Boom, one more time. I’m back with a new review, hey. This time I’ve been playing through Agents of Mayhem, the confusingly marketed single-player only game from Volition. I don’t know how, but they should’ve included co-op somehow. Anyway, click “Keep reading” if you want to read my thoughts about this ill-fated game.
Agents of Mayhem is the latest game from Volition. It’s a third-person open-world action-adventure game, much like their Saints Row games, except with a more futuristic/stylized tone. Unlike the SR games, however, this game contains no form of multiplayer whatsoever.
As the agents of MAYHEM, you are tasked with taking out LEGION, an evil empire of sorts who have the power of Dark Matter. The setting of the game is Volition’s take on Seoul, South Korea, with the rest of the world playing a smaller role in either characters’ backstories or in the Moscow Global Offensive mode.
When playing, one must select 3 characters to have in their squad. Switching between them is easily done with the D-Pad (with a controller). Every character have their own distinct personality and playstyle. All of them use their own (often unique) weapon types, like shotguns, swords, or rifles, and they all have their unique special and MAYHEM abilities. Their health and shield bars also differ depending on who it is. A character can become level 20, with an additional 20 levels obtainable by spending crystals. Leveling up gives you a skill point, which you can assign into one of four different character-specific upgrade. Crystals can also unlock other character-specific traits. The game allows for much mobility, with each character having a triple-jump and some being able to either dash in the air, or attach to a wall for some extra height when scaling buildings. Most characters have a dash-dodge while grounded, with some trading this out for the ability to turn invisible.
Aside from the on foot gameplay, there are also vehicles, which are limited to different types of cars, including trucks, muscle cars or sports cars. The cars you find on the street are nothing special, with LEGION cars being undrivable. However, the agents can also call on MAYHEM unique vehicles at any time, which all have better top speed and durability, and also come with a boost ability. MAYHEM vehicles can also release a shockwave to damage things, but crashing into them seem to cause roughly the same amount of damage.
Characters, their weapons, and the vehicles can all be equipped with skins, most of which are randomly found in chests around the game, or randomly selected as rewards for different activities. Cars themselves also have to be assembled by collecting X amount of parts via the same means. Chests also contain various materials, like money or scrap, which can either be used to build upgrades that can be attached to the character-specific skills, or build the various consumables that are available, like an on-demand airstrike. Another thing you can find in them are crystal shard, which at the same time act as the main collectibles of the game.
Yes, spread across the world are somewhere around 350 crystal shards. They can be found anywhere from an underground parking lot to the top of the highest building. Many of these of course require utilizing the game’s mobility options to its full potential, with some being placed in such a way that they require platforming from one moving airborne object to another. Collecting 10 crystal shards in any way converts them into a crystal, which as mentioned can be used to power-up the different characters.
The game has a huge variety of enemies, ranging from standard grunts, to tanktroopers, moving bombs, turrets, agile melee units, among others. Some enemies have energy shields, while some have armor plating, two traits which also make the characters more unique as some are strong against one of them, while others are not, and vice-versa. While the enemy variety is good, some enemies could use some extra work. For example, some turrets shoot big plasma balls that hone in on you, and both drain your characters shield very fast and also slow them down. That would be okay, if it didn’t have a fire-rate of about one per second, meaning once you get hit by one, you get hit by the rest and often die.
Speaking of slowing down, the game has status effects. These are often your typical more/less armor/attack, slower/faster movement etc. This works great, with the exception of some that make you unable to jump or shoot, which just makes the game less fun. Oh, regarding fun, should you not find the current difficulty fun, don’t worry, as there are 15 difficulties to choose from. Difficulty scaling is pretty good between them, although at points it felt like the one higher was maybe supposed to be two higher, but there’s enough as is.
Earlier I mentioned activities. Unlike Saints Row, these activities are just the usual ones. Racing in some way, save a person, destroy something, nothing really new or unique. In the ARK (the main hub), one can find VR Training Missions, which is a way to fight against different combinations of the game’s enemies. The Moscow Global Offensive thing is another one of those idle things, where, in this case, you send off an agent to somewhere in the world, wait a few minutes for them to return, and then receive some rewards. The rewards can be either material, contracts, or Legion Lairs.
