Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

"Innovative and fun"

Just when you start to think everything has been done before, Psi Ops comes out and adds a whole new way to kill bad guys. You play as Nick Scryer, a Psi Elite. With a combination of great controls and a better physics engine, your powers feel and act real. And although some are obviously used more than others, none of your powers ever feel useless, and once you get a power you will definitely be using it for the rest of the game.

The other great thing that abilities adds is how great they make a linear game. Even though it's a game broken into levels, where you usually only have one way you can go, your abilities make it so you can approach any situation with seemingly unlimited ways. First you can use Remote Viewing to enter a room unnoticed to see what's going on in there, and if there are any explosive cans lying around. Then you can enter the room and either kill the bad guys with your weapons, throw some stuff into them using telekinesis, throw them into each other with telekinesis, lift them up with telekinesis and then shoot them, take over one of them with mind control and use him to kill the others and then have him commit suicide, light them on fire, and much more.

If the AI was a little better then I think the game would have been much better, but they're not a ridiculously dumbed down AI either. They just don't tend to think too often. The cool thing is that when you are spotted they will sound the alarm and you'll be attacked by a lot of enemies, I say the cool thing because if you're in a building with hundreds or terrorists, they probably won't let you kill them one by one, room by room.

One of the problems in the game is backtracking, there just isn't any need for it. Most of the backtracking was trying to find a key to go back to a previous area, why not just make the level a little bit bigger and you would never run into that problem?

Another problem I had was the story. It started out with a really good movie, and even though it seems to be what everyone does when they get backed into a corner, I didn't even mind the whole memory loss thing. But after that you'll care about the story about as much as you would care about the story in a Mario game. The reason you keep playing is because you're having fun.

But you will be having fun, there's no two ways about that. Although the game is very short, you'll enjoy the whole thing. The innovations make up for it's shortcomings. Put it this way, there are only a total of 4 types of enemies, and 4 types of weapons in the entire game, and it never gets repetitive just because you'll be killing everyone of them in a different way.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/20/08

Game Release: Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (US, 06/14/04)