The mission is dull and witless, and the promised "evidence" of sabotage against developer Build a Rocket Boy utterly fails to materialize. The big MindsEye mission Blacklisted is out, and with it the promised revelation of "evidence of the sabotage" that has been alleged multiple times by Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) co-CEOs Leslie Benzies and Mark Gerhard. As a sort of sicko appreciator of MindsEye, I was looking forward to playing it, and last night I finally did. Friends, you may be less shocked than me to learn it sucks. Hard. MindsEye, the much-hyped narrative shooter headed up by former Rockstar stalwart Leslie Benzies, is a mess by any measure, but it brings a certain chaotic charm to the table: It's such an incoherent goat rodeo that it falls backwards into fun, and if you're into that sort of thing you can find yourself having a genuinely good time. Blacklisted, by contrast, is just low-effort trash across the board. Story, dialog, setting, gameplay—there's just nothing here that's even accidentally interesting. According to a recent Kotaku interview with former BARB lead animator Chris Wilson, Blacklisted was originally meant to be a Hitman crossover featuring Agent 47. But that was cancelled in March when IO Interactive ended its MindsEye publishing deal—so BARB took what it had and repurposed it for Blacklisted: Instead of 47, you're elite assassin Julia Black, a freelance killer brought in by an agency called Meridian to wack a notorious drug dealer, and a notorious arms dealer. The whole thing is very short—you can easily finish Blacklisted in well under an hour, unless you're an excessive screw-arounder like me—which is a blessing because the mission has checkpoints but it won't save your progress if you exit the game. This is actually the least of its problems, but still a strange choice: Surely those checkpoints can be saved for restoration in a future gameplay session without too much trouble, right? So why don't they? Even the trailer is low-e