In context: Developer Build A Rocket Boy and publisher IO Interactive positioned their genre-bending sci-fi shooter MindsEye as the next big blockbuster of 2025. Instead, it's breaking blocks in ways no one expected. Mission-breaking bugs and crippling glitches made the game nearly unplayable.

MindsEye launched Tuesday with high hopes – and fell apart within seconds. The brainchild of former Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies, the third-person action-adventure follows Jacob Diaz, a soldier with a neural implant, uncovering forgotten secrets in the desert metropolis of Redrock based loosely on Las Vegas.

While it flirts with open-world design, the experience is more like a "faux-pen" world – linear at its core, just dressed up to look expansive.

Early trailers promised polished gameplay and a sprawling cityscape, positioning MindsEye as a sleek, cinematic contender in the crime-action genre and potential GTA killer. With Benzies manning the director's chair, expectations soared.

This is what we were promised (above). This video review and the clips that follow is what we got.

Reality hit hard. After launch, players flooded forums and social media with reports of glaring issues and meme-worthy clips: glitched facial animations, non-player characters acting erratically or freezing completely, game crashes, and poor optimization that tanked performance across all platforms. The official Discord even disabled emoji reactions to stem the rising tide of negativity.

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Steam reviews are hovering around 60 percent negative. Many players have demanded refunds, frustrated that a $60-$80 game with such high-profile backing feels rushed and unfinished.

In a rare public update, Build A Rocket Boy acknowledged the issues and promised that the upcoming "Update 3" would deliver performance improvements, especially on consoles. Some players – once enthusiastic – are now cautiously optimistic that patches might turn MindsEye around.

While the promise of patches might ease some backlash, the studio's co-CEO Mark Gerhard deflected blame onto social media bots – allegedly hired by Rockstar Games – for the pre-launch wave of criticism. It's a familiar dodge in an industry that has grown increasingly comfortable with shipping half-finished products and pointing fingers when things go wrong.

Build A Rocket Boy's Chief Legal Officer Riley Graebner and Chief Financial Officer Paul Bland announced their departures on LinkedIn just days before the launch. While their parting words were kind, the timing suggests potential internal turmoil over the game's readiness. Whether those exits were in protest or a preemptive move to distance themselves from the fallout remains unclear.

Unsurprisingly, in hindsight, the studio also withheld advance review copies – a decision that fueled suspicion and left players blindsided when MindsEye launched in such a broken state.

Maybe Gerhard still has a chance to salvage his baby from the dumpster fire. No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 managed full-scale rebounds. However, his vision of an ongoing episodic adventure or "Roblox-like" experience is likely off the table. Even if MindsEye gets fixed, players will likely think twice before investing in future episodes. Although, who knows? A Roblox-like community of modders could actually salvage the game.