MindsEye Release: Plagued with Problems, Poor Reception, and a Jab from Rockstar

Even before the release of MindsEye, voices in the community were already saying that the game wasn’t ready and should be postponed. As Tuesday showed, those concerns were well-founded. The new video game from the former Grand Theft Auto producer and ex-president of Rockstar North, despite several patches, launched riddled with issues that could have been avoided simply by giving the developers a bit more time.

Players encountered constant crashes, poor optimization (even on PS5 Pro), and bizarre bugs — some of which have already become memes.

In general, MindsEye’s launch is being compared to Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA: Trilogy — Definitive Edition. Competing with even the original GTA: San Andreas feels like a stretch — NPC behavior is just incomparably worse. Unsurprisingly, this all led to criticism from both the press and gamers. As of now, MindsEye has nearly 1,500 reviews on Steam, most of them negative. On Metacritic, the PC version has a critic score of just 43/100 and a user score of 2.7/10 (console scores aren’t out yet, but likely won’t be much better). IGN gave it a 4/10, suggesting players think twice before buying. That said, if you already did — PlayStation users are getting refunds without hassle. No wonder media outlets didn’t receive review copies, and some sponsored streams were canceled or postponed.

So, the “GTA 6 killer” label given by some over-eager fans? MindsEye won’t live up to it. It’s unlikely to even hold players’ attention through the summer. Not even a HITMAN collaboration can salvage it. Leslie Benzies should have delayed the project until fall or even winter. Maybe then it would’ve turned out better. Ironically, his former colleagues at Rockstar Games, when publishing a press release about a new GTA Online update, respectfully pushed the date by a day.

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