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.
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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