Not What Many Visualised: Build A Rocket Boy’s ‘MindsEye’ Fails to Take Off
MindsEye, Build a Rocket Boy’s first title since many of the developer’s departure from GTA developers Rockstar, has achieved a title many optimistic fans were not expecting.
As it stands on aggregate-calculating review site Metacritic, Mindseye sits at a 43/100, making it the worst reviewed title of 2025 so far, seven points away from Captain Blood’s 50, and just one off of Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator’s 44. And whilst both Captain Blood and Ambulance Life sit at a 6 and 5.2 respectively, MindsEye has also failed to capture its intended audience of ‘open world sci-fi heads’, as the user score sits at an incredibly low 2.5.
The game had a somewhat rocky road to launch as is, with both the Chief Financial Officer (Paul Bland) and Chief Legal Officer (Riley Graebner) leaving the company one week before its release. Whilst Graebner stated that he was ‘proud’ of what BARB had achieved and was sad to go, there was no statement from Bland. The image provided to players was not a pretty one, with one person on the r/MindsEye subreddit stating ‘we’ve been cyberpunk’d’, a reference to the horrendous launch of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077. With BARB’s co-CEO Mark Gerhard providing a statement that previews from media outlets and content creators were infact funded negative reviews, hinting that their former employer Rockstar was to blame.
Sadly however when players finally got their hands on the title, this statement fell flat. MindsEye is a game riddled with bugs, from cars turning NPC’s into spaghetti when hit, to floating pedestrians, to faces of characters simply just, folding in on themselves. This in of itself is a fixable offence, much like the aforementioned Cyberpunk launch. Unlike Cyberpunk however, the issues spread further than the code. Guardian’s Christain Donlan states that ‘Its ideas, its moment-to-moment action and narrative are so thinly conceived that it barely exists.’ , and IGN’s Luke Riley stated the game was ‘high on ambition but low on original ideas’ and overall it ‘was simply not ready to be released’.
With two more sets of hotfixes looking to hit the game in the coming days, perhaps players looking for a third person, sci-fi shooter to burn some time will enjoy what they have paid for. But with the game’s launch following in the footsteps of Cyberpunk 2077, with many Playstation and PC players requesting and receiving their refunds for the game, the sad question isn’t ‘will the hotfixes make the game playable?’, its ‘will their be a playerbase left to play it?’.
