Ideas can be good things, this we know. However, we as critics also know that a good idea is only as good as its presentation. Otherwise, how are we supposed to know that an idea is good if its implementation sucks? This is the origin of the phrase “good idea, bad execution,” and it’s been applied to many concepts that just didn’t pan out properly; ethanol and most M. Night Shyamalan films come to mind. As cliché as it sounds, this phrase can also be said overall of the Feelplus-developed, Square Enix-published game Mindjack, a cyberpunk third-person shooter that has some great concepts but ultimately fails to deliver on their promises. First, the origin of the great concepts: as mentioned previously, Mindjack is developed by Japanese development studio Feelplus, a company better known for its role-playing games, having either developed or assisted development with such RPGs as Lost Odyssey, Infinite Undiscovery, Star Ocean: the Last Hope, and a smattering of other titles. This may help explain a few things – it could certainly explain Feelplus wanting to bring something different to the now-overcrowded third-person shooter genre, but the studio’s lack of experience in developing for the genre shows in its execution. Feelplus certainly started development of Mindjack with good intentions: the basic game elements and the new things Mindjack brings to the table sound like Feelplus have been studying the Gears of War playbook extensively and wanted to surpass their inspiration by taking some of its ideas to their logical conclusion.
Mindjack plays basically like Gears of War, complete with a cover-based movement system, similar shooting controls, and seamless cooperative play. The new ideas that Feelplus wanted to integrate, however, sound like they had grander ideas than even Cliff Bleszinski and Epic Games could have dreamed of: cooperative and competitive multiplayer have been seamlessly integrated into the single-player experience, essentially making single and multiplayer one and the same. How is this possible? This is where the game’s title “Mindjack” comes in: while one player is the host and controls the two main characters and plays through the story, other players can, at any point, hack into the game and control other characters, such as bad guys, random civilians, robotic drones, and more. The host player (as well as the other players) in the meantime can (either voluntarily or involuntarily) hack out of either of the two main characters at any point to find other characters to control. This is how developers of Gears of War clones should operate – seek ways to improve upon what Gears of War got right. And sometimes, this particular mechanic works out brilliantly: if your main character gets defeated, you can find another character to hack into and control to defeat enemies from a different flank and move ahead. I remember being overwhelmed by a large force of goons and having one of my characters fall, but then I found an idle cybernetic gorilla-type thingy and hacked into that, using it to smash the enemy line and protect my main characters. So when this idea works, it works.
However, everything else about this game is implemented so poorly that Epic Games really has no reason to fear being dethroned as the king of third-person shooter developers by Feelplus anytime soon. Controls, for one thing, are one area that leaves much to be desired. Movement feels sluggish, characters turn too slowly, and the cover system is nowhere near the smoothness of Gears of War. Some barriers act as cover for the purposes of movement but offer no real protection; some pieces of cover are so far apart that doing a single button press cover shift (where you move from one piece of cover to the other) leaves you exposed to enemy fire for a really unsafe period of time; and some cover pieces are close to each other, but you can’t do a simple cover shift over from one piece to the other. (One example is an area with some rooftop air vents; very close to each other, but you can’t directly shift from one to another, as pushing the cover shift button instead has you rolling past one!) That’s the least of Mindjack’s flaws, though; the biggest one that nearly ruins the game completely is the atrocious AI. Never mind the enemy goons being inconsistent, being as dumb as bricks but having overpowered weapons and armor to compensate for their lack of smarts; your AI partners (either the second main character or any number of other enemies you’ve appropriated with mind hacking abilities) are nothing short of suicidal, just blindly wading slowly into enemy fire as if they were zombies. Perhaps this is in an attempt to have players really try to find other players to play the other characters with, but come on! There’s no excuse for AI this bad, especially when none of your friends are playing Mindjack.
The graphics, sound, and overall presentation are equally as bad. The character models are primitive by today’s standards, and the environment not moving beyond that of generic cyberpunk colors. 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. Plus, when the action gets hectic, the graphics either slow to a crawl, stutter, or both, and that’s even more inexcusable considering how low-fi they are to begin with. And the overall storyline and voice acting is cheesy enough that I swear it had to have been sponsored by Velveeta. I really wanted to like Mindjack. I wanted to hold it up as a shining example of ingenuity and innovation from a studio that has a different perspective when it comes to game development. However, Mindjack is just too poorly implemented for me to recommend it to anyone. It’s not like Japanese game development studios can’t make a good shooter – they most certainly can, as evidenced by titles like Capcom’s more recent Resident Evil games and Platinum Games’ Vanquish. Mindjack, however, is not one of them. I can respect Feelplus’s good intentions here, but if this is the best they can do in the third-person shooter genre, then they should stick to making RPGs.
