Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy
It’s mind over matter in this original action game.

PLATFORM: XBX, PS2

PUBLISHER: Midway

DEVELOPER: Midway

GENRE: Action

ESRB: Mature

What’s more fun than shooting wave after wave of disposable enemies? Tossing them around with telekinesis, of course. That and several other mind-over-matter tricks are the main selling point of Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy.

What could have been another run-of-the-mill 3rd-person shooter becomes a fun-filled exercise in creative destruction, thanks to the inclusion of your psychic powers.

Besides tossing boxes into people and people into moving machinery, your can drain the minds of unsuspecting villains (causing their heads to explode), set them afire with pyrokinesis and see through doors with remote viewing.

Unlike some other games that grant you amusing powers, Psi-Ops lets you put your brain to work almost from the start – you’ll find that after you get your first power, your guns are rarely used.

There’s some confusing plot about going undercover inside some bad guy’s private army, but really, the game is about using your mind to toss explosive boxes at bad guys, throwing them off cliffs or causing them to just plain burst into flames.

After getting used to the different controls for using your powers, you’ll find it’s great fun, and the game is worth playing just to see what you can do.

It’s too bad the rest of the game is so generic. Oh look, we’re in an underground base, full of square corridors and lots of boxes and crates. When you think of the havoc you’d be able to wreck in just about any situation with psychic powers, the “let’s go from one secret base to the next” plot is kind of a downer.

Even though you play as a hunky soldier of fortune type, there are some respectable female sidekicks who pop up every so often. Everything else about the game, from the graphics to the script, is fairly lighthearted and cartoony, so even the gruesome ways you dispatch your foes doesn’t get overbearingly dark.

We never thought we'd find such simple pleasure in simply picking people up and beating them against the walls with our minds. Maybe that says something about us...