MindsEye Has Flopped, With 42% Positive Reviews & Less Than 4,000 Steam Players

No early review copies, bizarre claims that negative feedback comes from bots, two high-level executives leaving just a week before launch – all the signs were there that MindsEye, an action-adventure directed by former GTA developer and producer Leslie Benzies, was shaping up to be a disaster of concordian proportions.

On June 10, the game finally launched, and unfortunately for Build a Rocket Boy, the community's expectations weren't subverted, with the studio's debut title flopping hard and leaving thousands of players questioning its $60 price tag.

At the moment of writing, MindsEye has a positivity score of just 42% on Steam, with hundreds of people criticizing the game for poor NPC AI, an abundance of graphical glitches, terrible voiceover, the world that feels desolate and barebones, excessive cutscenes, buggy ragdoll physics, clunky driving controls on mouse and keyboard, lackluster gunplay, and – above all – abysmal optimization, which is mentioned as the biggest issue in virtually every review, including the positive ones.

Separate from the gameplay itself, but further fueling the backlash is MindsEye's price. At launch, the standard edition is $60 in the US and €60 (around $68) in Europe, and with video game pricing already a hot topic, many are questioning why such a lackluster experience is more expensive or just as expensive as 2025's most acclaimed titles, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Schedule 1, Oblivion Remastered, Split Fiction, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.

When it comes to MindsEye's player numbers, the situation is somehow even bleaker, with the game once again proving that having a recognizable name in the game director's chair means precisely nada and doesn't translate into sold copies.

On launch day, the shooter didn't even break 4,000 concurrent players on Steam, peaking at just 3,302 and going downhill since. Even The Day Before – a game I can't help but compare MindsEye to, and which, unlike MindsEye, most people were 99% sure was a scam before it even launched – reached over 38,000 concurrent players on release, putting the scale of Build A Rocket Boy's first game's failure into perspective.

With such a catastrophic performance, one can't help but wonder what the future holds for Leslie Benzies' studio. Doubt that even the most shameless gaming outlets that routinely hand out inflated scores to AAA slop would dare spinning 3,300 Steam players and a 42% positive rating as a success, which is bound to cripple EVERYWHERE's marketing efforts.

Furthermore, with results like these, MindsEye – which was previously described as "big-budget" by Eurogamer – appears unlikely to recoup its production cost, so, unless you subscribe to toxic optimism, it certainly seems we'll hear about layoffs at Build A Rocket Boy very soon, even if the team manages to patch all the issues raised by disappointed players.

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