Agents of Mayhem (2017)

Agents of Mayhem is not a great game. The writing is bad, the gameplay is repetitive, the mission structure is uninspired, the voice acting can be cringe inducing, the visuals are boring, and the music is...was there music? Yet I beat the game front to back, all missions. And gave it a 3/5. What gives?

Despite all this game's shortcomings there is something to be said for the Crackdown/Saints Row 4 formula. A giant open world where you leap, blast, and drive your way around is just what the doctor ordered once every 7 or so years. This really speaks to that formula, and how even a poor implementation of this can still be fun.

The writing in Agents of Mayhem is always trying too hard to be funny and edgy. As if written by a 14-year-old whose mom isn't watching, it uses profanity in a way that seems to miss the point of profanity. If every sentence has "fuck" then why even say it?

The story is lame, and told in cutscenes that look like a shitty Archer knockoff. But nobody fired up Agents of Mayhem (or Crackdown) for the story. I'm OK with the story being lackluster, as long as it doesn't get in the way. A group of comic book style villains who are villains for no other reason than to be villains terrorize a near-future Seoul in South Korea. You, the Agents of Mayhem, stop them. There is very little more to it than that. Some of the bad guys have some mildly interesting moments, like the rise of AISHA, an AI K-Pop group, but that's about it. Too much of the story is told in dusty tropes and try-hard dialogue to care about.

It's a shame, too, because every so often a genuinely funny scene emerges. Like when Joule, an Italian tech expert, goes into her father's lab and has to converse with an AI with bad voice recognition. It's got some good lines and is sort of relatable. But for every scene like that there are a dozen where you roll your eyes and cringe. Some of these good moments are in the banter between agents that play as you explore, which I appreciate.

The voice acting is…look, I'm sure those actors are doing the best they can with that they've got. But a few are so difficult to listen to that I muted the game and put on music. This is, I'm convinced, the "correct" way to play Agents of Mayhem. Put a muzzle on the game and it becomes way more enjoyable. The voices for Braddock, a tough as nails ex-marine, and Fortune, a Columbian sky-pirate, were particularly jarring. Fortune sounds like someone pretending to be Hispanic, and Braddock sounds like someone pretending to be tough. The rest of the voices range from "mildly annoying" to "pretty OK". I think the voice for Red Card, a German football hooligan, is done well. He's fun.

I was struck by just how much work was put into the voices. When you're in the field and your contact back at base is speaking to you, they have response lines for every single character. This means that every response for every in-game mission conversation was recorded 10-ish different ways. And it's not always the same lines, too. It's amazing that this much effort was put in, and it's a shame that so many of the characters are unlikeable.

Playing the game is actually not a bad time. You start with 3 characters (agents) that you can swap at-will. Each has a unique gun, special ability, "Mayhem Ability (a meter-driven super move), and they do not share a health pool. Over the course of the game you'll unlock more, up to 10 or so total agents. It can be fun to construct your group to fill gaps and play to your strengths. I liked Kingpin in particular, who is quick and does fantastic up-close damage with an SMG. Also Joule, who deploys a turret she can heal, and Sheherazad, a middle eastern ninja who does massive damage at close range. I enjoyed trying all the agents and finding a team that worked for me. Each character levels up independently (though they get XP if they're in your party, but they don't need to be the active agent), which gives a good sense of progression, as they unlock certain traits at level 10. The level cap is 20.

The map is loaded with activities, but I hope you're not a "clear the map" type, because you can't. Every single activity that's not a main quest or a collectible item respawns after a time. Once I noticed this I stopped doing them. What's the point if it never ends? Sure, I understand some activities should always be around for grinding and filling out the map. But all of them? It just didn't sit well with me. I like the progression of clearing a map, personally.

The story missions are mostly forgettable. Many of them have you going into a "lair", which is a short dungeon. There are only a handful of room types and they repeat, which makes every lair feel identical. Even the story ones largely feel the same, which is disappointing. There are a few exceptions, like Ariadne's lair which is filled with robot effigies and exploding stuffed animals. You'll start to notice how same-y everything is about 30% through the game.

