AGENTS OF MAYHEM
Super-spy shooter switches up single-player blasting
Dying to play a generic, grizzled army dude with a semi-automatic rifle and a dark past? Fill your boots: there are plenty of them shuffling about in PS4’s shooters. But if you fancy piloting a different sort of bullet-sponge – say, a roller derby player with a minigun and anger issues – then Volition’s new third-person shooter has you covered.
In our latest hands-on, we’re skating an extremely hungover Piper Andrews (codename Daisy) around the acid-bright, open-world city of Seoul. Our mission? To find out what in the whole hell we got up to last night. Mercifully, there’s no tiger in the bathtub, but the busted-up car outside suggests drunken Daisy wasn’t exactly peaches and cream. Indeed, the magical mystery tour of last night’s sins includes flashbacks to a very physical argument with a squid-shaped fast food dispenser and our girl going a few rounds in an underground robot fight club. Oops. We wish we were anyone else right now.
But that happens to be the central mechanic of Agents Of Mayhem. Introductory character missions aside, the Saints Row spin-off’s hoping you’ll spend most of your time body-swapping. Drafted by talent scout Persephone to fight big bad corporation LEGION, the misfit cast of 12 is made to be mixed up into three-person strike teams. Pick your person-shaped loadout, enter a mission, and
“A MISFIT CAST OF 12 IS MADE TO BE MIXED UP INTO STRIKE TEAMS.”
you’re able to switch between characters on the fly using the D-pad. When we come up against a swift horde of enemy ninja bots, it’s apparent that darling Daisy’s low-accuracy minigun is as useful as a chocolate dildo bat. The solution: teleport Oni into the action. The former Yakuza hitman glitters into view, accurate pistol at the ready. We’re keen to take advantage of his passive ability – target an enemy for long enough and they’re ‘slowed’, letting us take a leisurely one-shot pop at their head.
DISCO INFERNO
The real trouble begins when the procedural enemy generation chucks up chunkier LEGION goons. One particularly giant foe boasts a formidable area-ofeffect ground pound, and pistol fire seems to be bouncing off his metallic bonce. We reach for the D-pad again. Our last port of call is Kingpin: an automatic pistol-toting record mogul you probably know better as Pierce Washington. Yep, the Saints Row star appears in Agents Of Mayhem – and he’s packing quite the Mayhem Ability.
After we’ve built meter charge, hitting both bumpers unleashes Kingpin’s superpowered attack… a boombox that forces everyone around him to boogie uncontrollably. Thus, they’re stunned, and we can start lobbing grenade-guns at them. And the crowd goes wild! Well, less ‘wild’ than ‘on fire’. It’s clearly a callback to Saints Row IV’s hilarious dubstep gun. Never fear, loyal purple-jackets: the game doesn’t want for cheeky references to the series. Many of the – frankly – baffling number of special abilities, upgrades, gadgets, stolen LEGION technology and ‘Gremlin’ devices you’ll find in the vibrant metropolis have a distinct whiff of the trademark fleur de lis.
But what with the character-switching, stylised visuals, and ‘ultimate’ abilities, we’re smelling another influence here: Overwatch. “We’re trying to take inspiration from a lot of different sources,” Volition’s design manager Anoop Shekar tells us. “MOBAs, or something like Overwatch, where they have those kind of abilities – but putting them in a single-player context. Nobody’s really doing that and that’s an opportunity we think people are really going to enjoy.”
THE GUN AND ONLY
But why forgo co-op and multiplayer, when they were such fun in previous Saints entries? “We wanted players to feel like they are controlling the squad and have full control over who they’re playing as, and what they’re doing,” Shekar explains. “We wanted the focus to be on you as an individual running the Agency, and we didn’t want you to have to rely on your friends to do that.” Fair – waiting for mates to come online can be tiresome – but there’s definitely a sense from our latest hands-on that Agents Of Mayhem’s silly shenanigans and simple shooting would have felt more at home in a scrappy multiplayer brawler than a full-on solo campaign.
What we’ve seen of the writing struggles to match the bonkers snark of the Saints series, while the character-switching is a fumble (you’ve got to move your left thumb from your movement stick to hit the D-pad). It’s improved since last year’s E3 but the strides forward need to pick up the pace in time for an August launch. Get your skates on, Volition…
“KINGPIN’S MAYHEM ABILITY IS A BOOMBOX THAT FORCES NEARBY ENEMIES TO BOOGIE UNCONTROLLABLY.”