Yep, I’ve played it. The new MindsEye mission called Blacklisted. The one which Mark Gerhard, CEO of Build a Rocket Boy, said would “share some of the evidence of the sabotage” he claims was instigated by a malevolent third party around the game’s buggy initial launch.
Rather than being anything massively juicy or scandalous, it’s just MindsEye pretending to be Hitman for a reworked crossover I think would’ve been better served appearing in IO Interactive’s assassin sim. In truth, I don’t know why I thought for a second it might be anything more than that.
Blacklisted, for those who’ve not kept up with the sad story of Build a Rocket Boy and MindsEye over the past year and a bit, was originally supposed to be a collab between the studio and former MindsEye publishers IO Interactive’s Hitman series. Instead, since the two sides have parted ways, it’s just an extra mission in Build a Rocket Boy’s game.
The bones of it are simple and familiar. There are two evil and rich targets in MindsEye’s Las Vegas-inspired city of Redrock. They must be unalived. Agent 47 and Diana Burnwood aren’t available, so in their place are leather-clad assassin Julia Black and an anonymous handler working for Meridian, a mysterious agency that Julia’s estranged mum founded from the sounds of it. Julia looks a bit like Lara Croft might if your ageing goth dad was asked to design a Tomb Raider getup, on the condition that he wouldn’t subsequently have to face the mild embarrassment of showing it to your grandparents.
She and the handler have some banter back and forth as the mission progresses, but as you’d expect from new characters given little setup time, it’s nowhere near the nuanced chatter you get from 47 and Burnwood. While the intro cinematic and mission briefing pull as much in the way of Hitman vibes as they can, Blacklisted isn’t one of IO’s trademark layered murder sandboxes. Instead, you drive around the city in typical MindsEye fashion, being told off if you stray too far from the series of linear mission objectives that each amount to a single action sequence. There’s a car chase with a DJ, there’s a bit of police distraction so you can nick one of their outfits, there’s THE GODDAMNED SNEAKY WAREHOUSE INFILTRATION.
Sorry. While the rest of the set pieces are perfectly OK, if nothing that’ll blow you away, the warehouse stealth section stole more of my life than I should have ever let it. It seemed fine at first. Hop through a back window after knocking out some security guards. Crouch walk to an upper floor, following some blokes who’re spilling useful info that’ll help you kill your targets, then get out. And yet, I failed it an embarrassing number of times.
It was an evening after work, and so my concentration level was far from its best (it’s also been ages since I played MindsEye), but I reckon the game’s undercooked stealth detection mechanics were more to blame. You see, rather than the handy detection cones that give you a chance to notice you’re about to be clocked before a Hitman NPC properly spots you, MindsEye’s NPCs just instantly clock you and turn hostile, the moment you enter the very edge of their vision. There’s no easy visual indication of where they might be looking or how close you are to detection beforehand, unless I was missing something very subtle via the minimap.
Eventually, I managed not to get spotted on the stairs or in the office, but didn’t manage to leave without shooting my way out. Unsurprisingly for a game that’s always been much more geared to GTA-style gunning and driving than Hitman-esque stealth, the combat didn’t throw up any particular frustrations. From that point in the mission, you dress up as a masked DJ who seems a thinly-veiled dig at somebody the studio bosses have beefed with. This grants you access to a nightclub where you can shoot your first target.
The mission’s second kill, to be fair, is more freeform, with four possible ways to off a guy hosting a party in a packed hotel penthouse. I opted to spike his drink, since drowning him in a loo didn’t look like it was on the table. Prior to this final sequence, Julia’s handler comes clean to her that these kills aren’t about special drugs, or killer drones, or whatever bollocks had been teased up to that point. A mole within Meridian has nicked all of the agency’s important data, and that’s what’s really at stake here.
The handler also name drops an influencer agency BARB CEO Mark Gerhard has claimed were involved in the alleged real-world “sabotage” of MindsEye’s launch. “Sounds like you’ve got a real pest control problem,” Black responds.
So, there you go. A game that isn’t Hitman not quite pulling off a Hitman-style mission. Some vague references to industry drama, which seem totally pointless given that they barely registered with me, a person who’s covered said drama on numerous occasions as part of my job. Again, I’m not sure why I thought Blacklisted might be anything different, but it has at least made me briefly consider that if MindsEye’s release had gone well, not only might a bunch of people still be in jobs, but we might’ve gotten a decent Hitman mission set in not-Vegas out of it.