Eyes Wide Shut

"A Feast for the Eyes, A Mindlessly Bad Time" (Gamingbolt). "A catastrophy" (Gamestar). "Good approach, disastrous implementation" (Playfront). There has been pretty much said everything bad about MindsEye, the debut work of Build A Rocket Boy and self-proclaimed GTA GTA-killer - most of it bad. The open-world shooter is said to be a technical disaster. And the fact that studio boss and former Rockstar North producer Leslie Benzies suspects a huge conspiracy and review sabotage against his game may please the tabloids, but it doesn't inspire much confidence in reason and insight.

Since I don't want to go on about how the game is, I'll switch to my forte and say a few words about the soundtrack. When it comes to bad games, the score is very often condemned alike and comes off much worse than it might actually be. The most recent and most prominent example of this for me was the music for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which offered rather average fare, but therefore was already well above the ratings of the actual game.

I would like to come to a similar conclusion about the MindsEye-OST ... but I can't. The 12 tracks were composed by Stuart Ross, who worked on the music for Grand Theft Auto 2 and Grand Theft Auto III , but apart from that only has credits as a sound designer and general audio guy. At his side is Ryan Lee West, also known as Rival Consoles, a prolific electronic DJ with over nine albums to his name. However, the result of their collaboration remains ‘underwhelming’.

The music of MindsEye falls largely into the sci-fi action category, is dominated by synths and wafting basses and lacks any kind of identity. The music sounds like Mirror’s Edge without emotion, like Furi without climaxes or Forza Motorsport without drive. There is nothing to complain about in terms of quality. The whole thing is produced and mixed to a high standard, so that we immediately get the feeling that the camera is moving over a panoramic scene from Blade Runner 2049, which is an impressive part of the film due to its visual brilliance, but only a tiny one - and after the third shot of the city, we inevitably think to ourselves: when is something going to happen again?

Ross and West fail to answer this question in their work for MindsEye . Although there are minor rays of hope with tracks such as Ticking Clock , which break out of the usual pattern a little with the use of piano, for example, they too succumb to the monotonously repetitive soundscape of modernity. Even if the OST is not a total failure like the actual game, it still suffers from an avoidable uniformity. Many composers have already shown how it can be done better. Not learning from the past, as contemporary of an approach it may be - as in the real world - it is unfortunately also the wrong one for this score.