Modern shooter based on an appealing concept and not at all mind-lacking despite some deliberately biased (re)views...
Taking place in 2031 and featuring FIA agent Jim Corbijn and "anti-government activist" Rebecca Weiss in their efforts to stop ill-minded NERKAS boss A.G. Gardner yet eclipsed by Jim's former buddy Lyle Fernandez, from further abusing his powers after having digitally remastered his daughter Emily, the story for its manipulatory aspects remotely recalls sci-fi movies like Matrix (Wachowski) or Virtual Past (Emmerich), or Xbox games like Psi-Ops: Mindgate Conspiracy (Midway). Even more than in the latter, psi-powers here are political concept –sort of "divide and rule" for the interested using of unselfish civilians against their will as mere consumables for the own sake– as well as powerful tool for both fighting and gaming purposes. And this with success: while in Psi-Ops the use of mainly the directional stick doesn't always work all too well for being prone to (personal, technical) failures, it is amazing how fast on the contrary one gets accustomed even without time-consuming tutorials (though the Manual is very instructive) to hacking and hopping from character to character even in the stressier skirmish moments. Managing up to, say, ten different characters at once –e.g., in addition to the two protagonists, a mind-jacked civilian plus several mech mind slaves– thus gives rise to a pretty rapid pace in some of the tougher situations of the game thanks to its contagious effects (one mind slave causing another).
While simply moving ahead sometimes appears a little rigid and mechanic yet also depending on the particular character chosen, a variety of additional movements as dashing, diving, sliding, does permit reacting rapidly appropriate to the different situations' requirements, though one might wish the transitions between those actions to be smoother and less abrupt.
Switching between various characters also provides further in-fight possibilities: so one may act as sniper mind-jacking a civilian occupying a suited post higher situated than that of the two protagonists, as agile robot chimpanzee irritating fellow mechs at place, or even as one of the latter ones suicidally making itself explode to cause a sudden chain reaction. And it is also a range of abilities useful, except, perhaps, the melee attack or combos button (B), along with the plug-ins –5 rules and 20 arts– acquired through the different levels, to be explored end exploited during the gameplay, contrary to some other video games that seem to offer them rather for effect than efficiency.
The negative in this polyphony, however, is that one doesn't always have the control over the non-monitored characters so that they might expose themselves in strategically unfortunate places where they get easily injured or destroyed, which gets one to spending quite a lot of time on restoring one's partner in order to prevent him/her and so finally oneself from incapacitation... (the game is over when both protagonists are simultaneously down for about ten seconds) – I sometimes found it just better to let both Jim and Rebecca all alone mutually curing each other while going on with a third character rather than having to permanently supervise either him or her in a two-person constellation only.
Yet that enemies can be that easily turned into allies –whereas in reality usually they are not even chosen– might explain why the friendly seems even more inconsistent than the enemy AI here with the particular characters just not being always too aware of what role to play (one might call them "unmotivated", whilst enemies appear sometimes temporarily "parked" while otherwise quite tough when shooting), but then, according to whose mindset would they be supposed to (re)act?
With its appealing idea of freely floating minds –sort of metempsychosis–, the "Wanderers" as purely electric entities, yet too half-hearted to tell about all the potential consequences, this could have been a perfect game weren't there the various technical flaws that definitely should have been avoided: while the different weapons function as well as might be expected from a shooter, there is often an annoying gap between crosshair and actual fire line (so the objective appears red and in focus while in reality the bullets are fired against a pillar or fence in angular reach); also while aiming, and especially crazy when in sniper mode, the characters' hair (others or even the own!) can be before the objective in a semi-transparent manner, and dropped weapons or soldiers stay put in the air or halfway a nearby wall.
Another inconsistency that too should have been refined for the sake of the whole mind-hacking procedure: when hacking out of a given character and back to either Jim or Rebecca, they tend to be in different places than where one left them earlier, preferably where the scene did originally set in, what seems logical from the programming point of view but might lead to some unnecessary confusion when needing to reorientate.
And if music and sound effects in all are yet not extraordinary and rarely varied, the two personages' constant moaning during combat scenes when being wounded though probably meant to attract one's attention in addition to the visual sign indicating place and distance, too can really be getting on one's nerves.
Part of its difficulty though co-defined by applying one of the three level rules (Glide, Berserker, and Demigod time) the game does obtain from its sequencing several consecutive scenes of the in total twelve episodes without allowing for a saving point; so particularly when failing an episode's final boss to defeat yet another one of the game's ubiquitous hybrid hyper-mechs one has to repeat also the preceding fight scenes, what can become tedious, while the bosses in themselves show some evident similarities in spite of varying the means of their achievement (it is a shooter, after all). In addition to the chasing between bookshelves (Ninjas, Lyle Fernandez), it is but the last one that stands out: a martial arts-inspired Corrida-like battle within a futuristic round arena and with the bull being a humanoid mech, the so-called "Gardner Prototype", ironically mind-lacking purely physical force (for there's nothing to be hacked into?).
Accessible through either Host or Hack Portal on the start screen, when online one may choose to openly let in (blue-haloed) allies and (red-haloed) enemies or to lock them out by defining a hacker break-in limit, or to rather do so in another player's game either furthering or impeding his or her progress cooperative or competitively while it is up to the host to set up the rules (e.g., the difficulty level), and skirmishes might be organized in multiplayer mode between both team blue (Rebecca, civilians, mechs) and red (soldiers, civilians, ...) either collectively helping or hindering the respective host player's game and to be defined through a set of multiplayer rules (e.g., ratio, re-shuffle).
Well, while one cannot avoid stating that Mindjack didn't fully exploit its potential for neither story background nor gameplay mechanics, the game has still so many outstanding features to offer to making it all too worth a full playthrough plus further online excursions...