SPOILERS Agents of Mayhem - A Critique

This evening I finished "Agents of Mayhem" and I thought I'd write a critique, mostly for Volition but everyone is welcome to read it.

I should start with my background, as a game player and as a fan of Volition. I play a wide variety of game types (Adventure, Action, RPG, MMOs), primarily I like to get lost in another world of storytelling. The storytelling can take many, many different forms. I discovered Volition's games in the entirely wrong order, I started with Saints Row IV. I had purchased it during a Steam sale and played it about a year later and was absolutely delighted with the mixture of over the top humor, great characters and an interesting if not insane story. I then played Saints Row the Third and Saints Row 2, in that order.

I'm not going to go into bugs. All software has bugs and Agents of Mayhem is no exception. This is the first Volition game I've played at launch so it would be unfair for me to try to compare it with their other titles. I'll leave that to others that have.

Bottom line first, I did enjoy the game. I had fun. I put 70 hours in. But, unfortunately, when compared with Volition's other works it does not come anywhere near the standards they set in the past.

I pre-ordered Agents of Mayhem for my PC on Steam and clicked "Pre-Load" as soon as the button was there. Overall it's a decent game with an interesting story concept, however, it is missing a lot of what made the later Saints Row games really special and I hope in their next effort, Volition tries to restore that.

From a technical standpoint, the game is built on a solid core, clearly based on Volition's experience with the Saints Row series. However, even some of those elements feel over simplified. I understand the desire to streamline but it's been over-streamlined.

From a storytelling point of view, Agents of Mayhem is largely missed opportunities. Unlike the Saints Row series, it's difficult to connect with any of the characters. They aren't developed nearly enough and for the most part are all built on tropes and stereotypes (which may be intentional as part of the G.I. Joe parody/nod). This is worsened by the lack of a player character, there's no single character that can be used to "pull" everything together. Barring a custom character, it might have worked better if the player had played Persephone.

The story itself isn't very compelling and having an already "insane" villain go "insane" didn't really make any sense. The writing's tone didn't seem to be able to find it's place either, jumping between deadly serious, lighthearted and a little silly, and downright creepy. It's fine to have a mix (Saints Row IV did this well) but this just seemed to be inconsistent, perhaps written by different people. The world's state/setting is never really explained. We do get glimpses of the world and various characters' backstories but never in enough detail to put the pieces together. Worse, the goals of organizations and characters seemed very two dimensional, at best, and for the most part it's all just vague and hand-wavey . What little character development there is with the personal missions each seem to get to a point where it looks like it's about to get interesting and then it's over and doesn't go any deeper. Most don't even get that far and are just tired old cliches.

Some of the gameplay mechanics seemed poorly thought out as well, the RPG style attribute leveling is literally rendered pointless when the agent hits level 20 and is promoted to "Super Agent 20" since you can immediately max each attribute. Cores are so easy to come by that at the end of the game I had enough to max another 4 agents and I'd have more if I had bothered to look for the rest of the shards in the city. (According to Agency Status/Seoul Progress I can get another 149 shards.)

The jarring jumping around of styles for cutscenes does not do the game any favors either. Some are animated (albeit low budget by TV standards), some are done in a motion comic style (like Volition ran out of time and/or money to have them animated) and some are traditional CG.

I hope Volition's next game goes back to the high standard set with Saints Row the Third and Saints Row IV. I wouldn't even mind another Agents of Mayhem game if it brought much needed depth to it's universe and characters.
 
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Well, AoM is Nice, but same as you, I felt some emptiness on the game too... And to be fair, is a bit repetitive. (Go there, blow shit up and go to another place to blow more shit up and go to another place to blow even more shit up and finally, go to another settlement that needs your help [I couldn't let this slip])
 
Well, AoM is Nice, but same as you, I felt some emptiness on the game too... And to be fair, is a bit repetitive. (Go there, blow shit up and go to another place to blow more shit up and go to another place to blow even more shit up and finally, go to another settlement that needs your help [I couldn't let this slip])
True, even though the plot behind the missions and the settings were different each time, it was basically: Go there, hack that, oh Legion troops approaching, good now hack the other thing oops guess what more Legion troops on their way
 
Bottom line first, I did enjoy the game. I had fun. I put 70 hours in. But, unfortunately, when compared with Volition's other works it does not come anywhere near the standards they set in the past.
I agree with this. It's far more simplistic than something like SR2, which was epic.

