Mindjack Review

Posted By Micah C. about 1 year, 3 months ago

Mindjack Review

Mind control, as a concept, hasn’t been seen much in gaming. There are a couple of titles I can think of offhand that have used it (the Oddworld games, Psi-Ops), but it’s been an underutilized part of fiction when it comes to this particular medium. This is where Mindjack comes in. The basic premise of Mindjack is to put the player (or players) in a situation where they can control their battlefield through a digital method of mind control. Rather than using psionics, your character digitizes his or her consciousness, and transfers it to person or machine to use in combat. So, is this game capable of taking this concept and making it fantastic, or should this game simply go brain dead?

The plot of Mindjack takes place in the future, where the government of the US doesn’t have as much power as it used to. At this point in time, it’s all about corporations. As the main character of this game’s storyline, you must use your skills both on a technological level and physical level to unravel a conspiracy. If you don’t do so, the world is forfeit. Sound familiar? Yes, I’m aware that it sounds like the plots of most science fiction movies. Thing is, that vague description is literally all I know about the storyline of Mindjack. Throughout my six plus hours of play, all I can tell you is all that I just said. I could have simply read a synopsis from a press release.

There is no plot in Mindjack. Just stuff like this, ad nauseum. It is not as fun as it looks in screenshots.

The reason for this is Mindjack is a game that has terrible, terrible writing. Now, I’ve been known to criticize a game like Halo 3 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for bad writing, and I’ve done it justly. Those games have terrible plots with gaping plot holes. Mindjack, in itself, has no plot whatsoever. It’s one thing to have a barely cohesive plot that simply strings the player along a sequence of firefights. The most that Mindjack tells you is this: Your objective is to kill everything in front of you so you can get from point A to point B. Oh, you wanted character motivation? Not happening. We’re not telling you why you need to get from point A to point B, why the characters care, or why you should care. Just get there, or shut off your console. The story, the characters, and the plot of this game are simply dead on arrival.

Visual presentation in Mindjack isn’t bad by any stretch, but it’s by no means perfect either. The graphics are well polished, and though gunmetal colors are overused, it’s all rendered fairly well. The character models don’t look bad either, though I have a couple of gripes. The first one is that the eyes of the characters look like flat surfaces in their skulls. However, the biggest issue in the character models isn’t in design, but in use of them to tell a story. If you look at a game like Uncharted or Mass Effect, a painstaking amount of detail goes into facial animation to properly convey emotion. There are points in Mindjack where a character will be trying to convey an emotion, and there’s nothing there. The face simply moves little, and thus destroys immersion.

Character models look good in screens, but aren't used well.

The sound design in Mindjack almost doesn’t deserve that much of a mention. In description of the sound effects, the most that I can say is “they’re okay.” Truthfully, there’s not really much of a punch to them. The only part of said effects that I feel worth mentioning is the “Wanderer” sound effects, which are annoying to the point where I had to shut off my surround sound. The soundtrack is also incredibly repetitive, but at the same time is barely there. To my knowledge, there are maybe four tracks present in the soundtrack to Mindjack, but I’m prepared to be corrected. The reason for this is that there could very well be a full fifteen to twenty song soundtrack present in the game, but so many of the tracks are bland and repetitive to the point where they meld into one another, like when minutes pass in the mind of a bored person.

Mindjack Review, 4.0 out of 5 based on 14 ratings

Mindjack Review

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Angry Joe literally loses his mind reviewing Mindjack from Square Enix. It's only January and we already have a strong candidate for Worst Game of 2011! How can a concept this interesting be executed so poorly? Find out!