Mindjack

Well, I haven't done this for a while....errm...OK. OK, how about this?

[size=+1]MindJack[/size]​

Oh my word is this tripe idiotic and soulless! I may be only a student of Computer Game Development and Design but I swear, I could make a better game, even if I had my hands removed and could only use my nose, pressing keys by slamming my face at the keyboard like a confused woodpecker. Heck! I could use my rear end and it would still be better than this! It's such a soulless, loveless, thoughtless, lazy, futile, miserable, colourless, tasteless, boring, irritatingly long, frustratingly pointless, fruitless, witless gas bubble from the sewer run-off leading away from Square Enix.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was the prototype for the excellent Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The sci-fi setting, the cover-based shooting, the designs for the interface, the RPG addons. All that stuff that worked well in Human Revolution but not here for oh so many reasons!

Firstly! It's ugly! It has no charm or personality to anything on screen. The primary colour is grey, I feel like I'm walking through a disused car-park most of the time. But wait! There's light blue strips embedded in everything they could put them in! Oh! Well it must be the future then if they're there. No one in their right mind or with any emotion whatsoever would make any of these locations like this but fine! Whatever.

You see, Human Revolution was smarter than this. There was repetition to some of the interior designs, sure! But they looked like somewhere you would be comfortable in. The primary colour seemed to be orange but at least it was mixed up with other things. The game attempted these complex designs for the augments and the various machines and facilities you roamed through. When you were in a slum, it looked run down and dirty. When you were in an upmarket building, it was clean, warm and inviting. While still looking like the future without just adding some neon lights everywhere!

Secondly, there's no variation in what I'm doing and by Celestia's G-String, is it boring! I have never been so frustrated and so underwhelmed by the fact that I have succeeded. It's all cover based shooting and you continue like this over and over and over. It feels like a shooting range and get this! Every enemy has to move to a predetermined position before they attempt to find cover! So they'll all waddle over to this arbitrary spot before their AI will kick in. Exhilarating to know that I'm fighting the intellectually sub-normal. I half expect to be able to avoid fights by simply throwing down brightly coloured toys.

The one time throwing blind bag Ponies would be a good idea and I can't! Just hypnotise them with a Rarity doll in a train and walk through them unharmed. Still, that would be a mechanic that would be entertaining, even if I'm just laughing at it.

Instead, we have the mindhack feature. Why it's called MindJack when you spend your time performing something called a mindhack is the least of your worries because the feature doesn't feel all that rewarding. You have two levels of this power you're given. Mindslaving is a process where you weaken enemies by shooting them first. Once that happens, you walk up to them and hit square (because PS3) and you'll make them your ally until you win the firefight.

Ok, a few things I find annoying with it.

It has a really sucky range. I know that's something that could utterly break the game if you can control people from afar but it is really irritating to not be able to Mindslave someone because you're pinned down by fire. You have to run out, enslave, then run back to cover as quickly as possible. It's frustrating.

Also, there's not much benefit to doing so. The AI is a moron that will wander out of cover and straight into fire whether it's with you or against you. So, they die fast and only manage to become a short reprieve from the Protagonist Response Unit's constant fire. They're supposed to be the police but further than that, they don't do much or explain why they want to kill you so bad.

Another thing is that you can't have too many of them. It would be cool if you could have loads of enslaved soldiers like Pikmin. About ten or fifteen, all swarming and shooting for you with thoughts of playing with the Twilight Sparkle you promised them or whatever. That would be cool but all Mind Powers drain an energy bar that you drain to enslave things. You only seem to get that back when a slave has been killed. It tends to run out after three guys. It's hardly an army but I am fighting tall toddlers in full body armour and gasmasks so it could be worse.

The only rewarding thing about Mindslaving? Well, the effect of an extra gun appears minimal so your only bothering for something else for the enemy to fire at. Otherwise, I got a vague kick from pretending to be Littlekuriboh's version of Marik as I took peoples minds. Otherwise, I was just doing shooty-shooty at the nasty men.

