Game #1142: Mindjack

 THE WHOLE WORLD IS EXPLODE.

 Often considered one of the worst games ever made, I simply had to play Mindjack. And, well.... it's not that bad. No, really, it's far from good, but it's not all that bad. It's a cover-based third person shooter with a twist: You can mind-control enemies and civilians.

 The game is simple to a fault, to the point that it feels like an arcade shooter more than anything else. The game is made up of mostly very brief stages, which can be as shot as a single squared-arena confrontation. The worst part about this design is that you don't keep your weapons between encounters, so before each chapter you're back to your gun. Not that it matters, as there's not much variety. Two guns, two assault rifles, a shotgun, a sniper rifle and red, stronger variations of a few of those.

 The shooting is passable, but it's a bit wonky. Sometimes when hiding behind a wall, if you try to aim down the sights, your character will pop out of cover. Other times, even though you are aiming at an enemy, your bullets will hit your cover. It's not awful, but it's pretty janky.

 As you play though the game you unlock plug-ins. You can equip up to three of them, one is a difficulty plug-in, which makes the game easier or harder, and then there are two slots for perks. Such as more HP or things like that. It's a decent idea.

 Boss fights are very poorly done. Most of these are against large machinery. Most of the time, you only need to defeat the weaker enemies that spawn. Other times, an enemy with a rocket launcher will spawn alongside other enemies, you kill him, take the rocket launcher, land a few hits, wait for the rocket launcher enemy to respawn and do it all over again. It's not very fun. There's a human boss that you fight twice, a giant robotic gorilla and three ninjas that buck this trend, as they are simple fights against enemies that can soak up more damage, but they are the exception, not the rule.

 One of the funniest things about the game is how mind jacking works. At any time you can press R3+L3 to leave your body, you can then look for mind controlled enemies or civilians to hijack their bodies. It's usually better to try to cycle through available bodies with L1 and R1. Thing is... pretty much every combat arena has civilians in the middle of the shootout, and taking control over them will automatically have them pull a gun out of thin air. The one problem with this is that the AI of your character will go on the offensive, and if both your main body and your partner fall it's game over. You get about 10 seconds to revive them. Regardless, it's usually a better idea to hijack a body as soon as a shootout starts, because that way you have 2 CPUs helping you instead of just your AI partner. Mind-slaving enemies is a bit more fun. Most of the time, after weakening an enemy, you can press R1 to have the CPU take over them and help you. It's surprisingly fun, and amusing, to fight alongside an increasingly large amount of mind-slave enemies. That said, during boss fights you can't mind-slave enemies, probably in an attempt to make them tougher?

 The last thing worst talking about it the plot. Besides some wonky translation issues, like the 'THE WHOLE WORLD IS EXPLODE' line, the plot itself makes little sense. It has a rather interesting plot twist, but the way the story is told makes the foreshadowing feel like a plot hole. If the script was tighter and the plot was better told, the twist would've been great, but... yeah, it's poorly executed. At least you can get a few laughs at how bad it is.

 Mindjack is far and away from the worst games ever made, but it's definitely not very good. It's a subpar third person shooter with decent ideas that were poorly executed, and the ones that work well are hard to enjoy when the rest of the game is so mundane.

 4.0