If you asked the average player of video games who Leslie Benzies is, the answer would likely be, “Who is she?” But if you said the same thing to virtually any game developer, now or over the last thirty years, the answer would almost immediately be, “the former Rockstar producer and the guy who saved Red Dead Redemption.” In game development circles, Leslie Benzies is a man who needs no introduction, and to the hardcore gaming community, seeing that his pedigree is Rockstar through-and-through, well, that’s enough to pique anyone’s interest. Enter: Build a Rocket Boy and MindsEye.
After an unceremonious departure from Rockstar in 2016 and a lawsuit against Rockstar and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, Mr. Benzies founded Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) in 2018, with the help of some investors. While the first game announced was the yet-to-be-released massively multiplayer online game Everywhere, BARB revealed its first product to be released, built using the tools and systems of Everywhere, called MindsEye. The marketing for MindsEye was relatively low-key and short, with the first full teaser showing in 2024 and the proper reveal shown in February of 2025. Now that it has launched, does MindsEye do justice to the legacy of Leslie Benzies, or does it crash and burn like so many other storied game developers’ games after they leave the nest? Let’s find out.
The Setup
MindsEye opens with protagonist Jacob Diaz, portrayed by Alex Hernandez (most well-known as Lincoln Clay in Mafia III), conducting a military operation with his unit wherein he controls a drone using an implant in his neck. While exploring some sort of ancient structure, the drone and, by extension, Jacob went into some sort of spasm, causing the drone to lose control and shoot at Jacob’s squad members. After some minor fallout from that event, the game skips a few years ahead to Jacob’s arrival in Redrock City, a futuristic version of Las Vegas where robots are integrated into society, including as police, or “CopBots.” Jacob arrives having been secured a job, by his childhood friend, with Silva, the manufacturer of all the robots, as a security team member. His motivations and the rest of the story are a mystery I’ll leave for the player to discover.
The story of MindsEye is initially situated in the driver’s seat of the player’s experience until the player unlocks the “Free Roam” mode, where the player is free to explore Redrock and its surrounding areas without story missions. While Redrock is fully open during the story, the game is designed very similarly to the Mafia franchise (excluding Mafia III), where the player is encouraged, or forced, to keep following the main story instead of exploring the world. Another limitation is that Jacob is restricted to using only specific vehicles provided during the story, rather than the ability to use any of the many vehicles seen around the map.
Everywhere…or Nowhere?
The game is designed to have crafted experiences, like Jacob’s story, and then open the world up to the player as a random, no-name character to explore in Free Roam. The player is then expected to select additional “side activities” content created by BARB or other players by using “portals” in the world or from the menu. The problem is, the content is virtually barren at launch, and the content that does exist is boring. It’s a drone race, or a “destroy their cars” mission, or a tower defense; there’s nothing original and nothing exciting. Some of the BARB-created “side activities” are available during the story as Jacob as he comments on the experience he’s having, and there’s light tie-in to the story, but other content is not related, and even the BARB content is optional.
Another critical flaw of MindsEye is that there’s no large map. There’s a minimap, and it serves its purpose, but when trying to figure out where to go, the player is stuck following the story-imposed GPS marker and route. Or, even worse, just driving until the player maybe ends up somewhere because there is no GPS system in Free Roam. An open-world game like this requires a map to effectively explore, especially when the player is supposed to be finding things to do by driving around the world.
Shooting or So It Seems
Speaking of driving, the driving usually feels pretty good. Turning, light braking, and accelerating all work as they should, the only exception is that a hard brake, using the handbrake for a sharp turn, can too easily spin out the car. The physics while driving are also a mess during collisions. The cars flip and flop by hitting the tiniest object, but BARB has tried to account for this by a “press to flip the vehicle” button if the car ends up upside-down. There’s also no consistency as to how much damage a car will be able to take before it explodes, leading to uncertainty about taking bullets or smashing into other cars by mistake.
On the topic of bullets, there are a lot of bullets in MindsEye. The player is shooting, and being shot at, consistently, and there are a large variety of weapons made available throughout the course of the game. The issue here is that there’s no indication of which ammo a particular gun needs to operate; there are a handful of ammo types, and they fill the appropriate weapon automatically, but the player doesn’t know which gun it’s filling unless it’s the active gun or the player can remember the exact bullet count for other weapons. There’s also no way to buy ammo; it can only be acquired from dead enemies, so the player can run out of ammo very easily, except the starting pistol, which has unlimited ammo without explanation besides being a counter-balance.
Pulling the triggers to shoot feels good, especially on PS5 with a DualSense, but there’s no sense of satisfaction or impact upon landing a hit, neither body nor headshot. The player character’s health refills after not taking damage for a short time, and there are no health packs or healing boosts, nor armor for an extra health bar. It’s not impossible to die, but it is pretty difficult to die during a shooting encounter on the normal difficulty. MindsEye also uses a Grand Theft Auto-like snap-to targeting system, but it is much more poorly implemented.
Underbaked
Other poorly implemented aspects of MindsEye are primarily technical in nature, primarily the pop-in, level-of-detail loading issues, and blurring when zooming in. While driving around, there is a constant pop-in of assets, and, one time, an enemy just appeared in front of the character while walking during a side activity. When transitioning from scene to scene, the details on images, such as buildings, take a noticeably long time to load in before the game looks as it should. Strangely, when zooming in with a sniper rifle, the game will blur an enemy if the player moves the targeting reticle off of him for a moment and then has to re-focus if moved back; this makes it incredibly frustrating when trying to target a moving enemy. Oh, and the game runs at 30 frames per second; ick.
While playing the game, despite the plethora of technical issues, actual bugs were relatively few and far between. The game did crash once in the middle of a mission, but there were a lot of explosions going on at that time, so it’s possible the game was simply overwhelmed, and it worked fine the next attempt. There were never any missing NPCs, freezes, broken missions, or the like, and credit for that must be given to BARB.
Showing Character
MindsEye does have a few aspects to it that are quite good and really elevate the game on the whole. For example, the story is an interesting mystery and something that will hook the player early on once Jacob’s motivations are revealed. As it progressed, there was never a moment of boredom or complete predictability, a hallmark of good storytelling. The performances are also quite good…most of the time. There are a few moments where it feels like, as a part of MindsEye’s overall underbaked nature, the take for a line was a bad one, but they only did one take, so it ended up in the game. Thankfully, that’s a rarity, and the whole cast does a really great job conveying an interesting story.
Beyond that, the game, when the details have loaded in or if the camera is not in motion, is a pretty game. Detailed character models for the main cast, including great eye-rendering technology to feel like they’re not just dolls, plus a pretty (though underused) city setting and well-designed vehicles, are really enjoyable to look at. It is unfortunate that the look is marred by the technical issues mentioned earlier.
The sad reality is that MindsEye is just an unfinished game that was released as a nearly full-priced product. As strong as the story and the performances of the game are, the rest of the game is competently made, at best, and it’s janky and feels bad at worst. MindsEye is not unsalvageable; it’s not an irredeemable mess by any stretch of the imagination, and if BARB had taken another year to prepare more side activities, fix the technical issues, and refine the gameplay, there could be something special here. But between missing quality-of-life features, like a full-sized map, competent but janky driving, mediocre shooting, and a variety of technical shortcomings, the game’s story, acting, and inconsistent beauty are not enough to save this game from being just okay.
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This game isn’t even worth $10, much less full price. This score is a joke and this review is misleading.