First we have Contracts. They are either general or character-specific, and each give you a task, which can be about collecting money, killing enemies in a certain way, or doing something character-specific. There’s also the similar Connected Contracts, which also gives you a task to fulfill. The difference is that they give you three tasks per contract, and are also online reliant. You and (seemingly) up to 5 other players can help each other with these, of which there are three that change on a daily basis. Unfortunately, these can be hard to complete, as the playerbase isn’t really there.
Secondly, Legion Lairs are the dungeons of this game. Most Legion Lairs are a group of randomly assigned rooms and objectives, with the objectives including killing every enemy, and hacking certain things. Each lair consist of about 3-6 rooms, and they all contain a healthy amount of chests.
About the story mode, it mostly feels like an assortment of activities, in that most of it are about killing hordes of enemies, destroying something, racing, or going through Legion Lairs. Most of the time, these missions rely on the rule of three, so eventually it gets a bit tiresome. The cutscenes that exist are mostly hand-drawn animations, though some are more still images, while the animation itself is generally lacking a bit, although I appreciate the effort. The story also have a few bosses, and they’re all generally “destroy/kill these things before attacking the boss”, but at least it’s some variation. Each character also have their own specific missions, with some being about the sub-group they’re a part of, and these are mostly the same as the rest of the main missions.
Since you have a cast of at least 12 characters, you can get many different reactions to something happening in the story. Unfortunately this means that dialogue from non-playable characters have a general reaction to what the player character says, which can result in some weird-sounding conversations. While free-roaming though, you can sometimes get fun interactions between the playable characters. These do not sound as weird, however, as they’re specifically between the characters interacting. Generally, however, I feel that some of the humour in the game is also a bit too dumb, like “I’m shooting space lasers… from space!”, a sentence obviously said for humour. Some characters also say things that doesn’t seem to fit their personality, but that could just be me complaining for the sake of it.
It could possibly maybe also be the result of this game being a reference to most things in general, like Knight Rider, Marvel, Miami Vice, 80’s cartoons, DC etc., and therefore has a cheesy tone to it all. While I have no problem with all these references, sometimes it feels like that was the sole reason this game exists.
Speaking of references, a lot of things in this reference Saints Row, as it possibly takes place in an alternate universe to that series, as mentioned in the ending of Gat out of Hell. The MAYHEM logo is a stylized fleur-de-lis, much like the 3rd Street Saints, and its color of choice is purple. The rulers of LEGION are called the Morningstar, like the gang from SR3. A main boss is called Aisha, like Johnny Gat’s wife. And speaking of Gat, he’s a playable DLC character, just like Kinzie is (under the codename Safeword), both returning as playable from Gat out of Hell. Other playable characters are from Saints Row are the chess buddies Pierce (codename Kingpin) and Oleg (codename Yeti). Most if not all of the MAYHEM vehicles are also named after vehicles appearing throughout those games. Many dialogues also mention things from the SR series, even though they never happened in this universe. Chronologically speaking, if this game was to take place at the same time as a Saints Row game, my guess is between the time of Saints Row 2 and 3, as Pierce seems to be in about the same mindset as the Boss was at that point.
With that side-tracking done, I feel that the gameplay of Agents of Mayhem is what Saints Row 4 should have been. While SR4 was a fun game to play, it went a bit too extreme too fast. This game has more mobility and is generally more outlandish than SR3, but less so than SR4, so as a ramp-up this would’ve fitted more.
Agents of Mayhem, while unfortunately a flop, is a good game. It may not be as good as the best Saints Row game, but its gameplay is fun. It has some replayability with its many characters and mission replay. Fans of Saints Row will find many things to like, but may also be a bit disappointed. If you like games that aren’t very serious and have unrealistic human abilities, I’d recommend this game.