The makers of “Mindjack” knew jack about what kind of game they wanted to create, but had a mind to develop one anyway. “Mindjack” is a boring, incompetent, pop-out-from-behind-cover third-person shooter that could have been done better on the Nintendo 64, but separates itself from other entries in this crowded genre with an odd twist: You’re not playing as a character, but an electrical entity that can exit the protagonist’s body at any time and, like Patrick Swayze did to Whoopi Goldberg in “Ghost,” jump into other humans — and robots — on the battlefield. Taking entities over is generally pointless, as switching to a new person has little practical difference from just running to where they’re standing, but this premise does offer a novel approach to health. Every time the entity whose mind you’re jacking is killed, you have a time limit in which you must find something else to jack. It’s a neat idea, and injects a nice bit of franticness now and then.
These occasional frenzies are the only excitement to be found in the single-player campaign, which makes up for pushover enemies with a cover system that doesn’t work half the time, leaving you exposed to these hapless simps’ erratic fire.
