LTTP: Agents of Mayhem

ronaldthump · Jan 13, 2018

So I bought AOM for $20 during one of the sales - probably black friday. I'm a fan of Volition, thought Saints Row was a lot of fun and that one with the president/Aliens was just incredibly stupid but so much fun.

I'm 5 characters in, and there's a lot of potential here - can't quite put my finger on it - but its sort of boring?

Its sort of Crackdown meets Saint's row but something feels off. Maybe its the mission structure, the boring-ish overworld or the sort of open world slog of misc quests. One of the biggest problems really is the lack of interesting things in to do in the open world. Terrain is flat so there's very little difference in area: The game is always go here, do this. Go here, do that. With an total absence of interesting things in Seoul to do.

I did Hardtack (the shotgun tank guy) solo mission and it was just a swarm of enemies coming at me and it was a lesson in tedium. Just the same dull enemies coming at you left, right. It's so bad.

I like that there's unlockable characters but I find it really irritating to do 1x boring misc quest to unlock the characters quest/mission. It's always do stupid misc things, like drive around, kill some thugs, save a hostage, go to a lair and then you can try to unlock your character. Its bad.

The characters swear a lot in this cartoony 3rd person shooter, somewhat amusing I guess

Pros:
* sometimes shooting + killing enemies (esp with hollywood in mayhem mode is fun)
* Unlocking new characters and new playstyles is cool. I just got the black gangster character with the uzi and he's fun to play with.
* Swapping btw characters is sort of cool
* Lots of unlockables and perks and what not
* I like that there's a hub and different difficulty to XP+cash bonus

Cons:
* The map is accessed via 2 buttons presses and its really quite irritating because you want to look at it easily. And because the map is locked away like this, it makes it really unuseful. Normally in this type of game, I'd have the world mapped out in my head already - you play any sort of open world - eg; infamous, GTAV etc - you'd remember areas. I don't remember any of the regions in this game at all. There ought to be a minimap overlay.
* The game is so fucking repetitive.
* Entering these Lairs are so fucking boring. Its the same everytime. Boring!
* you seem to be killing the same enemies all the time. I've mayhemed it to maximum mayhem and killed the final guy and reset the meter.
* Mission structure seems to be the same shit mixed up different ways
* Something about the controls especially with regards to jumping and dashing feels off
* When a character dies/drop - I can't even work out how to get the special drop/item to bring them back. But if you die after a checkpoint, they come back.

I keep coming back to it though but its a reluctance sort of return. Knowing me, I'll probably give up on it soon. I keep thinking "I wonder what I'll do to fix this game".

What's the best unlockable character?

AntiMacro · Jan 13, 2018

It's pretty repetitive, but I really like jumping in and playing five or six missions at a time. It's a great lunch hour game.

There's a couple characters I don't have much use for, but I love the one with the bow and the asian guy with the badass pistol and fear aura.

bulletyen · Jan 13, 2018

I haven't played this, but outside of Tom Chick I haven't heard many positive assessments of this game. The theme is something I want to like but all I've seen of the game, from the oddly bland and unappealing design of the characters to the seemingly chaotically messy looking gameplay to the terribly unfunny one liners, makes me teeter on the fence on whether to ever buy it or try it at all.

One of the things that I would have liked to see in this game was character creation, though it's unfair for me to fault a game for not having something it was never suppose to have. As much as I love Saints Row, no developer should have to become a sweatshop for a successful franchise forever, so it's too bad AoM didn't pan out. Still, I'm glad Volition has not been shuttered in spite of lay offs, as there are not many developers of their scale operating on their kind of budget anymore. Their longtime development director Jim Boone has returned after not overseeing AoM, so maybe that's a good sign things are going up (article from last October):

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-10-09-life-after-agents-of-mayhem-where-now-for-volition

ronaldthump · Jan 13, 2018

bulletyen said:
I haven't played this, but outside of Tom Chick I haven't heard many positive assessments of this game. The theme is something I want to like but all I've seen of the game, from the oddly bland and unappealing design of the characters to the seemingly chaotically messy looking gameplay to the terribly unfunny one liners, makes me teeter on the fence on whether to ever buy it or try it at all.

One of the things that I would have liked to see in this game was character creation, though it's unfair for me to fault a game for not having something it was never suppose to have. As much as I love Saints Row, no developer should have to become a sweatshop for a successful franchise forever, so it's too bad AoM didn't pan out. Still, I'm glad Volition has not been shuttered in spite of lay offs, as there are not many developers of their scale operating on their kind of budget anymore. Their longtime development director Jim Boone has returned after not overseeing AoM, so maybe that's a good sign things are going up (article from last October):

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-10-09-life-after-agents-of-mayhem-where-now-for-volition

Thanks for posting that. A really good sobering read and its a shame they had to lose staff to stay afloat. Volition should do what they do well which is fun insane saint row open world games. Hopefully their next game will be a return to form

ITBEATS · Jan 13, 2018

I'm playing this now after picking it up for 20 euro and think, while not in any way perfect, it's a competent game that has moments of super fun gameplay. It shouldn't have flopped as much as it did.

drewfonse · Jan 13, 2018

It's actually pretty fun. I have only played it for 3-4 hours, but it's not bad at all

Fairy Godmother · Jan 13, 2018

Just bought this the other day. Waiting for it to come in the mail now.

I know it's not a masterpiece, but I enjoyed all the Saints Row games so this should be serviceable.

Deleted member 20799 · Jan 13, 2018

Basically felt like a string of things to do tied together rather superficially - there's potential, but nothing compelling enough with so much divided attention between characters, repetitive mission structure, and relatively weak narrative. There are some missions towards the end that felt a little more SR 3/4 in terms of humour/absurdity, but... I kinda lost the point.

