One of the most important GTA developers has released a new third person action game, but its launch has been marred by performance issues and bugs.

Launching a brand new IP at the same time as the Switch 2 launch and the not-E3 season of preview showcases was perhaps not the wisest choice for new third person action game MindsEye, but that’s turned out to be only one problem amongst many for the troubled release.

MindsEye, developed by Build A Rocket Boy, was released across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on Tuesday, June 10, and as you may have noticed, we don’t have a review up yet. In fact, no outlets have published reviews at the time of writing, presumably because everyone is in the same boat and hasn’t received a review copy yet.

Publishers aren’t required to give codes to publications but, as has been the case in the past, it can often suggest that they’re not entirely confident in the final product and want to avoid negative press. While we’ll hold our full judgement for now, the game’s launch hasn’t exactly gone down well with those that have already bought it.

On Steam, the game has a ‘mixed’ average rating based on over 800 reviews, with some players calling out performance issues and ‘extremely restricting’ system requirements.

Many of these issues have been encapsulated in video clips on social media, which show stuttering problems, glitches where you fall through the floor, distorted faces, characters floating in the air, and crash bugs.

‘They really should have delayed MindsEye,’ one user on X wrote. ‘Was playing it and all of a sudden it crashed. Then my save data got corrupted.’

‘MindsEye is a complete technical DISASTER,’ another wrote. ‘Avoid this game right now at ALL COSTS.’

Following the game’s launch, Build A Rocket Boy has promised to improve performance across all platforms.

‘We understand that the current minimum spec requirements are very high, but our engineering team are working around the clock to improve performance on mainstream hardware as well as consoles by integrating the performance improvements in Unreal Engine V5.6,’ a statement reads. ‘We will provide patch 3 update timing, including these improvements, within the next 24 hours.’

In the run up to launch, MindsEye has had a weird vibe around it. When negative previews began circulating online last month, Build A Rocket Boy’s co-CEO Mark Gerhard claimed all the people who reacted negatively to the game were being financed by an unnamed ‘someone’.

In a response on Discord, Gerhard wrote: ‘I just said that there is a concerted effort by some people that don’t want to see Leslie [Benzies] or Build A Rocket Boy to be successful that are making a concerted effort to trash the game and the studio. It’s pretty easy to see the bots and the repeated replies to any content that we put out.’

While he doesn’t explicitly state who he is referring to, many have taken this to be a reference to Rockstar Games and/or Take-Two Interactive. Leslie Benzies, the co-founder of Build A Rocket Boy, was previously a lead developer on the GTA series and former president of Rockstar North.

He left Rockstar in 2016 but, shortly afterwards, Benzies filed a lawsuit against the company claiming he was unlawfully dismissed and entitled to unpaid royalties. This case came to an end in February 2019 with an undisclosed settlement between Take-Two and Benzies.

MindsEye is the studio’s first game but Build A Rocket Boy previously announced a massively multiplayer online title called Everywhere, which has been compared to an adult version of Roblox.

While MindsEye was originally going to be one experience within this wider Everywhere package, it has spun out into a separate entity with its own creation suite, called Play.MindsEye and Build.MindsEye.

However, as revealed in an interview with VGC, the developers have said Everywhere will be shown again at some point in the future. ‘MindsEye is definitely the thing that people should be focusing on,’ assistant game director, Adam Whiting, said. ‘But we haven’t forgotten about Everywhere, it will re-emerge.’

It remains to be seen if MindsEye can overcome these initial launch issues, but for now, you can expect our full review in the coming weeks.

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