AGENTS OF MAYHEM
Volition drops the Saints, and also the ball
Ithink about the trajectory of Saints Row a lot. Starting as a GTA clone, the series found its footing with Saints Row: The Third, where the violence and excess created a funny, often absurd story that could have been satire if it wasn’t having so much fun.
SaintsRowIV makes you President of the United States of America. Aliens have blown up the Earth, and you’re trapped in a Matrix-style simulation. (Also, you have superpowers.) Still funny, and far more absurd, this setting gave Volition an excuse to tweak its open-world design— doing away with realism to make basic traversal more fun.
Don’t worry, all of this is relevant to AgentsofMayhem. It isn’t a SaintsRow, but there’s a thread that connects them. Certain SaintsRow characters are present, for instance—albeit in ‘alternate universe’ forms. More practically, they’re both open-world games, and share an irreverent tone. But where SaintsRow developed a strong, distinct identity, AgentsofMayhem feels like it has none.
It’s a singleplayer open-world hero shooter. You play the rogue’s gallery of MAYHEM (the Multinational Agency Hunting Evil Masterminds), in a war against LEGION (the League of Evil Gentlemen Intent on Obliterating Nations). The two groups fight across a futuristic Seoul that, ironically, feels like it was designed in the mid-2000s. I didn’t get a chance to explore it in too much detail, but what I did see felt flat—with none of the vibrance and character of the best sandboxes. The futuristic white skyscrapers and pastel colors are nice to look at, but feel unexciting compared to SaintsRow, which used an exaggerated color palette to create distinct zones within a cohesive whole. Agentsof
Mayhem is competing with a near constant stream of open-world rivals, many of which feel more modern.
The cel-shaded aesthetic does little for me. I had a great time in the similarly cartoonish Borderlands2 and the Xbox One’s SunshineOverdrive, but Agents feels more restrained. I’ve only played for 90 minutes, much of it in featureless futuristic warehouses. (Think MassEffect 2 on a budget.) Even though the world is much bigger than what I’ve seen, it worries me that, in the short time I played, I couldn’t discern anything captivating about the visual design. GTA is immediately impressive in its scope and detail. JustCause3 has a vastness and vibrancy that contrasts against your own idiotic escapades. Mafia3 uses post processing to mimic its cinematic inspirations. AgentsofMayhem, based on what I’ve seen, is just a lightly comedic area that you’re in.
getting around
Exploring the world—something Saints RowIV excelled at—here feels uninteresting. There’s a triple jump, which is nice, but horizontal travel is done either on foot or in a car. This feels like a wasted opportunity given the multiple characters. Overwatch stands out by having different, meaningful traversal systems for each character. In AgentsofMayhem, some characters can dash instead of dodge, but from what I saw, that’s about as divergent as their movement gets.
There are 12 agents, and you pick three for each mission. So far, so BioWare RPG, but in Agents it’s not you and your squad. Rather, when you switch, your previous character disappears and your current one materializes in their place. While they’re out of action, agents slowly regenerate their shield and health.
There’s the seed of a good idea here. Not only do you need to switch agents based on their proximity to death, but each has a specific set of strengths and weaknesses. Some are better at
I’ve only played 90 minutes, much of it in featureless futuristic warehouses
damaging armor, others at shields (again, it’s a bit MassEffect), and each is suited to either short, medium, or long range combat. Fights can feel frantic, if only because having to switch up based on an agent’s specialities and condition adds extra interaction to the otherwise basic gunplay. AgentsofMayhem’s RPG elements mean there’s an added layer of progression. Damage values spew from enemies as you shoot them, inviting you to upgrade and tweak your loadout.
The game offers a varied cast of personalities, genders, and body types— but few of them sparked my interest. Hollywood is a generic action hero who’s specifically written as a generic action hero, but, beyond some knowing movie banter, nothing about his character suggests Volition is doing anything clever with that concept. Elsewhere there’s the typical hodgepodge: a pirate, a hitman, a soldier, and a foul-mouthed, violent rollerskater. The latter, Daisy, was my favorite, probably because she cropped up in a couple of the character-specific missions I played.
Each agent has a recruitment and personal mission. In Daisy’s recruitment mission, she’s following in the footsteps of her drunken rampage across the city the previous night. In each location, she remembers a sepia-tinged brawl— playable, of course—that takes her from a sushi restaurant to a local underground robot fight club. Silly, but kind of charming.
Daisy’s best moment came later, during the personal mission of Braddock—a former US marine. As Braddock tracks down her former comrades, who have defected to LEGION, Daisy butts in on comms—clearly bored, and a little bit drunk. She and Braddock get into an argument about clown dicks. “In my experience, clowns have got normal, regular person dicks,” explains Braddock. It’s a fun, irreverent conversation, and a sign that Volition hasn’t forgotten the importance of Saints Row’s character interactions. By giving each agent a personality outside of their basic character archetype, and by letting them interact with each other and form distinct relationships, they could produce some memorable, funny dialogue.
Each agent has specific abilities, plus a special ‘Mayhem’ skill that charges as you kill things. It’s standard hero shooter stuff: a mixture of area-of-effect, damage over time, and status conditions that can help whittle down the hordes. Some agents can stun every enemy in a radius, some can temporarily enhance their weapon, and some can just do lots of big, explosive damage. From what I’ve seen, it’s a reasonably (almost disappointingly) subdued set of skills, and nothing that wouldn’t fit into any hero shooter. More interesting to me are the gadgets, which let you modify a character with various perks. One, for Hollywood, offered a percentage chance to spawn a bouncing explosive clay rabbit on an enemy’s death. It’s far and away the weirdest thing I saw.
As you play, you’ll earn money and XP, unlocking new skills, gadgets, and customization options for each agent. That means plenty of scope for tinkering. Being able to instantly switch characters allows you to synchronize abilities and specializations. During my short session I stumbled upon some interesting combinations: Fortune’s stun, for instance, benefits heavy-hitting short range characters like Hardtack—buying him vital seconds to close the distance and engage at deadly range.
aiming low
Such theorycrafting may offer a compulsive hook, but I didn’t find the gunplay particularly exciting. For one thing, it’s a disappointingly basic arsenal for a futuristic comedy game. Hollywood carries a basic assault rifle, as befits a basic action star. The rest of the roster wields SMGs, shotguns, pistols, and, because this is a hero shooter, a bow and arrow. I’m not saying Volition needs to go full Dildo Bat or Dubstep Gun, but, aside from the obvious SaintsRow comparison, the arsenal feels uninspired even in comparison to other hero shooters.
I’m disappointed. It’s hard not to feel that this is a step backwards for Volition. SaintsRow built a strong, unique identity—even as it borrowed ideas. AgentsofMayhem doesn’t. It’s all been done elsewhere, often better. The best case is that the demo I played turns out to be unrepresentative, and the writing and character progression combine to form a charming story with a compulsive RPG-lite loop. The worst case is that the demo is representative, and AgentsofMayhem is simply unremarkable and derivative. Phil Savage
I’m not saying that Volition needs to go full Di ldo Bat or dubstep gun