'Agents of Mayhem' Has Heart, But You Spend Too Much Time Finding the Fun

I couldn't tell you anything about the first two Saints Row games. They came across as bland, try-hard Grand Theft Auto rip-offs. But when Saints Row: The Third came out, several of my colleagues were insistent about giving it a try. They tossed a copy on my desk, and that night, as I helped a group of dopes rob a bank while wearing enormous cartoon masks of themselves, I quickly fell in love with the world of Johnny Gat and the 3rd Street Saints. The shooting parts of Saints Row: The Third and Saints Row IV were fine, but they largely succeeded because the characters, world, and mission design were funny and charming.

Agents of Mayhem is the latest game from Volition, the developers of the Saints Row games. It's a game that couldn't have existed without the foundation laid down by Saints Row, but one that seems haunted by it, as well. The game has some roots in the past, being set in the re-created Earth proposed at the end of Saints Row IV: Gat out of Hell, though largely disconnected from the world of Saints Row. It's again set in an open world, swapping the previously fictionalized cities—Stilwater, Steelport—for a futuristic take on Seoul, South Korea. In Saints Row IV, the series embraced a Crackdown-like universe of superpowered characters, collectibles and all, and Agents of Mayhem is playing with the same set of tools.

I've played more than 10 hours of Agents of Mayhem, and there is a lot to like. There's a good chance I'll see it all the way to the end, but damn, it's been a long time since I've played a game that's so actively fought me on finding its own fun. It's frustrating.

The game makes an awful first impression, for one. A key differentiation for Agents of Mayhem is the ability to swap between three characters at any time, presumably so players can have access to a wide variety of dynamic characters and abilities during combat.

Why, then, does Agents of Mayhem introduce you to this concept with the three blandest characters the game has to offer? One of them is a tank with a shotgun, another has an assault rifle and can throw grenades, and the last one has really fast dual pistols. It's hours before you have a chance to play with a character who does anything remotely interesting, and it doesn't help that the game's first mission is a bland assault on some generic evil lair. (That part never really gets much better; the game's set pieces lack flair and distinction.

Worse still, most of the game's additional characters—12 in all—are optional unlocks. If you don't spend time with the game's ample side missions, you'll end up with only a handful. Because I spent a few hours unlocking new agents, however, I now have a really fascinating group to play with. (Their individual stories are interesting, too.) One wields a bow and arrow for long-range sniping, capable of slipping in and out of stealth and targeting enemies with powerful area of effect attacks. Another can deploy a turret for distraction, while she focuses on attacking a single enemy, her energy weapon multiplying in power the long her beam focuses. The last character in my lineup is, perhaps, the coolest: a Yakuza-like gangster who wields a monstrously powerful pistol that, combined with critical hits, can be strung together to take out an entire group of enemies with a couple shots.

That's to say nothing of the rad folks I've got on the sidelines, like one dude stomps around with a monstrous freeze ray, capable of stopping folks in their tracks long enough for him to shatter them into a million pieces with a melee attack. If I could bring him with me, too, I would.

It's a strange choice to bury the game's biggest asset this way. If you simply stuck to the main path, deciding to hit up the side missions later, you're likely to miss out on taking advantage of the way combat can get interesting, as you weave together disparate powers and abilities to wreak havoc.

Agents of Mayhem is full of curious decisions like this, as it turn out.

The best open world games have, by definition, memorable worlds. Though Agents of Mayhem's take on Seoul comes across as lifeless, with citizenry rarely reacting to your actions, it's really tough to commit much of it to memory; the game is constantly removing you from the world. In order to change your squad, buy new tech, or interact with the metagame elements, you have to jump back to a place called The Ark. For whatever reason, none of this can be accomplished through the main menus, while you're exploring Seoul itself. Instead, if you accidentally bring the wrong squad member with, or if you want to send a spare agent on a side mission in the game's Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood-like metagame, that means a trip back to The Ark.

I like being able to swap my squad all the time, I like that sidelined agents can be useful and collect loot for me, and it's maddening to spend so much time away from the game in order to accomplish these tasks. It slows everything down.

All of this is what I mean by having to constantly fight the game to find the fun. When everything is in sync—a dynamic trio of agents with wild and contradictory powers fighting alongside one another, a memorable set piece with lots of enemies—it's easy to fall in love with what Agents of Mayhem is trying to pull off. You understand the game. But it's not going to be surprising if a lot of people bounce off in the opening hours, unwilling to spend their own time trying to find that, or eventually growing tired of navigating poorly designed UI to see these moments.

That's to say nothing of the game's humor, which, as we discussed on Waypoint Radio yesterday, is the definition of hit-or-miss. Unlike Saints Row's latter installments, Agents of Mayhem cannot rely on this to carry the day. Every once and awhile, the R-rated G.I. Joe shtick lands on something genuinely funny, but it usually feels like it's trying too hard.

Playing on PC, the game's performance left something to be desired on a more than capable machine. My i5-6500, GeForce GTX 1080, and 16GB RAM should have been able to get a consistent frame rate, but the game was often all over the place. The lack of consistency was the real head-scratcher, too; often, the frame rate would dive, or dive into a straight-up stutter, at random times, even when there wasn't much happening in the game at the time.

Agents of Mayhem walks a delicate line, trying to leverage what folks loved about Saints Row while trying to build something new. The game's core concept is sound and good, but the high notes are far enough apart that it can often feel like too much work to reach the next one. And while I'm always going to applaud a video game trying to make you laugh, an emotion we could use plenty more of in 2017, Agents of Mayhem often isn't very funny. It does have heart, though, and enough satisfying pieces that I'll be playing more of it. Maybe it'll be enough for you, too.

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