MIndjack constitutes further evidence that japanese developers should not try making shooters
Looks half decent - mindjacking is a nice idea
THE BAD:
Mind numbing repetition - terrible cover and shooting mechanics - putrid AI - grating voice acting - annoying stock characters - boring, confusing plot - no pause function - no checkpoints during stages
THE UGLY
No checkpoints means replaying up to 20 minutes sections every time you die
Gears of War is a great game and it sold millions of copies. As it happens, its formula has been replicated, even improved upon, dozens of times. Lately japanese developers have started pushing out Gears clones in the attempt to cash-in on the western market. Needless to say, most of these attempts have been complete failures. Developed by Feelplus, known for their collaboration on RPGs such as Lost Odyssey, Star Ocean TLH and Blue Dragon on the DS, Mindjack is nothing but the latest of these failed forays in the shooter genre.
The game tells the story of a mismatched pair of agents, spiky hair male and blonde leather-clad female, investigating... something... the plot is too confusing to actually make out what the hell is going on, something about disappearing bodies and evil corporations... you will not care, no one will care about the cardboard stock protagonists and their motivations, what with their phoned-in voice acting, cringe worthy one liners and cheesy and cliché sexual tension. This is the kind of characters the japanese think western gamers find cool and the kind of humor they think we find funny. It's not, it's just awful from the nonsensical start, through a plot twist you'll see coming a mile away, to the meaningless end.
Gameplay-wise we are looking at the same cover based shooter you've played a dozen times before. The only twist being the fact you can control any defeated enemy after shooting them down, either by turning them into a friendly or by taking control of them directly. It's a cool idea and being able to possess any soldier, robot, the sparse pedestrians and even cyborg chimpanzees and mechanic gorillas is fun. Unfortunately this is not enough to make you forget the terrible shooting and cover mechanics that plague the game: most of the times your character will not lean out of cover correctly, so he will shoot the object you're hiding behind instead of the enemy. Even if you manage to fire at your target, every kill is an exercise in boredom: enemies take way too many bullets to kill and you find yourself holding down the fire button for interminable seconds before repeating for the next enemy. Headshots don't work, no matter where you shoot your enemy, they always take a whole magazine to go down. Sometimes weapons don't reload when you press the button and the reloading process will be interrupted if you move in cover, so you may think you have a full clip but find yourself having to reload in a bad situation. Often times, when trying to dash or roll out of the way you will take cover and when trying to take cover you will roll to the side, often into the same group of enemies you're trying to defend yourself from. You can run up to a guy and hold B to use him as a human shield, but there's no way to dispose of him afterwards: all you can do is let him go and see him immediately turn around and shoot you. Other than that there's no other melee attack to speak of.
Friendly and enemy AI is rotten to the core. Enemies will run at you, punch you in the face then casually walk back to cover, they will play hide and seek with you by jumping from cover to cover like they were schizophrenic. They will sometimes take cover in front of objects instead of behind them and will always take cover leaving their head exposed for you to shoot, they will sometimes run past you as you were invisible only to come back a second later to shoot you in the back. Friendlies will either stand around getting shot or stand behind cover doing nothing as if petrified and half the time will fail to revive you when you die. They will shoot walls instead of enemies and will never pick up any of the hunderds of weapons lying on the ground, sticking with a lame, slow pistol all the time.
The arsenal at your disposal is your standard discount pack including pistol, machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle and rocket launcher. None of them packs any punch or is in any way satisfying to shoot, and even if they were it wouldn't matter since whenever you complete a level you invariably lose all your weapons and ammo. On a side note, enemies and weapons have stupid names like 'Stutter' and 'Squawker'.
The worst thing about the game is the almost complete absence of checkpoints: you die, you start the level all over again. It's incredibly frustrating, especially considering some lengthy sections and boss battles. Imagine playing through a 15-20 minutes level, dying because your allies are useless and having to restart the whole stage from square one, bosses and all. As hinted, friendly AI can revive you, avoiding a restart, bust most of the time they'll die before you do or get shot on the way to revive you. When both you characters are down you have ten seconds to find a pedestrian to revive one or it's the level all over again. It's a mess, a complete waste of time.
Say you need to answer your phone or take a bathroom break during gameplay; well, forget about it: the game does not feature a pause function, not even in single player, so either find a safe spot to park your character or be ready to restart the level when you get back to the game.
Technically speaking the game looks decent: character models are detailed enough and mech design is fairly interesting. Frame rate holds up nicely. In short: at least the game runs ok.
Multiplayer is an interesting idea on paper: basically you can join another player's single player game in progress and take control of the enemies trying to kill him, or you can see the opposite thing happening to you, with someone intruding into your game. It can be fun for a while, but breaking into someone else's game to hinder their progress is bound to annoy them and most of the time they'll likely kick you out if you're slowing them down too much. Original idea, but bound to get people angry more than entertained. Fortunately intrusions can be turned off in the options menu.
In conclusion, Mindjack had a few good things going for it, but the execution is so disgustingly poor this is a huge waste of potential. Even if gameplay were more polished, even if the game wasn't a pain to play, this would still not redeem the awful plot and cast of characters, which make you constantly hope the level you're playing is the last.
Mindjack constitutes further evidence that japanese developers should not try making shooters and that developer Feelplus should stick providing software support to Square Enix for their RPGs. The way things are, Mindjack comes off as a terrible game you should stay away from at all costs.