Agents of Mayhem Review (PS4)

Saints Row 5 is a game about a secret agency… Oh, what’s that? This is a NEW game called Agents of Mayhem? I’m quite sure this plays and feels like it’s another entry in the Saints Row series from developer Deep Silver. After all, it plays like a Saints Row game, sounds like a Saints Row game, and the story sounds like the same far-fetched thing that would come from the Saints Row game series… Well then, let’s look at Agents of Mayhem.

Game Name: Agents of Mayhem 
Platform(s): Xbox One; PlayStation 4 (Reviewed) & PC
Publisher(s): Deep silver
Developer(s): Volition
Release Date: August 15, 2017 
Price: $59.99 | Amazon

In a simultaneous global assault, LEGION has taken control over the nations of the world and the only force left to stop them is MAYHEM. Led by the mysterious and no-nonsense Persephone Brimstone, MAYHEM’s elite Super Agents are called to the city of Seoul, South Korea. Led by LEGION Minister Doctor Babylon and his diabolical lieutenants, a nefarious plot is set in motion to build a world-altering device that will grant unrivaled power to the supervillain organization. In order to stop LEGION and take back the world, the Agents of Mayhem will traverse a sprawling urban battlefield from the ground to the rooftops and team up as a super-agent collective to stop LEGION at any cost. Success is far from guaranteed and collateral damage will be substantial, but it’s all in a day’s work for the Agents…

The gameplay in Agents of Mayhem is pretty straightforward. You’re given a third person perspective and you hammer the crap out of the fire button till things are dead. You do have some abilities like double jumping and dodging for just about every class of character, yes there are classes here. Where Agents of Mayhem tries to be different is giving you a choice of snipers, heavies, speedster DPS (Damage Per Second), and fancy shooters for you to play with. These characters come with different abilities like a Fisherman’s hook that can bring people in, a drone that helps you shoot at enemies, or a sweeping one hit kill or an AOE (Area of Effect) blast shot that takes down groups with a single hit. Outside of that, Agents of Mayhem is pretty generic when it comes to combat.

You accomplish all this with a group of only three characters at a time, meaning you have to think about group makeup and actually pay attention to what you have to do in the missions rather than picking three people and bulldozing through each mission. Not to mention that out of these three characters, you can only use one at a time, and once they have been downed, you cannot use them any further unless you’re randomly given a revive token (which do not drop often). The number of times you’ll fail a mission due to not having someone who can break armor or take down a group quickly due to a bad pick happens way too often, but a quick changeover or restarting from one of the too many checkpoints will fix that problem fast.

However, the best place that Agents of Mayhem excels is in its storytelling, which is a combination of animated cut-scenes and conversations between characters during your travels in each mission. During some of the more story-based missions or character introduction missions, these scenes are fun to watch and a joy to play, but outside of these segments, which do dry up very fast, you are left with a lot of races, collection, and score based missions to do which are just not that much fun. You’d think that given the amount of fun and interesting side missions Deep Silver was able to put into the Saints Row series that they could come up with something a bit more interesting tha the foot and car races for the majority of their side missions.

It’s a sad thing to say about Agents of Mayhem, but it’s a very “meh” looking game. That being said, it’s still a damn good looking game. Everything looks crisp and shiny for a game set in the future with all the pew pew laser guns that a game like this is expected to have. Yet I still can’t shake that Saints Row feeling in the way the characters look, and it doesn’t help that one of my favorite characters to bring on every mission is Johnny Gat from that very same series and he looks like he was pulled right out of the Saints Row 4 game and placed into this one. Outside of that one tiny flaw, the explosions go kaboom, things comically go splat and the electronic style to everything looks like something you would see in a hololens style world. So I can’t fault it that much. It’s just that after so long, you’d think that Deep Silver would want to do something that would look like a step away or evolution from Saints Row instead of something that looks like an extended Saints Row DLC campaign.

The sound in Agents of Mayhem is a little disappointing. There’s no customization playlist of amazing tracks for you to rock out to in the cars, and everything sounds like it was taken from the most generic Sci-Fi sound library on the planet. Even the characters, while being full of personality, just sound generic as hell. Again, it just feels like they did the same recording style as they did with Saints Row thinking that it will be enough to keep those fans satisfied and that’s good enough, but it’s not. Seems like a step backward in the developers’ sense… Hell, there’s not even a Nolan North sound option!

Overall, Agents of Mayhem is a decent game, and it barely hits that level. It’s a game that is just too generic and too familiar to someone like me who is a Saints Row fan for it to be enjoyable on a new game level. Agents of Mayhem feels like it should have been a Saints Row DLC or even Saints Row 5, not the beginning of a new series of games. It’s just a feeling that I cannot shake. I’m sure there are a lot more die-hard fans out there who love Agents of Mayhem and will think I “just don’t get it”, but sometimes you just expect something different from a developer from time to time, and this just was not it.

Review Disclosure Statement: Agents of Mayhem was provided to us by Five Star Games on behalf of Deep Silver for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please go review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.

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