Where do I even begin with this charming piece of Dreamcast-like software? Let me just say right off the bat, don’t even give it a second glance when you see it the bargain bin at the gaming dispensary; and if you buy it for anything under $9.99, you’ll be the one getting “jacked”. There are a number of you reading this who’ve probably played this game when it was called Psi Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy. Dig that out of your vault and play it because it offers everything Mindjack does and more. Mindjack might have at one point sounded great on paper but fails to deliver on so many levels that it didn’t even stand a chance in 2011′s visually stimulated marketplace.
You know that your game is in bad shape when the introduction to it is more exciting (and looks ten times better) than the game itself. In just a few minutes of opening video, Mindjack portrays an extraordinarily bizarre and gloomy future where flying metallic brains zoom through the air and connect, or ‘jack’, themselves into everyday citizens minds. Once connected, the person, or thing, is forced to do the bidding of the brain, no matter how terrible the task may be. In this universe, a jacking can happen at any time to any one. It can happen while you’re mailing a letter, or walking your dog, or while you’re at work laughing around the water cooler with your co-workers. In the intro we see two rivaling factions of brains flying on over to a growing skirmish of jacked citizens ducking it out. As more brains arrive and jump from human to human, it eventually develops into full-blown chaos. Brains are controlling dozens of people and in seconds we see people turning on each other and fellow police officers shooting it out to the death. Eventually there is a massive 5-ton cyber gorilla and, well… let’s just say it gets pretty crazy. While the opening sequence can get any enthusiastic player jazzed up to experience this world, Mindjack never lives up to the opening hype.
In Mindjack you can indeed leave your main characters physical body in order to take power of nearly every enemy, civilian, and even the occasional helpful weaponized robot. Zipping out of a character and into the body of an inoperative robot, a frantic civilian, damaged enemy, and eventually even a cyber gorilla, is cool at its core but the game play elements and controls enveloping this idea falls flat on its face. You might get a macabre sense of pleasure from taking control of an otherwise powerless civilian and giving him or her the adamant determination to kill the enemy soldiers only to be gunned down in the process. Once this happens, it’s onto the next disposable civilian to control, and repeat.
What drives me crazy about Mindjack is how badly the story fails to explain and properly make sense of the vast sociological alterations that a technology like this would bring to mankind. Instead of developing this sole fascinating aspect of the universe, it instead hands you cliché after cliché on a dull, silver platter (I say this because in addition to the stiff graphics, mostly everything in the game is silver or grey, making this ambitious looking future quite ordinary). Developers take note, please; stale meat-headed characters and unforeseen plot twists don’t always have to be what is expected!
On top of all this, you have to put up with the lame repartee between the main characters who have nothing interesting to add and don’t even speak like normal humans – a product of poor east to west translation and dialogue. Sound design in the game was solid from an effects point of view. Guns and explosions sounded powerful and had a lot of oomph behind them. All the environmental effects were there the usual diegetics like the pitter-patter of footsteps, beeps of computers, and opening of doors were acceptable. I’m fairly certain that I’ve heard all of these effects in previous games and it was pretty clear that not a lot of love was given to the sound design.
No matter whom you end up jacking in the game (giggles), movement on the part of your character or any of your mental hostages will always feel rigid and bulky. Characters have a weighty and robotic feel to them, which is unparalleled for a 2011 release thus far. There is almost always a brief and painful holdup between the time you tell your avatar to run away from danger and the time where they react to your request. The game throughout has an extremely undesirable and unnatural feel to it, but ironically because all of the other characters are tethered to the same physical limitations, it is possible to make the best of it and have some entertaining shoot-outs. Shootouts will test your usual in-game skills like running and jumping, firing in the open and from behind cover, and dodging your essentials like rockets and grenades.
The game continues its stream of awkwardness (it’s a way of life) with the enemy AI. Enemies will run around frantically trying to find anything they can to shoot at, and will sometimes even stand still entirely while you gun them down. This is the, in this writers opinion, the worst thing that enemy AI can do and infuriated me in game. With your jacking ability, you can force civilians and other enemies to fight for your team, which is a great way to diverge the enemies’ attention and give them something else to shoot at. On higher difficulties, the enemy is a crack shot and you must have your wits about you in order to help keep your fellow main characters moving and strong.
There is a healing system that acts as a pick-me-up when your allies are down and out, but this is not available at all times within the game. I praise Mindjack for its exemplary viewpoint on cooperative play and the game actually can pose quite a respectable challenge if you let other players enter into your campaign. Sometimes they’ll end up fighting for your cause but they’ll mostly just join the opposing force and increase your enemy teams resilience. Up to six players can jump in on the jacking though this to quickly wears thin, as the balancing issues are less than stellar.
To summarize Mindjack; it’s really difficult to get pleasure from a video game where you cannot control the character the way you want to. Mindjack is a low budget game that appears to have been quickly rushed to the stores so that the developer could move onto something else, perhaps a project that they more were proud of. It makes me sad that half attempts at third person game play like this get the green light these days instead of focusing on more motivated titles in the genre. Every part of this game feels soiled, clunky, and lame. It was a solid premise but poorly executed, and hey, it happens. I just hope they didn’t expect the cyber gorilla to save everything because he can only do so much. That cyber gorilla will hopefully be the break out star of this one-off title and leave Mindjack in the dust. Do me a favor, if any of you ever see me playing this game in public, please ‘jack’ me and smash my Playstation 3. Maybe force myself to deliver a few punches to the face or groin for good measure. I should have learned my lesson the first time.
