It's hard to know where to start when writing about Agents of Mayhem, the new IP from the Saints Row developers at Volition. Some of its parts seem familiar of course, but taken together, it becomes difficult to describe in terms of other games. It takes multiplayer hero-shooter elements and puts them into a single-player experience, it borrows from the Pixar aesthetic and marries it to decidedly un-Pixar subject matter, and it even adds a surprising amount of RPG min/maxing to the predominantly shooty antics of third-person open-world action games. Even now as I read what I’m writing, it sounds kind of like I’m making it up as I go. I’m not – I actually played Agents of Mayhem, and it’s just that off-the-wall. In a good way.
At Mayhem’s heart is your squad of three agents, which you hand-pick from a larger pool of undisclosed size. In my demo, there were four to choose from, so someone was going to have to warm the bench. I carefully poured over the tabs full of info on each of them, finding much more to consider than I expected. Separate weapon, ability, and passive slots had their own sets of selectable mods to change their behaviors, a mostly empty inventory waited to be filled with unlockable gadgets, and a collection of character-specific stat boosts gave me a lot to chew on right off the bat. I decided I’d crunch numbers later, after I’d had the chance to crack some skulls.
And crack skulls I did, first with Agents of Mayhem’s square-jawed ex-reality TV star, Hollywood. With an assault rifle and an underslung grenade launcher, his kit is flexible and immediately understandable. But even if his tools are familiar, the flair with which he utilizes them helps him break the mold a bit. He launches each and every grenade with an equally explosive pelvic thrust, and his Mayhem ability (AoM’s equivalent to an “Ultimate”) turns an entire area around him into his own personal Michael Bay movie set, complete with unnecessary pyrotechnic displays and a bottomless clip for his bullet-hose. It’s silly, stylish, and a literal blast to use...pretty much Agents of Mayhem in a bottle.
The Right Agent for the Job
Hollywood is a great all-arounder; I had no problem dispensing the first wave of goons I faced while searching for the entrance to a nearby enemy hideout. But as his health began to whittle away, I decided to switch the shotgun-toting Hardtack in to give Hollywood a chance to take a breather and regenerate some health. I wasn't sorry I did either. The open spaces of a city sandbox might not seem like an ideal encounter space for a shotgun, but Hardtack’s handy teleportation harpoon fixes that nicely. Just hurl that thing into some distant sniper’s chest and suddenly they’re standing there, stunned, with the barrel of your shotgun resting on their nose. “Get over here,” evolved.
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Just hurl that harpoon into some distant sniper’s chest and suddenly they’re standing there, stunned, with the barrel of your shotgun resting on their nose. 'Get over here' evolved.
Last in my crew was the ex-sky pirate, Fortune, who rocks dual machine pistols and a sweet flying drone companion named G.L.O.R.Y., who zooms about, stunning enemies to set them up for the kill. Her active ability, Quicksand, creates an area of effect in which all enemies move slower, and and if they happen to be stunned, they remain so while under the effects of Quicksand. This pairs really well with her Mayhem ability, where she sends G.L.O.R.Y. out on a stunning spree. Just throw Quicksand out on a group of enemies after your robotic companion does her thing, and they’ll be standing there in a stupor forever while you mow them down.
Mind you, I didn’t figure combos like that out right away. In fact, my first few scuffles in the streets of a futuristic Seoul were kind of pedestrian. Agents of Mayhem’s core shooting and movement feel so familiar and graspable that I found myself just circle-strafing and pew-pewing my way to victory. It’s worth noting that had the demo not been set to “easy” by default, I would have had to lean more heavily on my crew’s abilities. Still, it’s nice to have a familiar base to fall back on while you learn all the crazy ins and outs.
Considering that you can swap seamlessly between characters at any time, even in the middle of some attack animations, there’s a ton of possibility here, and I only just started scratching the surface after multiple runs through the demo. Once I subbed out Hollywood to make the bow-wielding, trap-laying Rama my third, the character switching really started to click. I’d lay an explosive trap at my feet, switch to Hardtack, and then harpoon some poor fool to teleport him right onto it. Or starting with Fortune, I’d wait for her drone to stun an enemy, then quick-switch to Rama to set up an easy headshot with her bow. Simple and deadly.
Heart and Seoul
The characters and their abilities are the stars, but they aren’t the only elements of AoM that set it apart from the open-world action rank-and-file. You might have caught that I was searching for an enemy hideout at the start of the demo. After dispatching a few waves of enemies, I found it...by flipping open an unassuming-looking trashcan to hit a switch inside, opening a secret entrance leading down below street level. These hideouts will be procedurally generated in the final game, and their placements in the world will be randomized. Think of them like dungeons for you to discover and clear; a reason to keep exploring the world once the story has concluded.
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Saints Row is a comedy movie with action, Agents of Mayhem is an action movie with comedy.
That won’t be all either. The folks at Volition want the villains of L.E.G.I.O.N. to have a presence beyond story missions, so you’ll see their dastardly schemes playing out in the world from time to time. You may round a corner and see a huge graviton sphere warping space around it, sucking in everything in sight, and it’ll be up to you to shut it down. The demo included one of these events as part of a story mission, but other instances like it will be a standard part of exploring virtual-Seoul.
As for the story, it’s perhaps a little more grounded than the later entries in the Saints Row series, but it’s still zanier than any Grand Theft Auto or the like. One member of the dev team put it best when he said that “[if] Saints Row is a comedy movie with action, Agents of Mayhem is an action movie with comedy.” My mission to prevent the marriage of a kidnapped AI pop-star to a ruthlessly violent cyborg confirmed as much. It culminated in a K-Pop style musical number, followed by a brutal boss battle that gave my dodging reflexes a bit of a workout. I was particularly glad to find that all of my special abilities worked on my oversized opponent, including Hardtack’s harpoon. In fact, according to the devs, this was a very intentional choice, just so they can throw crazy challenges at the player to give them interesting problems to solve with the tools at their squad’s disposal.
It’s obviously tough to get a sense of how the open-world gameplay loop will shake out from a linear, walled-off demo, but one thing is clear already: Agents of Mayhem’s character swapping and skill synergy is going to give players a lot more to think about than the genre typically allows, and once a larger portion of the cast is revealed, there’s just no telling what the possibilities might be.
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