Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) is doing everything it can to ensure that the potential failure of the year receives some form of attention.
Although MindsEye was released about six months ago, it feels like a century has passed. BARB’s third-person action-adventure game and metaverse were clearly unfinished when they launched on Steam. The game failed due to its ridiculous story, boring missions, terrible combat scenes, and extensive technical issues. The MindsEye gaming experience was thoroughly unpleasant and was panned by players and critics alike. The fallout from the failure was even worse, with BARB head Leslie Benzies reportedly blaming saboteurs for the game’s failure before the studio laid off more than a hundred employees.
Some of the laid-off designers then accused BARB of poor management and a complete loss of direction. They claimed that Benzies could never decide what kind of game he wanted to make. The whole situation was unpleasant. Amid the chaos, BARB attempted to redeem itself from the most spectacular failure of 2025. Since its release, the game has received six major updates that have improved its performance and added features that should have been included from the beginning, such as the ability to dodge. The latest update arrived this week, bringing further performance improvements, enhanced artificial intelligence and animation, and more challenging combat and encounters—everything the game desperately needed.
This update coincides with the release of a free starter pack that allows players to try out various MindsEye elements. The pack includes one campaign mission: the seventh mission of the Robin Hood campaign. The mission begins with an enjoyable stealth section set in a trailer park. Next is an entertaining car chase where we pursue a truck in a sandstorm. Next is a street firefight, followed by the climax where we sit in a car and shoot at the vehicles chasing us with a machine gun. We’ve seen this kind of thing in every open-world game released since 2008, but it’s not that bad.
Making the strongest mission available for free is definitely a smart move by BARB, and they basically have nothing to lose. The package also includes 14 Arcadia missions, i.e., additional content created with MindsEye‘s authoring tools. At launch, MindsEye‘s side missions were terrible, but perhaps they have improved since then. According to BARB, the free starter pack will be updated regularly with new game modes, so Robin Hood may be replaced later.
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