Man, this game is awful.
I’ll always have something of a soft spot for MindJack, since I first played it when I was in High School and me and my brothers used to play and laugh at it together. It has a couple good ideas that are buried under terrible execution and poorly designed gameplay.
The only good things about this game are the visuals, the soundtrack and the idea behind how Mind Hacking is supposed to work, both in gameplay and the story. I really like the aesthetic of the Minority Report-style cyberpunk future and a lot of the enemy designs are really cool, especially the cyborg ninja and the robot gorilla. The soundtrack is genuinely great and there’s one specific song that really deserves to be in a better game. Funnily enough, it’s also the boss theme for the cyborg ninja, so someone at Feelplus clearly had a favorite.
Mind Hacking as a concept is incredibly cool. The ability to leave your body and take control of other people at any time could have worked so well in a story about paranoia, where you don’t know who to trust and anyone has the potential to be an enemy. They try to do that here, complete with a twist that could have been cool if the story was actually coherent, but like with everything else in this game, they fail miserably in the execution.
First off, the story is complete nonsense. It’s incredibly poorly told and just throws names and terms at you like you’re supposed to know what they mean, takes you to random locations just for the sake of having fights there, and just kind of ends once it runs out of ideas. It also has like 3 characters in it in total, all of whom are only memorable because of their God-awful voice acting and constant terrible dialogue. The script and story were apparently outsourced to “an unnamed company in the UK” so it would appeal to westerners, then translated to Japanese by the developers, then translated back to English when the game came out. It gives the game an almost surreal quality since absolutely nothing ends up making any sense, including the twist that (spoilers for all 0 people who care) you are not actually playing as Jim-the-main-character-man, but a different guy whose actually been pulling the strings the entire time. It would have been nice if I actually knew who that guy was or if he had more than 2 minutes of screen time in the entire game.
The gameplay is just as bad, with the core cover based shooting being ripped straight from Gears of War, but done worse in every way. For some stupid ass reason they decided to bind run, roll and take cover all to the same button, so you constantly enter and exit cover when you don’t mean to. The reticle for every weapon isn’t aligned properly, so you can end up shooting your cover or missing your enemy even when the game says you’re lined up. The melee attack is completely broken and only works about half the time. And to top it all off, this game has some of the dumbest fucking AI that I have ever seen in a video game. One of the unintentional effects of mind hacking is that, when you leave your body, you can watch the fights play out and notice how not a single person is hitting anything. Both your allies and your enemies will get stuck on cover, refuse to take cover, shoot their cover, shoot each other even when they’re on the same team and get themselves killed if they get anywhere near an explosive weapon. Your AI allies (or “Mind Slaves” as the game calls them) also refuse to heal you if you get downed, so the only time I ever got a game over was when I watched my NPC companions stand still next to my corpse and get shot while they did nothing. I don’t think you could have coded these people to be any dumber if you tried.
MindJack is my favorite kind of bad game though, since it’s incredibly funny to laugh at and the dumb AI means that the game is easy to get through without too much frustration. There’s no reason to ever pay money for this, but if you can look up some YouTube clips you might see some cool cyberpunk designs and unintentionally funny moments.
I’ll always have something of a soft spot for MindJack, since I first played it when I was in High School and me and my brothers used to play and laugh at it together. It has a couple good ideas that are buried under terrible execution and poorly designed gameplay.
The only good things about this game are the visuals, the soundtrack and the idea behind how Mind Hacking is supposed to work, both in gameplay and the story. I really like the aesthetic of the Minority Report-style cyberpunk future and a lot of the enemy designs are really cool, especially the cyborg ninja and the robot gorilla. The soundtrack is genuinely great and there’s one specific song that really deserves to be in a better game. Funnily enough, it’s also the boss theme for the cyborg ninja, so someone at Feelplus clearly had a favorite.
Mind Hacking as a concept is incredibly cool. The ability to leave your body and take control of other people at any time could have worked so well in a story about paranoia, where you don’t know who to trust and anyone has the potential to be an enemy. They try to do that here, complete with a twist that could have been cool if the story was actually coherent, but like with everything else in this game, they fail miserably in the execution.
First off, the story is complete nonsense. It’s incredibly poorly told and just throws names and terms at you like you’re supposed to know what they mean, takes you to random locations just for the sake of having fights there, and just kind of ends once it runs out of ideas. It also has like 3 characters in it in total, all of whom are only memorable because of their God-awful voice acting and constant terrible dialogue. The script and story were apparently outsourced to “an unnamed company in the UK” so it would appeal to westerners, then translated to Japanese by the developers, then translated back to English when the game came out. It gives the game an almost surreal quality since absolutely nothing ends up making any sense, including the twist that (spoilers for all 0 people who care) you are not actually playing as Jim-the-main-character-man, but a different guy whose actually been pulling the strings the entire time. It would have been nice if I actually knew who that guy was or if he had more than 2 minutes of screen time in the entire game.
The gameplay is just as bad, with the core cover based shooting being ripped straight from Gears of War, but done worse in every way. For some stupid ass reason they decided to bind run, roll and take cover all to the same button, so you constantly enter and exit cover when you don’t mean to. The reticle for every weapon isn’t aligned properly, so you can end up shooting your cover or missing your enemy even when the game says you’re lined up. The melee attack is completely broken and only works about half the time. And to top it all off, this game has some of the dumbest fucking AI that I have ever seen in a video game. One of the unintentional effects of mind hacking is that, when you leave your body, you can watch the fights play out and notice how not a single person is hitting anything. Both your allies and your enemies will get stuck on cover, refuse to take cover, shoot their cover, shoot each other even when they’re on the same team and get themselves killed if they get anywhere near an explosive weapon. Your AI allies (or “Mind Slaves” as the game calls them) also refuse to heal you if you get downed, so the only time I ever got a game over was when I watched my NPC companions stand still next to my corpse and get shot while they did nothing. I don’t think you could have coded these people to be any dumber if you tried.
MindJack is my favorite kind of bad game though, since it’s incredibly funny to laugh at and the dumb AI means that the game is easy to get through without too much frustration. There’s no reason to ever pay money for this, but if you can look up some YouTube clips you might see some cool cyberpunk designs and unintentionally funny moments.