Yep it’s pretty mediocre. Though I suppose the surprising thing (if you could call it that) is how few risks it takes. The band don’t embarrass themselves (well, relative to how they normally sound anyway) and there arent any outright duds in the tracklist, but they definitely arent trying to show any new sides of themselves that havent already been done to death either. Say what you will about the earlier DT albums but for as patchy as they could be they all have something distinctive to distinguish them. This one is very by-numbers. It’s sonically closest to Train Of Thought but that album had a lot of pretty good riffs on it and had some catchy songwriting ideas. This album is majorly lacking in riffs, or even in weird left turns like Ruddess going ragtime or whatever (there are a couple moments like that but not many)
Best tracks are Bend The Clock and Shadow Man Incident which have more interesting ideas and arrangements than the rest by a decent margin, but it’s kind of too little too late. I’d have really liked to have seen a crazy instrumental on here, that probably would have boosted the album.

also apparently in addition to the album cover using AI, Hugh Syme is also just reusing art he made for other artists now. What a guy!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dreamtheater/comments/1ijxgqm/guy_reports_on_fb_hugh_copy_pasted_his_own_albums/