One thing that I really enjoyed was the difficulty settings. You can choose between 0-15 depending on your progression in the game, with 15 being extremely difficult and 0 being functionally impossible to lose. Each step up gives you a boost in XP and cash. At some point I bumped the difficulty to max and tried. It was actually a good challenge - until I got to a boss fight. The boss fight was straight up impossible on max difficulty with the group I chose so I had to dip it down. Still, it made for a good change of pace.

Maybe my experience here is colored because I got it for $3 on sale on PSN, and I played it the first week my daughter was born. I was off for paternity leave and had nothing to do except just "be available" for anything my wife needed. Time is a weird blur in those first days of parenthood, and Agents of Mayhem was the perfect low-commitment, drop-in-drop-out game for that time.

With all its shortcomings, Agents of Mayhem is a fine game mechanically, it really is. If you're missing Crackdown (or Saints Row 4) I would absolutely say it's worth playing just for that gameplay loop alone. Just put it on mute.

AOM lives and dies on the strength of its characters, and getting to know them is what kept me engaged for most of the game. The agents all play differently, even in terms of their traversal abilities, so getting a new agent and unlocking some of their gadgets to mess around with is always fun. All the agents, as well as the supporting cast of characters back at The Ark, are charmingly flat caricatures that aren't trying to be anything more, and there's some humorous dialogue and whatnot sprinkled throughout the game.

Once you've unlocked the final agent, however, and are no longer those spikes of novelty, the repetitiveness really sets in. While Soule has some fun, good-looking environments to play around in, eventually you've been everywhere, more than once. While every side mission is fun enough the first time you do it, they get real old real fast; it's the same problem all open-world games seem to have, but confined to a tiny map. Even worse, every story mission inevitably leads to a L.E.G.I.O.N. Lair, a series of modular, functionally identical dungeons that distinguish themselves only by how long it takes to slog through one of them—if you're lucky, you'll be in and out in 5 minutes.

All the other features the game throws in to try to shake thing up just, kinda, don't? All the character and weapon skins are just paint jobs (in the case of Scheherazade's swords, a barely noticeable paint job) with the exception of the 3 starter characters who each have one unique skin (Fortune's steampunk set is, admittedly, very cool). For all that some of the upgrades and gadgets are actually fun changes, a lot of the character upgrades are kind of boring, the supposedly super advanced L.E.G.I.O.N. Tech provides such game-changing boosts as "get 8% bonus Mayhem when you kill a stunned character" and "Do extra damage to Blitztroopers", and there was at least one Core ability that I was pretty sure would make the character worse.

Also there are some game-breaking glitches, though the relatively good checkpointing and quick load times minimize the frustration if you have to restart.

All in all, the game is just a little undercooked—good ideas, but not developed to their full potential, with a lot of pointless fluff mixed in. But if you're looking for a palate cleanser in between games it might be a fun one to mess around with.

p.s. What's a game with a good hacking minigame? Do they exist? I mean, I guess I like Bioshock hacking, but only because I happen to be really good at it.

...And that's OK.

Really, it's not a bad game when you get down to it. It does feel a bit slapdash when it comes to the environments. Seoul Itself isn't bad. There's a number of unique spots, but it can feel a bit samey. Where that hurts the most is in Legion bases... Those things are cookie cutter as sin. I very quickly memorized the tiles used to make each base and knew exactly where to look for loot. That hurt it the most really.

The side missions are your bog standard repeatable tosh, it's an open world that's not made by CDPR, so there's that :/

The writing and characters are where this games shines. The story isn't anything special, but the Saturday Morning Cartoon for adults feel they were going for made up for it. I instantly fell in love with Daisy and took her to the end of the game. Each character has one extra story mission which expands more on their personality and why they're with Mayhem, but... they should have expanded soooo much more on this. The characters sell this game, and we're left wanting.

All in all, I'd give it a solid "above average" 3.5, but I can't so it get's rounded up to a 4.

If it's on sale, get it and enjoy it. Skip the dlc, it doesn't really add much.