Gameitall When I first heard of Mindjack, I had to honestly say the idea sounded promising. A multiplayer game where you can hack in and control anyone in the game world to shoot up your opponents, it’s a promising premis that if done right could be a big multiplayer hit for Square Enix.
However, Mindjack falls into a few problems, one is in it’s execution, and the other is the fact that no one wants to play it. Which is justifiable.
At first glance, Mindjack is a 3rd-person cover based shooter, similar to Gears of War; but where Mindjack tries to follow it’s bloody companion, it fails at some of the most basic things of shooters. The controls are clunky at best, unresponsive at worst, you tend to stick to cover forcing you to do a combat roll out of it, which leads you into direct enemy fire. There are of course other major gameplay problems, as enemies need nearly an entire clip to take down,weapons feel like they’re firing everywhere but where your target is, melee attacks is completely useless and your partner AI is dumber than your Resident Evil 5 buddy.
Of course, the big selling point of the game would be the Mindjack ability which is never really explained how or why your character is able to do it. You can jump out of your main characters body to possess other characters, robots, Cyborg enhanced Gorillas, and soldiers, although as long as they’re a non combatant (which they miseriously pull out a pistol or weapon after you hack them) or stunned. What sounds like a good idea on paper is terrible in execution, it’s slow, clunky and tedious system, that does nothing but stall the player than advanced him further. If your looking for a game with a good take over somebody’s body mechanic, try Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex for PS2, or 1999’s Omikron: The Nomad Soul for PC.
When you hear the words Square Enix being brought up in a conversation, immediately you think back to the great cinematic moments of Final Fantasy or even the recent Deus Ex. You’d be sadly disapointed in this game, after a decent hand to hand fight scene, the cinematics become a mess. For being a game released for $60 and being released in 2011, the game looks like a launch title for the 360, while that isn’t bad, it’s not what we would expect from the company and for the price tag.
It’s hard to find something to like in Mindjack, it’s a mess of a story with no explanation, faulty mechanics, and terrible AI. Mindjack is a perfect example of what happens when a good company drops the ball and delivers an absolute crappy game.
Mindjack gets a 2/10
Pros – Good concept, one really good hand to hand fight scene, Monkeys…
Cons – Broken controls, Broken Mechanics, Bad AI
