Agents of Mayhem is the kind of game that makes you question whether you’re wasting your life playing video games. That is a harsh indictment, and I stand by it, but ultimately Agents of Mayhem isn’t a terrible game. It’s a game with good ideas, good intentions, and insufficient resources to make those ideas work well. What you end up with is a game that was just fun enough to keep me playing but annoying and boring enough to give me a feeling of emptiness when it was all over. Unlike something like Horizon Zero Dawn, which created a unique and special world and told a gripping story, Agents of Mayhem feels like a whole bunch of filler holding…nothing together. It’s all mortar and no bricks.
The concept behind Agents of Mayhem, however, is rock solid. Combine Crackdown with Overwatch with a G.I. Joe super agent aesthetic and let the player loose in a futuristic Seoul, full of side-missions, giant buildings, cute little mascots, and big explosions. In order to keep things fresh Agents of Mayhem serves up 12 characters (with more to come as DLC, including a scummy Gamestop pre-order deal for Saints Row favorite Johnny Gat) with differing abilities and characteristics, and lets you roll with 3 of them at a time (except for some agent specific missions.) This system works decently well and while the game would definitely be better with co-op, I didn’t feel its absence too powerfully. If you’re feeling bored you can always change your squad up to use someone else, and I did this several times before settling on a trio of characters I felt complimented each other and sticking with them through the last third of the game.
I was glad the game let me change things up on my own, because Agents of Mayhem can be boring. It can be very boring. The mechanics are not the problem (more on that in a bit), though they don’t help much. It’s a pretty straightforward run and gun third person shooter (no kneeling behind cover here, though some agents can cloak and run behind a corner out of danger.) Each agent has one weapon, which they can change a little bit through the “gadget” upgrade system, one special ability on a cooldown (such as shooting a bullet that induces fear in an opponent, or shooting a cluster of grenades) and an ultimate “Mayhem” ability that takes a very long time to charge up, or can be charged through a randomly dropping powerup. The Mayhem ability are supposed to be huge tide turners, but they mostly fall flat for me. One lets you shoot your chaingun without it overheating. Another induces fear in everyone around the character for a few seconds. They’re useful, but since you spend almost all your time fighting clusters of cannon fodder all it means is you can defeat one of those groups faster than you would have otherwise.
While the play styles vary between the agents (there’s a sniper with a bow, a ninja with a sword and shuriken, the chaingunner, a guy with a short range ice gun that freezes over and can be smashed into the ground for an AOE, a turret and electricity gun character etc…) there’s not a lot of variety within each character. The chaingun lady feels pretty much the same fully upgraded as she does when you first get her, and with your limited move set there’s not a lot you can do to change up your playstyle with her. The gadget upgrades might add damage over time to a weapon, increase the clip size, or change the status effect it inflicts, but with a few exceptions they don’t change the way a weapon feels or plays. That means that the variety has to come from level and task design, and here Agents of Mayhem falls very very flat.
Agents of Mayhem repeats itself relentlessly. If you do a task once, other than in a boss fight, you can be pretty sure that you will do it again, likely in the same mission, and then again later in the game. Some of these simple tasks will be done again and again over the course of the game, to the point that they elicited frustrated sighs from me whenever they came up. Boy I hope you like blowing up clusters of explosive barrels because Agents of Mayhem loves to ask you to do that over and over again. I also hope you like delving into identical cookie cutter dungeons (called lairs) that are all gray and ugly, and fighting waves of enemies in them, because that’s Agents of Mayhem’s favorite trick. Sometimes there’s poison gas and you have to hit a few switches to escape to the next room. Sometimes the game literally just tells you to move on to the next room and you don’t have to do anything, which can make a supposed balls to the wall action game feel like the world’s worst walking simulator. There are some strings of missions where you delve into the same looking dungeons, completing the same objectives, over and over to the point where you might think you’re playing a horrible indie roguelike or a game from the very early PS2/Xbox era. Remember the library from Halo? This is much, much worse, though no one lair is quite that long (and the combat is not nearly as fun as Halo’s was, either at the time or now.)
In addition to the repetition, Agents of Mayhem is full of jank. I encountered multiple bugs ranging from minor to a bluescreen crash of my PS4, and even when the game is working as intended it’s full of clipping and weird NPC behavior and cut scenes that trigger far from seamlessly. It needed significant polish and it’s clear that this was shipped either to meet a deadline or because the publisher didn’t have faith in it and didn’t want to spend any more money. To be fair, it is a completable video game, and not even a bad one, but it doesn’t feel finished.
