in between, and then some messed-up Need for Speed racing game mechanics and Cyberpunk 2077 template dialog are thrown on top. The result is not a mix of genres, but a playful stew that tastes of everything, but doesn’t get any of it right. Magic becomes Maggi.

Every game mechanic feels like an individually purchased set piece from better games, but without polish, coherence or timing. The open world feels empty, because although it is structurally reminiscent of GTA, it doesn’t allow for any credible interaction. The races feel out of place and old-fashioned, like something from a mid-range arcade game from 2012. Then again, you’re supposed to investigate like in a detective game, but with clues practically flashing in your face. And all of this is embedded in an overambitious story that acts as if Inception, Mr. Robot and Altered Carbon have just been merged, but with the depth of a PowerPoint intro. Instead of a coherent game, the result is a patchwork of game ideas that, individually, have barely made it out of the concept phase. Everything screams “Triple-A!”, but the result is a kit of references that lacks its own signature. MindsEye is not inspired, it is overloaded. Not stylish, but arbitrary. And above all, it is not ambitious, but overstretched.

As for the gameplay itself, MindsEye has the half-baked identity crisis of a teenager trying to please Rockstar Games, Criterion, Remedy and Ubisoft all at the same time. The first mission begins with a very scripted walk-and-talk, then comes a car chase with cars that steer about as believably as oil-powered shopping carts. After that, you suddenly end up in a kind of open world where you can either race, start investigations or do little side jobs. Unfortunately, none of this is even remotely well implemented. The car races feel like something out of a cheap arcade game from ten years ago. The battles are sluggish, the gunplay has no hit feedback, cover systems only work sporadically and the enemy AI fluctuates between stupid and unfair. The story, on the other hand, is so overloaded with pseudo-philosophical elements and constant changes of perspective that after the third “mind-diver simulation” at the latest, you lose track of what is actually real and what is not. Stylistically, this is supposed to appear profound and meaningful, but in reality it is just exhausting and confusing.

MindsEye deserves a special prize for visual disorientation management with its camera work during vehicle journeys. What is delivered here is not only impractical, but in parts simply unplayable. The camera looks as if it is hanging loosely on a string behind the vehicle, without any consideration for the shape of the terrain, driving behavior or physical logic. As soon as you enter a steeper incline, the illusion breaks down completely. Instead of dynamically adapting to the gradient or keeping the vehicle in the center in a meaningful way, the camera stubbornly glides along on its own axis and you can no longer see where you are going. But that doesn’t seem to matter anyway. Incidentally, it does.

The result is a grotesque mixture of tunnel vision and graphic errors: the vehicle body half disappears, the view to the front is blocked, and you seriously wonder whether the camera programmer responsible has ever been on a tricycle, if at all. This lack of vertical camera tracking makes simple journeys a challenge that has nothing to do with driving skills, but everything to do with luck and getting used to incorrect perspectives. Especially in an open game world with height differences, ramps and serpentines, such an omission is not only annoying, but a direct hindrance to the game. Then you’re happy about every sandstorm so that you can no longer see the misery.

Then do it yourself!

And as if the whole genre mishmash wasn’t confusing enough, MindsEye finally tops off the chaos with a “build mode”. Apparently the developers thought it wasn’t enough to throw together racing game, shooter and story elements. No, there also has to be an editor with which you can create your own content. Sounds like freedom and creativity on paper, but in reality it feels more like an unfinished dev tool that you accidentally forgot to hide in the final build.

The mode is vaguely reminiscent of a stripped-down mission or map editor, as we know it from old Ubisoft games or The Sims 4, only with less functionality, no usable user guidance and no guarantee that what you’ve built will be playable in any meaningful way. Instead of a powerful sandbox, you get a fragmentary beta playground with rudimentary placement tools, inconsistent physics behavior and the charming uncertainty of whether the scene will still exist at all the next time you load it or whether it will simply sink into the ground. There is no narrative coherence, no clear objectives, no structure.

This modular mode is not a bonus, but rather another symptom of the overambitious and simultaneously disoriented design. It offers no real game mechanics, but demonstrates how content could be generated – if the game worked around it. In a finished product, something like this might have charm as an optional feature. In an unstable, overloaded base game, it seems like an involuntary glimpse into a toolbox that should never have been seen. An editor for a game that is still in the shell.

Epilogue

You could almost think MindsEye is a desperate attempt to deliver an interactive promotional video for a Netflix original movie that will never be made. I’ve seen a lot of games that want to be cinematic, but this one really pushes the boundaries. It feels like the gameplay is interrupted every two minutes to force the next highly dramatic tracking shot, meaningful dialog scene or flashback in a sepia filter on me. It’s not enough that the characters constantly rant in meaningless monologues about guilt, reality and existence, no, they also do this in a production that acts as if you’ve just seen the new Blade Runner. And yet you sit there, controller or mouse completely useless in your hand, waiting to be allowed to play a bit again at some point, only to end up ten seconds later in another scripted cutscene that would make even Kojima wonder if it’s getting too much.

You can tell at every turn that a studio has tried to do everything at once without knowing how to link individual elements together in a meaningful way. It wants to be an action epic, a social satire, a racing game, a detective game and a story-driven thriller all at the same time. In the end, it is none of these. Instead, you get an overambitious, underdeveloped something that is technically barely usable and frays in all directions in terms of content. For 60 euros, this is not a bold step in a new direction, but a brazen attempt to throw half-finished goods onto the market with an inflated image. And that’s not just expensive and disappointing, it’s downright annoying.

The whole thing is not a game that you play, but a game that drags you through its own ambitions in the hope that you forget how empty it all actually is because of all the stylistic bluster. It’s the interactive series marathon that makes you wish that at least the end credits were finally playable. Please don’t buy it (yet)! Too bad about the money.