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Although MindsEye only released five months ago, it somehow feels like a century since it burst forward from the starting line, smacked its head off the first hurdle and was driven away comatose in an ambulance that then exploded. Build A Rocket Boy’s third-person action adventure/reconstituted metaverse was plainly unfinished when it stumbled onto Steam, beleaguered by a preposterous story, tedious missions, terrible combat, and extensive technical issues.
MindsEye was thoroughly unpleasant to play, panned by players and critics alike (including myself, to be fully transparent). The fallout from its failure was even less savoury, with Build A Rocket Boy’s boss Leslie Benzies reportedly blaming the game’s failure on ‘saboteurs’, before the studio laid off more than a hundred employees. Some of those axed designers then accused Build A Rocket Boy of mismanagement and a total lack of direction, claiming that Benzies “never decided what game he wanted to make”.
It was all pretty nasty. Among all this chaos, Build A Rocket Boy has tried to improve 2025’s most spectacular flop. The game has received six notable updates since release, improving its performance and adding mechanics it really should have launched with, like a dodge roll. The most recent patch arrived this week, bringing further performance updates, improved AI and animation, and “tightened up” combat and encounters—all of which the game desperately needs.
But this update also coincides with the launch of a “free starter pack” that allows players to try out various bits of MindsEye. This includes one campaign mission to try out, namely the seventh mission from the campaign—Robin Hood.
As it happens, Robin Hood was my favourite mission of the campaign when I reviewed MindsEye, though by that I mean it is the only mission I enjoyed without any major caveats. It begins with a passable stealth section in a trailer park, before moving onto a genuinely fun car chase where you pursue a truck during a sandstorm. These are followed by a street gunfight and a climactic sequence where you ride shotgun in a car while hosing down a load of pursuing vehicles with a machinegun. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before in any open world game since 2008, but it’s alright.
Making your strongest mission available for free is certainly a choice on BARB’s part, though I suppose when your best foot is your only foot you’ve no option but to put it forward. It also means you don’t have to drop 50 notes to see MindsEye at its (low) peak, which is something.
The pack also includes 14 Arcadia missions i.e. side content built using MindsEye’s creation tools. MindsEye’s side missions were utterly abominable when I played it, but that was several months ago, so perhaps they’ve improved since.
Build A Rocket Boy says that the free starter pack “is updated regularly, offering new ways to play”, which means they may cycle out Robin Hood with a different campaign farther down the line. So if you want to see what MindsEye looks like at its best without laying down cash, I’d recommend you check out the free starter pack ASAP.
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