Review by: Tom Chick

I love Mindjack in theory. The foundation is just a regular ol’ shooter with the usual guns and an occasional grenade. But when you kill a dude, if you’re quick, you can shoot mind bullets at his body. This brings him back to life and convinces him to change teams. Don’t look for an in-game explanation for your mind bullets, because it’s not forthcoming until later in the game, as if it hasn’t been happening for five or six levels already. “Hey, uh, so here’s a gameplay mechanic,” Mindjack mutters from the get-go. “Just pretend it makes sense for now, and we’ll catch up the story later on, okay?”

Not that I care one whit about the story, which is awful and incomprehensible in that uniquely Japanese way of trying to be Western. What I mainly get from the cutscenes is that the lead character, Dude Guy McAction Man, is a real douche. Is this how Japanese developers see American videogame heroes? I suppose to be fair, it isn’t entirely inaccurate.

So, anyway, you’re playing along, killing dudes and then resurrecting them to fight on your behalf, and even taking direct control to play as these risen warriors. Feel free to mindjump into robots – don’t worry, a story will be along eventually – and do some unmanned shootering. Electronic Arts tried something similar with a console version of Battlefield many years ago, but without the resurrection/conversion gimmick. You just jumped from soldier to soldier, like some sort of crazy combat Pazuzu, playing them like so many puppets.

But Mindjack is a bit like a strategy game. You’re converting resources from adversarial to friendly. Gather killed dudes with your mind bullets, accumulating an army bigger than the other guy’s army. You go from you and your sidekick – the obligatory woman scientist/hacker kind of deal – being outnumbered and under fire, to turning the tables until there are a bunch of you hunting down a couple of lone holdouts hunkered behind cover. The levels that don’t involve fighting down long hallways actually turn into cool tactical puzzles about trying to flank each other. Once you hit the end of the section, you get your experience points (did I mention that you unlock perks and game mods as you level up?) and then everything reboots for the next set piece.

So far, so good. But wait, there’s more. Mindjack’s best gimmick is erasing the distinction between single player and multiplayer. If you leave your game open to the internet, every section plays like a multiplayer match where random people can jump in and mindjack around. The blue team will mindjack into any friendly characters. Quick, kill and convert some bad guys to make room for your allies! The red team has free run of the weaker but more plentiful AI bad guys.

Now you might think that this is a terrible idea, and the poor guy I pinned down so that he couldn't get past the very first level* would probably agree with you. But consider that the alternative is to play Mindjack as a single player game. You really aren’t going to get much out of this approach, given the bad AI and clunky shooting. And ultimately, that’s what drags down this fantastically loopy but nevertheless fantastic idea. The AI does the usual AI stupid things, mostly notably making ridiculously bad decisions about when and where to move. Note to developers: if you're going to make a shooter based on positional tactics, make sure your AI guys get that memo.