Agents Of Mayhem
Developer Volition Publisher Deep Silver Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Just imagine the elevator pitch. Based on Volition’s success in turning increasingly absurd concepts into hits, it’s not surprising that its idea of a Saturdaymorning superhero cartoon with an adult edge got the green light. Sadly, the team behind Saints Row has stripped its latest open-world adventure down to the meekest of essentials, losing all semblance of flair and any meaningful connection to the series from which it so loosely spun. In lieu of 7am animated nostalgia, you get a straight-to-DVD, bargain-bin trudge. And about that ‘mature’ edge? All you need, apparently, is a single, repeated joke about a bad guy’s genitals, and a few sporadic fuck-yous to crank the PEGI rating up to 18.
Agents Of Mayhem’s most redeeming quality is its titular roster of agents – an Overwatch- esque lineup of colourfully designed heroes all working for the global organisation, Mayhem (Multinational AgencY Hunting Evil Masterminds). It’s immediately clear that Blizzard’s work was the inspiration for Mayhem’s dozen disciples of chaos – each uses a mechanically similar, but visually diverse, range of weapons and abilities to fight the antagonistic cabal, Legion. There’s the Johnny Cage, er, homage, Hollywood, who gyrates missiles from his groin; the shotgun-wielding man-tank, Hardtack; and Fortune, who darts around with a pair of Tracer-style auto-pistols and a floaty drone for good measure. You start with access to only these three, but the game quickly expands your pool of agents, weapons, and Mayhem powers – special destructive abilities only unleashed once you cause enough damage. Do stop us if you’ve heard this one before, won’t you.
The agents themselves are never truly outlandish in their tools and tricks, but there’s an idiosyncratic diversity between them that provides ample reason to push forward to unlocking the next. There’s Rama, who skirts around with a satisfyingly punchy bow, and derby star Daisy, who rollerblades about the place while dishing out untold damage with a minigun. There are highs and lows across the cast, but the game encourages variety and experimentation by having you take three of them into battle at once.
This works from a purely mechanical perspective, but there’s no narrative consequence to it thanks to the decision to only have one agent on screen at any one time, cycling through your chosen trio to pick the best one for the task at hand. It’s a promising idea, but Volition essentially boils it down to whether you need short, medium or long-range combat for a particular encounter or enemy, while also giving you a way to deal with various enemy buffs and status effects. As soon as you need a different set of skills, you just switch to another of your two chosen heroes who have been lying invisibly in wait.
There are supporting cast members for your chosen agent to banter with, but dialogue alternates between beige expository exchanges and eardrum-scraping oneliners. Saints Row was never going to win any awards for its script, but it at least maintained a stable level of bottom-line entertainment that benefitted no end from a sense of swagger and personality. This, however, is incapable of even properly delivering the punchline to a half-decent dick joke. As you watch another of its admittedly well-crafted animated cutscenes fade, only to retake control and fight yet another lame Legion head honcho, you’ll wonder why you’re bothering.
The lack of purpose wouldn’t be so noticeable in a more enjoyable, more explosively inventive game, but the level and mission design throughout Agents Of Mayhem does it no favours at all. There’s not a single stretch of variety between when you first start and when you finish – if you finish, of course. The only real interaction you have with the game world is shooting at things, be they enemies or inanimate objects that need to be destroyed; the sole exception is an endlessly repeated hacking minigame. Volition sees no reason to add anything more in between. You will blast your way through the same cookie-cutter enemies, through the same claustrophobic underground enemy lairs, and only the punch of its gunplay and the rambunctious glitz of its AOE explosions stop it from being history’s most soporific take on the superhero fantasy. While its respectably sized but atmospherically lifeless rendition of Seoul sports a futuristic neon sheen, the many quests within that vibrant space are terribly structured. From MAYHEM’s Avengers-esque helicarrier, the Ark, you beam down into the overworld to run, triple-jump and, if you can suffer the treacly handling, drive your way across the city. But you’ll spend most of your time travelling manually between mission objectives. In some missions, you travel to a first checkpoint, only to have to travel to another, before finally heading to the actual mission. It’s a nearconstant padding exercise, the sort of open-world design tactic we thought had long been consigned to the scrapheap. To be forced through so much trudge, only to end up shooting the same enemies in the same places time and time again, is a painful disappointment.
Volition’s failure here given its recent track record is in equal parts confusing and frustrating, and suggests something of an identity crisis; no surprise, perhaps, in a game that treats its cast members as mute, disposable loadouts. This is a studio that thrives in absurdity and relishes the brash boldness of a game without conventional limits. In Agents Of Mayhem, the limits are all around you, all of the time – from the moment you start playing to the minute you stop, it feels permanently imprisoned by its own lack of imagination. The result is a game that carries the weight of a litany of sins – a saint that has fallen far, far from grace.
The lack of purpose wouldn’t be so noticeable in a more enjoyable, more explosively inventive game