Yes! Carry out my bidding, Mind Slave, or Fluttershy will mysteriously disappear! Ah-ha-ha-haaa!​

The other level to this is Mindjacking! This is when you leap out of your body and wander around the battlefield to look for another to possess. That is also a cool idea, like the Mindslaving. And like the Mindslaving, it has some major issues with it.

Your old body is then AI controlled when you leave it. And we all know what means by now! The difference is that you have two main characters called...Gun-Man and Plot-Girl that the game relies on being alive to continue because the story needs them specifically. I suddenly can't change things to the Amazing Adventures of A Random Robot because it will also return you to Gun-Man every single time you win a firefight.

But get this! You lose and return to the last checkpoint if you let Gun-Man and Plot-Girl die. They can be revived, somehow, with your mind powers but it's extremely difficult to revive them in time if both of them have been killed as the time you have is very short. Otherwise, they tend to be able to heal each other well enough. And only if they're not under attack too much because one will rush straight to the other's need regardless of the danger. And they die rather often and always because the AI tried to take cover behind the wrong thing. A giant robot attacked us and Gun-Man tried taking cover behind a wall, right in the robots line of fire. And he didn't move an inch out of the way!

So, getting out of your skin is annoying but there's got to be some benefit right? Well, the other things you can control offer an alternative direction of attack, at least. Seeing as you can try and outflank the enemy by possessing a robot or a civilian huddling behind them, it does offer some tactical advantage. The robots can fire their weapons and explode as a sort of disposable gun which is handy. The civilians are a little different as they control exactly as Gun-Man and Plot-Girl do to, with cover based stuff and two weapons and everything.

It's just that they pull a weapon out from nowhere and start fighting. I'm serious, they pull a gun out from their underpants or something and start firing off rounds. It makes no sense at all. I wasn't aware I was fighting in the futuristic version of Sanford!

Basically this but in neon blue and gray​

It's possible to make thin, business like women take on these armed personnel. It's even possible to control children later on. It's funny but because the AI is trying out it's new tactic of soaking up the bad guy's bullets so they have none left but is using one of the guys you need alive to progress as the sponge, it's rather dampens the experience. It becomes a frustrating chore to make sure your advantage pays off rather than an organic, if bizarre way of introducing some sense of tactics.

And, let's talk about the story and characters. Because just growling "Assuming Control!" every time I switched bodies wasn't going to cut it for ten hours of shooting galleries and tempting people to your side with ponies. After all, there might be a nice context to all this.

What they give you is as bare as possible in a plot that should be good and interesting, but has no soul to it at all. I call the protagonists Gun-man and Plot-Girl because I don't care about their names. They might as well be called that because all Gun-Man does is fail at witty banter and shoot things while Plot-Girl give you a new excuse to move onwards to the next linear, enclosed, boring location to shoot more of the same guys. That's it. Nothing much else is revealed, other than Plot-Girl being a scientist or something.

And this game has a twist and I'm pretty sure it's horribly obvious what it is. It's also an idiotic one at that as I'm pretty sure the game will end with me finding out that I've been playing as an outside force that has been hacking these people and driving them towards some goal like an outside puppeteer. Which is weird, as I appear to leave my puppets with no knowledge of that happening, even though they can clearly see people being enslaved and fighting for me. It's laughably pointless. It seems to be around technology where people have chips in their brains that are supposed to control their homes' but can be used to control you instead. If one of the cinematics is to be believed there's two factions in this too and they fight each other. Whoop-di-doo...I just keep hoping this game was more awful.

You see, if it was even worse, I could find some humour in how badly it's attempting to engage me. Like The Room or Troll 2, it could be trying to be good but coming off as too corny or idiotic or something that I could at least enjoy as a spectacle, whether it's a good or bad design decision. Mindjack is not a good bad game. It's too frustrating to really be noteworthy or worth looking for the things to laugh at. It's grey, lifeless and colourless sludge. The shooting mechanics are acceptable, I suppose but it has no heart to it and little reason for me to care as a result.

Still, there are good bad games that are worth seeing. I might show you one I found sometime soon...Watch this space.