And it’s not just the quickly made cookie cutter missions or the bugs that make it feel unfinished. There’s something very off about a lot of systems in the game. For example, you collect gadgets to modify your agents and “cores” to upgrade their abilities throughout the game. I ran out of gadgets to collect at about the half way mark (since I had them all) and I ended the game with 54 cores in my inventory. Considering that you only need 36 to fully upgrade your whole squad, that seems like a really weird balance (to be fair I did search for core fragments because I love Crackdown style traversal resource gathering, but the game was passing them out like candy by the end in loot chests and end of mission rewards.) On the flip side, none of my agents reached max level, and I was constantly low on cash to buy base upgrades and other items. The game gives you XP and cash for every mission, but it usually gives you about $2,500 and 2000 XP, whether at the start of the game or the end. By the end of the game you can get $1,700 just from blowing up a group of enemies, so having such a piddling sum as a mission reward just feels weird.
There are also 4 different character upgrade systems, a host of skins for characters weapons and vehicles (though I only collected a tiny percentage of those) and additional half baked systems like a world map where you can deploy characters to collect miniscule amounts of resources (basically useless), contracts, which require you to meet certain specific objectives either on your own or with other players in order to collect miniscule amounts of resources (basically useless), and a territory control metagame where you take over bad guys towers and then they take those towers back (both useless AND infuriating.) Finally there are overpowered consumable weapons that can be purchased for ingame currency and can do anything from unleashing a nuke to kill everyone to reviving your whole squad if you wipe.
All of this, plus the cut and paste dungeon design and plans for adding agents, make me think that this was planned as a free to play game at some point. It doesn’t have any free to play hooks at present, and I am not sure what you would want to buy, but the concept of “quantity over quality” for so much of the content and the various types and levels of currency make me think that there were plans to make this free to play but it was decided it made more sense as a traditional $60 game.
It’s not worth $60. I would have been happy at about $20, but honestly I would probably have been just as happy to skip it altogether. It’s not that it’s totally without charm. The basic gameplay is fine. Unlike others I enjoyed the (very cheaply made) animated cut scenes; the voice acting is good, the graphics are reasonably nice (though the world is not very interactive and there was more pop-in than I expected on my PS4 Pro) and though there’s not enough music the music that’s there is pretty good, including a couple nice nods to K-pop (though this game should CLEARLY have a ton more K-pop.)
There’s also fun to be had in the story missions, which have a lot of the repetition of the rest of the game but at least also offer some unique encounters and story beats, and do create the feeling of playing through a season of a low budget G.I. Joe rip off (albeit with more cursing and blood than a cartoon like that would ever had.)
But the gameplay I’ve described as “fine” also feels pretty dated (this really does feel like a Crackdown sequel from 2011, except for the graphics and complex loot systems) and the open world activities are such garbage that just traversing the city collecting shards and loot chests is pretty much the only fun to be had outside the mission structure. The driving is functional but nothing more. The humor and writing ranges from bad to okay to the occasional line where I said “eh, alright, that was clever.” The connections to the Saints Row universe, other than a couple characters from the games, are extremely minor.
It’s also not a very long game. I probably put 15 hours into it, and that was with unlocking all the characters and (regrettably) sampling a bunch of the side missions. I didn’t die once either (individual characters did but not the whole team), though I let the game set the difficulty for me and it never went above 7 so I probably could have bumped it up. I didn’t want to, because the problems this game have wouldn’t be solved by increased difficulty. Increased difficulty won’t make those cut and paste dungeons any less repetitive (or fix the inexplicable secret rooms that have no loot or purpose for existing inside the already boring as hell dungeons.) Increased difficulty won’t fix the bland side missions (or some of the story missions) or add some decent music when exploring the world (seriously, the game’s lack of interesting sound much of the time is a real problem.)
It’s an empty experience and when I was finished I felt myself wondering “Why did I play that? Why did I finish it? Why didn’t I read a book or listen to some music or just take a nap?” The game held my attention but at the bare minimum level, and nothing about it was ever satisfying or thrilling or joyful. Compared to something like Zelda, which felt like a portal into another world of adventure and whimsy, or even Quantum Break, which at least told a semi-competent story, Agents of Mayhem has that cheap off-brand drugstore chocolate feel to it. It’s sweet enough that it’s not unenjoyable, but when you’re done you just feel like you should have bought something more enjoyable if you were going to take in that many empty calories.
I was in the mood for a low-key open world game that wasn’t as intense in either story or gameplay as Horizon: Zero Dawn. I wanted another Sunseet Overdrive. I wanted Saints Row 2 again. Volition didn’t want to make that again, though. They wanted to make this. And they did. I’m just not sure who it’s for.
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