MindsEye‘s new Blacklisted DLC mission is out now, and the base game has received a price cut, amid an attempted comeback.
MindsEye has been a sore spot in gaming since its release. It was released in the Summer and was immediately lampooned online by fans and critics alike for its lack of content and technical issues. What followed was a torrent of refunds (which even PlayStation honoured) and hundreds of layoffs amid allegations of crunched development. Former Grand Theft Auto lead and MindsEye director Leslie Benzies then proceeded to blame the game’s disastrous launch on “Saboteurs,” and Build a Rocket Boy’s co-CEO Mark Gerhard went so far as to suggest that some of the negative reception to the game was being financed by bad actors.
This is somehow, ironically, what the Blacklisted DLC is about. In the MindsEye Blacklisted DLC, you embody the world-class assassin, Julia Black. She’s tasked with taking down a network of criminals who are tearing a company apart (from the inside and out). The mission relates to the real-life claims by Build a Rocket Boy’s top brass that bad actors and inside sabotage caused MindsEye to fail, and the DLC is said to have evidence of this sabotage (which is yet to be found as of this posting). The mission is brief and was initially designed as a crossover with Hitman, before publisher IO Interactive pulled out.
As it stands, MindsEye has an abysmal below 50% rating on every platform on Metacritic, and judging by some testimonials so far, that is unlikely to change. Some fans have taken to forums like Reddit to voice their displeasure. One player said, “It’s still just not good. Cringe dialogue, terrible voice acting that sounds AI anyway, the level only takes half an hour to an hour to complete which is no surprise, and it’s just not all that interesting,” adding, “It’s like BARB can’t do anything right. I love MindsEye but bro, what are they doing?” It’s important to note that this fan liked the base MindsEye experience, but disliked Blacklisted.
Polygon’s scathing review of the Blacklisted DLC says, “Like MindsEye itself, all of this is painfully stupid. Blacklisted is a petty diss track that hardly delivers any substantial bars,” Like everyone else who has played the DLC, this testimonial says it has no depth (according to Steam Charts, that number is between 1-41).
To add to the fire, a new interview has surfaced today that sheds light on the troubled development of MindsEye with Kotaku and industry animator veteran, Chris Wilson. It turns out his reason for leaving the company is “Basically, the Teramind monitoring and the blatant lack of respect for the staff, where they were not being honest about the reasons for the monitoring, why they started it, when they started it—that was like finding that nail in the coffin for me.” According to Wilson and other anonymous Build a Rocket Boy testimonials, the company used monitoring software called Teramind to check employee workloads down to keystroke logging.
It appears MindsEye is still a far way off from being a Cyberpunk 2077 comeback story, and the Blacklisted update seems to be deepening the fissure made by Build a Rocket Boy instead of making things better.