Overall it's a decent game with an interesting story concept, however, it is missing a lot of what made the later Saints Row games really special and I hope in their next effort, Volition tries to restore that.
Agree 100%

From a technical standpoint, the game is built on a solid core, clearly based on Volition's experience with the Saints Row series. However, even some of those elements feel over simplified. I understand the desire to streamline but it's been over-streamlined.
I feel that it's over simplified too. Things like teleporting into cars and teleporting into buildings instead of opening doors just feels like corner-cutting.

From a storytelling point of view, Agents of Mayhem is largely missed opportunities. Unlike the Saints Row series, it's difficult to connect with any of the characters. They aren't developed nearly enough and for the most part are all built on tropes and stereotypes (which may be intentional as part of the G.I. Joe parody/nod). This is worsened by the lack of a player character, there's no single character that can be used to "pull" everything together. Barring a custom character, it might have worked better if the player had played Persephone.
Personally, after playing it for a while, I'm not so fond of the character switching. I preferred having a single customized character all the way through the game like I did in Saints Row. I feel like I don't know any of the characters very well in AOM.

I hope Volition's next game goes back to the high standard set with Saints Row the Third and Saints Row IV. I wouldn't even mind another Agents of Mayhem game if it brought much needed depth to it's universe and characters.
I never liked Saints Row IV that much, and I'd prefer it go back to SR2 and SR3, honestly. (except I did like 1950's Steelport and How the Saints Saved Christmas DLC a lot)
 
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I have to say, I think they did a really bad job at marketing this game, that is something I have to straight up criticize, and also the super strange polishing issues. Also, (apparently according to lots of people online) a bad job of explaining what type of game it is.

Barely anyone seems to know the game existed, it is utterly bizarre.

Like, these guys are given the strangest impression, I think it summarizes a lot of issues that should be considered.


I really hope feedback to the game has been constructive enough that Volition understands what people are critiqueing in regards to all the different aspects of development, it's obviously not just one horrible thing, it's a huge range of smaller things.
 
Before Agents of Mayhem came out I thought it was going to be pretty bad. I thought there was no way a game with such outdated graphics, generic gameplay, and on top of that Denuvo could be worth $60. But now that it's out and I finally got a chance to play it, I have to say... it's freaking terrible.

Seriously, there's nothing good about this game. The graphics are only slightly better than Saints Row IV and yet while I'm one of the few people that can actually run Arkham Knight at a constant 60 FPS on Ultra. my PC can hardly hold Agents of Mayhem at 45 FPS in the open world. That wouldn't be so bad if the game actually had impressive graphics, but it doesn't even support MSAA. Nevermind the fact that everything looks like it was made out of cardboard.

Gameplay wise there's not much to speak of. It feels like it was purposely engineered by the greatest minds of the 21st century to be the most generic and forgettable 3rd person shooter ever. The open world aspect is pointless apart from some extremely tedious and boring vehicle missions, and it's on-par with Saints Row IV in terms of dull-ness. Heck it's probably worse, the peds not only have less variety but they seem to have fewer polygons as well. I could swear I was playing GTA III for a while.

Long story short, if you take everything that was good about Saints Row IV (which wasn't much), remove it, and you pretty much have Agents of Mayhem. Which is precisely what many of us predicted it would be.
 
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Hmm, it's odd hearing people talk about performance problems - I was running pre-release builds at 60fps at 4k without difficulty - but then I have a GTX 1080!

I've critiqued AoM in private to DSV, but my biggest issues with it are:
  • Culturally, the game is extremely American. If you didn't grow up in America watching American morning cartoons and reading American comics, 99.9% of the references will fly by you completely. It feels like a big collection of in-jokes that you're not privy to, and that sucks.
  • The open world is full of things visually, but very little of it can actually be interacted with in any way.
  • The city feels very small.
  • There are no planes or helicopters, and the car variety is pretty minimal. Several of the road vehicles aren't player controllable, either.
  • The story feels like it starts half way through without a good hook to get me interested.
  • We're given a huge cast of characters that have backstory we're suddenly supposed to care about with little to no intro.
  • At times, visual effects are overwhelming and fill the screen, making it hard to see what you're doing.
  • There's no real feedback when you're getting injured until your character is downed.
  • Missions feel repetitive - there's lots of "go here, scan this, hack this, enter base, clear rooms, suddenly done".
  • Combat doesn't really feel satisfying - for example melee attacks often need to be done over and over to kill common enemies.
Edit: on the bright side, it is fairly pretty.
 
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