Agents of Mayhem
I’m a computer!
Developer Volition publisher Deep SilVer price $ 59.99 USD AvAilAble At Steam, retail www.aomthegame.com
Before developing Agents of Mayhem, developer Volition had already parodied the superhero genre with the excellent Saints Row 4, a game in which the leader of the Saints is now the President of the US and must fight back against alien invaders. For a series that began as a tongue in cheek shot at GTA and its contemporaries, the final full outing fully embraced the absurdity of both the premise and the superhero conceit. Set in the same universe as Volition’s other games, Saints Row and Red Faction, Agents of Mayhem follows on from the “Recreate Earth” ending of the Saints Row IV standalone expansion Gat out of Hell, and presents a near future in which the Saints don’t exist, but the super-agent group M.A.Y.H.E.M. (Multinational AgencY Hunting Evil Masterminds) founded by Persephone Brimstone (a character from Gat out of Hell) and funded by Ultor Corporation, the antagonists of the Red Faction games and the Saints in Saints Row 2 before the corporation merged with the Saints in Saints Row: The Third, protects the earth from evil. All of this is a rather roundabout way of saying that Volition has trod the ground of Agents of Mayhem before. For some reason or other, however, rather than combining the sum of experience from previous games to create something new and special, Volition has somehow developed a game that, while enjoyable enough to warrant wasting a few hours on, ultimately feels like a half-baked version of the games that came before.
Based both on superhero tropes and Saturday morning cartoons, Agents of Mayhem sees teams of three agents fighting against the forces of L.E.G.I.O.N., the League of Evil
Gentlemen Intent on Obliterating Nations. The Agents themselves are essentially action figures brought to life, each with a unique weapon and approach to combat, an idea heightened by the fact that loading screens feature pithy bits of advice (none of it useful, only some of it funny) much like the “The More You Know” PSAs crossed with the Fenslerfilm GI Joe PSA parodies. Set in a near future Seoul, South Korea, the world’s leader when it comes to innovative technology, the Agents fight against a branch of LE.G.I.O.N. headed by Doctor Babylon, a madman intent on using dark matter crystals to do something evil. His plan doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but when it comes to Saturday morning cartoons, logic has never really been the strong suit of evil.
Initially players have access to three agents, the TV star and bounty hunter turned super agent PR man for Mayhem, Hollywood, the Colombian sky pirate, Fortune and giant seaman, Hardtack, while another ten are unlockable through either the story missions or through character specific missions. These “AOM Special Episodes” show the game at its best, giving players more of an insight into the characters they unlock and also feature some of the best writing in the game, as the jokes can be made character specific rather than generic as they are in the open world. Unlocking Daisy, a tattooed bombshell roller derby badass with a minigun requires players to make their way around Seoul trying to find specific places to jog Daisy’s memory of what happened the night before when she went on a bender. Unlocking Johnny Gat (a cop killer in the Saints timeline but a killer cop in the Agents timeline) has him ostensibly teaching a rookie robot cop about police work. They’re fun, mostly funny and don’t outstay their welcome, lasting only about ten or so minutes a piece.
There are enough Agents that everyone should be able to find a team of three they like. For my part I mostly played with Rama, a long range glass cannon bow user who can cause damage over time, Braddock, a fairly straightforward soldier with the ability to call down orbital lasers, and either Daisy, the aforementioned roller derby tank, or Joule, a turret using Italian engineer/fashionista. Each agent has their own unique weapon, special ability that works on a timer and “Mayhem” ability that is charged through combat. Characters can be modified by swapping in and out three abilities: their special ability, weapon ability and passive ability. These alternate skills or upgrades are unlocked through levelling and can also be found in the game world. These three skill slots can also be augmented further with Legion Gadgets, modifiers that can be added to give extra abilities to the character. Braddock, for instance, has a Legion Gadget that grants her fast movement for a short while after killing an enemy with a critical hit. Each character also has a specialisation when it comes to combat as well. Some characters are good at taking down shields, others are good at taking down armour, and others do extra damage to doomsday machines or enemy leaders. As agents level they gain access to extra specialisations, making it easier to balance a team the more you play.
Combat is fun and learning how to take on the different types of enemies with different team compositions, and there’s a pleasantly chaotic feeling to proceedings that keeps fights fresh. Unfortunately, that chaos and fun of combat doesn’t really extend to mission
it’s understandable that an evil mastermind might desire uniformity in base design
and world design. Seoul is quite small for an open world, but that doesn’t stop it from being filled with cookie-cutter areas and repetitive content. Similarly the story missions rarely do more than introduce a new villain every four or five outings. The missions in between usually see the agents going to an area, killing some enemies before heading to another area, killing enemies, entering a Legion base that looks and feels like every other Legion base you’ve fought your way through, and then doing it all over again. It’s understandable that an evil mastermind might desire uniformity when it comes to base design, but when it comes to gameplay, it’s boring.
Agents of Mayhem is also riddled with little glitches, none of which have been fatal but most of which have been very annoying. NPCs sometimes failed to trigger for the next part of a mission, requiring a restart from last checkpoint. For a number of missions I was unable to call my vehicle for no apparent reason. At one time a prompt from a character mission (unlocking Red Card, a crazy German football hooligan) to hit Q to use a special power stayed on screen for the next few missions, but while it was there I couldn’t use special powers with anyone aside from Red Card.
Agents of Mayhem isn’t a bad game. It’s fun enough to warrant wasting some time playing, but it’s nothing special. The game is pretty much the very definition of OK. There’s nothing particularly bad about it, but there’s nothing overly memorable aside from the fact that the Volition games that came before it did many of the same things but did them better. For whatever reason - maybe it was a case of budgetary restraint, or maybe it was deadline crunch - Agents of Mayhem feels somewhat like an unpolished draft of a much better game. It’s repetitive, not particularly funny, repetitive and not particularly funny, and ultimately feels more like a knockoff of Crackdown and Saints Row IV than a new game in its own right.
DANIEL WILKS