The big MindsEye mission Blacklisted is out, and with it the promised revelation of “evidence of the sabotage” that has been alleged multiple times by Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) co-CEOs Leslie Benzies and Mark Gerhard. As a sort of sicko appreciator of MindsEye, I was looking forward to playing it, and last night I finally did.
Friends, you may be less shocked than me to learn it sucks. Hard.
MindsEye, the much-hyped narrative shooter headed up by former Rockstar stalwart Leslie Benzies, is a mess by any measure, but it brings a certain chaotic charm to the table: It’s such an incoherent goat rodeo that it falls backwards into fun, and if you’re into that sort of thing you can find yourself having a genuinely good time. Blacklisted, by contrast, is just low-effort trash across the board. Story, dialog, setting, gameplay—there’s just nothing here that’s even accidentally interesting.
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According to a recent Kotaku interview with former BARB lead animator Chris Wilson, Blacklisted was originally meant to be a Hitman crossover featuring Agent 47. But that was cancelled in March when IO Interactive ended its MindsEye publishing deal—so BARB took what it had and repurposed it for Blacklisted: Instead of 47, you’re elite assassin Julia Black, a freelance killer brought in by an agency called Meridian to wack a notorious drug dealer, and a notorious arms dealer.
The whole thing is very short—you can easily finish Blacklisted in well under an hour, unless you’re an excessive screw-arounder like me—which is a blessing because the mission has checkpoints but it won’t save your progress if you exit the game. This is actually the least of its problems, but still a strange choice: Surely those checkpoints can be saved for restoration in a future gameplay session without too much trouble, right? So why don’t they?
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Even the trailer is low-effort: It’s all very cinematic and Bond-esque, but as Polygon discovered, that’s royalty-free music. Classy.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter, nor does the staggeringly senseless “plot,” or smaller nonsensical details like the sudden appearance of police in Redrock city (in fixed locations, of course) despite their complete absence when I’m repeatedly turning crowds of pedestrians into goo by power-sliding my hijacked limousine into them while my unsuspecting kidnap victim is having a perfectly normal conversation on his phone in the back.
Where Blacklisted really drops the ball (and then trips over it and brains itself on the corner of a table) is its utter failure to demonstrate “evidence” of sabotage against MindsEye and BARB. At one point in the expansion I was forced to pursue a masked DJ who may have been intended as a reference to Cyber Boi, the masked YouTuber who found himself in hot water with BARB after he released a video noting that Benzies, the BARB co-founder, is mentioned in the Epstein files.
Wilson, the former BARB employee, told Kotaku that Cyber Boi was believed by studio leadership to be behind the alleged sabotage of the game, evidence of which came from some “hate mail” Benzies shared with BARB staff. Benzies’ presentation apparently did not make much of an impression: “These emails read like League of Legends chats,” Wilson said. “In no way did it seem like a sophisticated multi-million dollar plan to try and take down Build a Rocket Boy.”
But there’s nothing of that sort in Blacklisted: Just a car chase with a hysterical, seemingly drugged-up DJ that ends in what I’m fairly certain is a pre-determined outcome, and his death. There’s also a mention of a “ritual network” in Meridian that’s seeking to overthrow it from the inside, surely a reference to a real-world company of the same name that BARB alleged worked with Cyber Boi in the alleged sabotage campaign. But again, that’s it: A single, throwaway mention that’s easy to overlook even if you’ve been following along with this whole gong show.
My final result. 15 minutes of that playtime was spent trying to figure out a safecracking mechanic. I did not figure it out, but it didn’t matter anyway so who cares.
The wider conspiracy that comes to light as the Blacklisted mission progresses is likewise toothless and empty. The real mission is to retrieve data stolen from Meridian, but what is it? How did my victim get it? What was he going to do with it? No idea. All I—that is, Julia Black, elite assassin—have to go on about any of it is the oddly robotic voice of our Meridian handler dropping occasional bits of pointless expedition into our ears.
Ironically, I feel like Blacklisted only makes the claims of sabotage even more dubious, because it’s such a wet fart. There’s nothing in the way of even a clear allegation of dirty tricks, much less evidence of such, and it’s not even amusingly fun to play like the base game. The only thing it proves, assuming we don’t hear any claims of sabotage against Blacklisted itself in the near future, is that MindsEye is a really bad game.
The one good thing about Blacklisted is that it’s free, so if you already own MindsEye it will cost you nothing aside from an hour of your time to try it out. I still don’t recommend it.
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