Mindjack Critic Reviews

You'll feel frustration nearly as much as exhilaration, but the concept shines through.

Mindjack is an ingenuous bit of design that belongs in a much better game. With any luck, someone with a more spirited sense for how to build a shooter will steal the idea.

If you can look past the lack of polish and horrible graphics, there's a compelling and unique take on cover-based shooters here, along with an interesting lesson on how games deal with plot. It's a rewarding little game, if you can hack it.

Don't just skip the cinematics, skip Mindjack altogether. Playing this game made me wish it were as easy to enjoy a crummy videogame as it is a B-movie, but really, Mindjack is worse than that. It's more like a student film.

Normally I wouldn't mind graphics that weren't state-of-the-art if they had a unique style to them, but Mindjack's style is just too bland to excuse.

The worst part is that MindJack's implementation of the shooter is so imbalanced and guileless that it actually harms the game.

Enemy AI is dim as hell (foes will often run right by you to attack a comrade as you shoot them in the back of the head at point blank range), the wonky cover system often has you shooting bullets into nothingness even when it appears they should be hitting your targets, and there's no way to pause the game.

Myriad control problems, brain dead AI, and a cringe-worthy storyline make Mindjack a shooter worth skipping.

Mindjack's chilling vision of the future is smothered by awkward controls and poor storytelling.

Mindjack teaches us that a good concept doesn't always evolve into a good game. Square Enix should really think about all the mistakes they've made if they ever want to create a successor.

With its defining features only partially living up to their potential, it's reduced to a barely average third-person shooter.

A good concept doesn't always evolve into a good game. That's MindJack, an interesting game with good concept, poor controls, bad AI and poor storytelling.

Mindjack is a bit of a mixed bag. I really like the concept but I hated the execution of the game.

I really am a sucker for a decent third person shooter but where MindJack wasn't mediocre, it was downright terrible. An interesting gameplay conceit was brutalized by bad design choices and even worse execution.

Interesting ideas like the multiplayer interactions aren't supported by a suitable structure, story and technical execution.

A short and throwaway campaign, held together with repetitive combat, Mindjack is, just another by-the-numbers shooter to add on top of the pile.

Overall Mindjack would have been a decent launch title when the Xbox 360 first arrived; but at this stage in the console's life Mindjack is simply not 'up-to-snuff.' The bland and dreary visuals combined with poor audio and a less than thrilling single player mode suggests Mindjack is best left for the bargain bins.

There's little to redeem Mindjack. You'll quickly grow tired of the unresponsive controls and repetitive shootouts, and the multiplayer game's appeal, while novel, is fleeting. What's left is a dreadful shooter that will have you wishing you could mindjack into another host, preferably someone who's playing a better game.

Even if you give other players the boot, too few checkpoints sometimes means replaying 20 minutes of content, and mowing down scores of low-IQ, undifferentiated thugs (and the occasional cybernetically enhanced ape), while contending with flabby controls, invisible edges that soak up bullets, and cover mechanics that feel grandfathered in from a previous generation of third-person shooter.

Compared to Mindjack, I even like some of the dance games for Kinect – there at least I move my body. But nothing about this game makes me sweat. It's sad because given the mindhack feature, this could have been a game with potential.