[XBOX 360] Mindjack

 

 

 

Mindjack is a little known third person shooter from 2011
This game has an awful reputation and many people call it one of the worst games ever, if not the worst, ON metacritic it has a score of 1.1 out of 150 reviews.

I went into it thinking it would be really bad but something stupid to laugh at.
Luckily, the co-op still works so I played the whole thing with a buddy.

The premise is something like you're these agents in control of technology that allows you to hack into peoples brains and turn into them for a period.
I'm not too sure exactly what the story is, there are frequent cutscenes, and its actually kind of entertaining to watch with some decent voice acting and writing, but it was kind of in one ear out the other.

So its kind of a typical third person shooter of the era, its got some controls once again copied from Gears of War, like holding A to go into that running mode that controls like a car, A to snap into cover, blind firing, the whole lot. What it does unique is the hacking ability.
The way this works, is you can press a button to snap out of your current main character body, and you can go into any civililian body or captured enemy body. The main reason to do this, as far as I can tell, is to save your main character whenever they go down.

It has a revive mechanic similar to all the other third person games, once you go down, your buddy has to help you up. Well, you can help yourself up, by hacking into pedestrians and playing as them for a minute.
Its not really feasble to keep playing as other characters besdies the main characters, because the game will fail if both characters go down and are not revived within 10 seconds, so hacking into other bodies is only useful for saving the main characters when they go down.

You can also hack into any enemy you shoot at.
The enemies dont have health bars or anything, and if you shoot them too much they'll die
But if you shoot them just enough to get them into a downed state, where you can then press X to instantly from a certain distance 'mindslav' them into fighting on your side. And you can do this to as many enemies as you want, and they fight on your side indefinitely until the 'scene clears' and you move onto the next battle. This is a pretty entertaining mechanic, and feels overpowered at first, and like the game has no challenge, but soon enough the game starts to be pretty challenging because of all the bosses thrown at you that require you to shoot them with explosives/rockets while it just keeps spawning these regular enemies.

and there is a decent variety of enemies. You got standard soldiers, snipers, these weird spider mutants that are more a goofy annoyance than a real threat, flying robots that shoot rockets at you, giant mechs, etc.

The game is pretty generic, but at the same time its got tons of quirks of its own.
Like how it shows a kill log, as if youre playing a PVP deathmatch, but it shows the kill messages for every enemy you take down. Which is pretty damn satisfying and I prefer if more games had that.
And the fact that theres a psuedo leveling system, but it really does nothing at all. It unlocks these perks you can equip in 2 slots, and you can only equip them in the main menu, so you have to quit out of the game to even equip them.  stuff like more health, more accuracy, or strangely making your character twice as big.
Theres also these 'rules' you can unlock which is very odd, it like changes how the game plays, the 'rules' you can unlock basically just change the difficulty. But you can oddly only change 'difficulties' at certain levels, so we never touched this weird mechanic.

It also has this baffling mechanic of being able to drop in and out of any multiplayer game and choose your 'team' which means playing co-op or playing AGAINST the player and becoming an enemy. Who would want to do this? its like the game expects you to play through the campaign multiple times making it hard on yourself by allowing real players to become the enemies? i dont  understand how anyone would want to do that. So you have to explicitely make sure you select 'blue team' which is co-op whenever you join.

Its got other quirks like everytime you defeat a wave of enemies it will say ' Winner!'  and then force the co-op partner outside of whatever body they possessed, and turn into a floating camera just floating around until you wait for the scripted event to stop, then you press the bumpers to snap to the main character again and become them again. This happens frequently and just takes you outside of the game needlessly.

The length of the levels is strange too. They're called 'scenes' and a typical level will last less than 5 minutes. Its kind of a fun way to break up the game, it was more a funny thing than something good or bad.

The actual combat its self is pretty barebones. Theres really not that many guns, two different assault rifles, one full auto, the other burst, a few pistols, a sniper, a shotgun. Basically used the three round burst gun the whole game, except for this other odd quirk where every time you win a level/section you start the next one with only a pistol. So had to use the pistol a bit here and there.

The graphics arent anything amazing, all the locations look pretty samey and generic, just fighting on streets or in between lots of buildings, most of the game takes place outside or inside some office complexes, the game looks OK theres nothing really glaringly bad about the visuals though.

The controls are fine theres no major complaints, its responsive enough, the cover system is minimal gears of war influenced, it works but is clearly not very deep. Theres no way to crouch so you just have to press A to snap into cover.  Theres a roll mechanic where you can spam A to keep rolling like a maniac which helps getting yourself out of sticky situations.

The game is pretty short and we finished it in just two sessions. There was a boss part here and there which gave us some trouble and annoyance, some weird places where you'll get a checkpoint every 30 seconds, but then another section where you wont see a checkpoint for almost 15 minutes. Some boss fights like the giant mech where it isnt made clear how to take it down while waves of enemies keep respawning, but overall the game is nowhere near as bad as its reputation says.
Its a mindless co-op campaign shooter with campy voice acting, some funny one liners, a cheesy high-tech conspiracy story, and some kinda enjoyable shooting mechanics especially with the kill log  and trying to mindslave all the enemies into fighting on your side.
The game at first can be pretty confusing to figure out how it all works, "why do i keep turning into a floating camera this is stupid"  yeah, but once you figure out how it works the game is pretty painless and actually kinda fun. I dont know why everyone thinks this is like the worst game in the world, far from it, dont get me wrong its not a great game or anything, but its nowhere near a horrible one especially considering you can finish it easily in a weekend with a buddy.

6/10