The makers of “Mindjack” knew jack about what kind of game they wanted to create, but had a mind to develop one anyway. “Mindjack” is a boring, incompetent, pop-out-from-behind-cover third-person shooter that could have been done better on the Nintendo 64, but separates itself from other entries in this crowded genre with an odd twist: You’re not playing as a character, but an electrical entity that can exit the protagonist’s body at any time and, like Patrick Swayze did to Whoopi Goldberg in “Ghost,” jump into other humans — and robots — on the battlefield. Taking entities over is generally pointless, as switching to a new person has little practical difference from just running to where they’re standing, but this premise does offer a novel approach to health. Every time the entity whose mind you’re jacking is killed, you have a time limit in which you must find something else to jack. It’s a neat idea, and injects a nice bit of franticness now and then.
These occasional frenzies are the only excitement to be found in the single-player campaign, which makes up for pushover enemies with a cover system that doesn’t work half the time, leaving you exposed to these hapless simps’ erratic fire.
The multiplayer mode is so much more compelling than solo play, you can only conclude its success was accidental. There is no multiplayer mode, per se; instead, the developers have expanded the hacking concept so that you can enter other people’s single-player games. That’s right — you can be going along doing your thing in the campaign mode, and suddenly a malevolent entity will enter the gamespace, flying around like the smoke monster from “Lost” looking for enemies to inhabit. This initiates a kind of parallel game in which you’re not only fighting the computer, but a much smarter human enemy jumping between entities all around you. You can bar your single-player game to these hackers if you so choose, but why deprive yourself of the “Nemesis”-esque constant fear that the game could get way harder any minute?
| ‘Mindjack’ |
| » Price: $59.99 |
| » Rating: 3 out of 5 stars |
So, playing “Mindjack” is a gamble, as the game could be boring or thrilling depending on the actions of strangers. If the developers put their minds to refining the premise, a sequel done right could deliver an, ahem, jackpot every time.
