Agents of Mayhem – Review – A spin off to The Saint Row Series

So, we left the series off at “Gat out of Hell”, which was a very enjoyable expansion to the original game. This game starts of from one of the endings you can get from that expansion. So the Agents of Mayhem are a global police force that exists to catch all sorts of bad guys. It is an open world game with character switching at any time. Each character is well made, unique and enjoyable. The enemies this time around are the “Legion” lead by Dr Babylon.  The main heroes are Hollywood, Yeti , hacker girl , Arrow Indian Doctor, Roller skating machine girl, Johnny Gat from the original series and many more.

This time around there is focus on using as many character as possible with the new swapping ability. With some moves in the game that are often only achieved using swapping characters. The game is based in Seoul, South Korea and the style of the game graphics are cartoonish. To be honest the game looks good and the design style is fun to play and attractive. However there is little environment interaction so its pretty static as far as game-play goes. Just looks really cool but they did not leverage the great design to create some interesting game-play.

The side mission game-play in general is a lot like Saint’s Row Series. So, nothing new there. The main missions are your typical cookie cutter mission. You kill bad guys, you get a boss, you kill him and repeat.

Story of Agents of Mayhem

This is a hit or miss for most people. If you enjoyed the Saints Row Series then you know exactly what I’m talking about. However, keep in mind the jokes were not as good this time around. The references to pop culture are a bit dated and some of the jokes just fell flat. It’s the same style of writing but doesn’t seem like the same writers. So, the game suffers hugely in its predictable and sometimes awful dialogues. Keeping in mind Saints Row Series was always goofy but this gets pretty bad at times. The cut scenes are cool though with that style of cartoon animation and are interesting to watch.

Overall

Agents of Mayhem has a store where you can buy upgrades and guns etc. So, you can fine tune your character a lot. You can even send them on online timed missions to bring back some loot. However these features are not fully realized and one wonders why they were added in the first place. The strange part is that the game does not have proper coop online game-play, like it did in “Gat out of Hell”. This decision is indeed puzzling as it was one of the main fun features about the previous game. You could side up with a buddy and go wreak havoc in the city.

The game does have some bugs and glitches at this point, however we expect those to be sorted out.

Conclusion

There are some likable features in this game. Also, this style of game-play is such a niche that anything new that comes up in the style of Saints Row is always appreciated. However, this game could have been amazing with its great graphics and design. Where this game falls flat is the writing. The dialogues make it feel like a B Grade Game and that’s not something an update can fix. Perhaps they can still make it coop play with an update. It could open up a lot of features for the game. We just wish it was a bit less repetitive, fresh in story and game play design.