When we stepped over to the Square Enix booth for our tour and chance to play the games they had to offer, we knew almost nothing about the newly announced Mindjack. In development by Feelplus Inc and published by the aforementioned Square Enix, Mindjack looks to bring players into a new kind of action adventure game. Only time will tell whether they succeed in this goal, but our early impressions are below.
Mindjack is a third person shooter that takes place in AD 2031 as the governments of the world have slowly started to decline, leaving corrupt organizations rising in their wake. Players will take the roles of rogue agents as they fight for survival while entangling themselves deeper into the mysteries going on in the world.
What Mindjack offers gamers to distance itself from other shooters on the market is the ability to take control of anyone and anything on the battlefield from civilians, to enemies, to robots. You are also able to jump freely from body to body at anytime during the combat, making the game very fast paced and at times hard to kill anyone. At one point I started to snipe my co-worker only to have him escape his characters mind, leaving the body to fall onto the ground before I could take my shot. When you do jump out, you become a spirit wandering around the battlefield, looking for your next person or robot to overtake.
Besides just the ability to overtake someone on the battlefield, you will also have the option to use Mindslave. As you are about to finish off an enemy, the option will appear giving players the chance to make that defeated enemy a walking ally. This adds yet another fun twist to the gameplay that could make for some very interesting combat situations. Along with this, the game will feature a smooth transition from single player campaign to co-op fun, though we were not shown any of this at the booth.
Overall Mindjack was a very enjoyable demo through the 10 or 15 minutes that we got with the game. The ability to overtake anyone or anything on the battlefield at anytime during combat was very smooth and brought a whole new element to the game. It will be nice to see what the game has to offer after a few more months of polish as right now it might be hard to throw 60 bones on this as a retail game.