Bond · Jan 13, 2018

I paid full price for Agents of Mayhem at launch on the console, and it should win the award for most undercooked game of this generation. The level of quality control is embarrassing, from laughable NPC models and awkward throwaway missions. Character swapping and using the different powers is excellent for the first couple hours, but once the novelty wears off, it just becomes pointless.

It's mind-boggling that Volition did not add co-op elements, especially with such emphasis on a team. The endless wave of enemies offers no challenge, as the AI doesn't adapt to your spamming button technique. Open world elements feel unnecessary as exploring it doesn't add anything but needless padding, and while having stable driving mechanics come at odds with the Crackdown inspired movement. Lairs are incredibly repetitive with assets copied and paste, straight from previous missions. Volition also hit rock bottom with their writing, as the smart parodies of modern life get replaced by childish dick jokes. The final battle is appalling, with one of the worst video game bosses in the longest time.

What happened during development? Agents of Mayhem felt like a bad demo for a Saints Row reboot or sequel. It's painful for me because Volition is one of the best development studios working today, with there previous titles surprising with their quality. I pray that the studio can rebuild after AOM flopped so badly. Hopefully, we get updates on their next project around E3 2018.

Cranston · Jan 13, 2018

I actually really enjoyed it. It has flaws, of course, but I liked unlocking new characters. It's silly and doesn't take itself seriously. The reviews were harsh.

TangoAlphaLima · Jan 13, 2018

It could have benefited from better traversal mechanics. It doesn't feel fun to run around in the open world.

Adam Tyner · Jan 13, 2018

I genuinely had a blast with Agents of Mayhem -- enough to play through it twice and slug it out to get the Platinum -- although it's hard to ignore its flaws.

I love how distinct each Agent plays and feels: the character-specific dialogue, the completely different sets of weapons and abilities, how much there was to upgrade and customize, being able to swap characters out on-the-fly (even if you were stuck choosing among a set of 3 when you're actually out in the world)... Lazarus and Safeword are especially unique and fun, so if you're one of the few who sincerely had a good time with AoM, the DLC really is worth a shot. Being a child of the '80s with a longstanding G.I. Joe obsession and a stack of Saints Row games on the shelf, I absolutely appreciate what Volition was going for, and I was all over the glorious ridiculousness of the Gaunt->Steeltoe->A.I.S.H.A. stretch in particular. I dug the variety of skins too (even if weapon/car skins don't amount to much). I guess it's blasphemy to say this, but if I had to choose, I'd rather have the character-swapping mechanic over co-op.

At the same time, my Agents wound up getting way too powerful, too quickly, so that by the end, the game was kind of a cakewalk even on the highest difficulty levels. It reminded me a bit of Infamous: Second Son in that AoM gets so much right, but with so few things to do and just a tiny handful of enemy types encountered over and over and over and over and over and over and over, it just feels like they ran out of time and had to slap the meat of the game together in a couple of weeks. I'd audibly groan whenever I'd have to descend into yet another cookie-cutter lair. I wish I didn't have to keep going back to the A.R.K. to do things I feel like I should be able to setup from a menu, anytime, anywhere. The open world wasn't much fun to just goof around in, and even with as much as I enjoyed many of the missions, hardly any of the other activities/events held my interest. The game's strongest in the middle, and the post-A.I.S.H.A. missions are largely forgettable.

It's the sort of thing that I can picture being an okay-but-far-from-great first game laying the foundation for a hell of a sequel that gets everything right. Kind of a drag that'll never happen.

ArgyleReptile · Jan 13, 2018

It was my most anticipated game last year and I even made the OT at the other other place.

Unfortunately, it was a rather lackluster game. That said, I enjoyed my time with the game. It had a ton of potential, but as someone said, it felt very undercooked.

Combat was the best aspect of the game. Was tight and gameplay is fun. Character switching was great, and I'm someone who was glad that the game wasn't multi-player as I wanted a game like this for a long time.

Characters were fun, though I think they needed more melee focused characters. Really appreciated the diversity, though that was always present in the Saints Row series.

Writing ranged from decent to lame, but it didn't bother me.

The open world, I think, was supposed to be way bigger than it was. It was kinda fun to platform around, but driving wasn't interesting, though it controlled well.

I really wanted it to do well, but it just wasn't in the cards. Didn't help it became a joke around it's release with the "Agents if Maybe" stuff.

flyinj · Jan 13, 2018

I just bought this on the humble sale and played it for two hours. It's kinda fun, but holy crap does it run badly. The frame rate is all over the place on my 1070 at 1080p.

Any tips on how to get the frame rate to stabilize at a steady 60 fps? I turned off all the Nvidia specific settings and dropped the shadows to medium and turned off msaa and it's still dropping and hitching.

Justified · Jan 13, 2018

Got it for the low, just to check it out. Couldn't finish. You review is exactly how I felt

ronaldthump · Jan 13, 2018

flyinj said:
I just bought this on the humble sale and played it for two hours. It's kinda fun, but holy crap does it run badly. The frame rate is all over the place on my 1070 at 1080p.

Any tips on how to get the frame rate to stabilize at a steady 60 fps? I turned off all the Nvidia specific settings and dropped the shadows to medium and turned off msaa and it's still dropping and hitching.

I'm playing on PS4pro and it runs mostly fine even when hollywood's mayhem powers are going off.
But.

Its the loudest my ps4pro ever gets. It gets loud running AOM.

Falchion · Jan 13, 2018

Yeah it seems like a game that best enjoyed in small bursts and not binged because you'll just get burned out.

malyse · Jan 13, 2018

Personally, I'm just hoping it sold well enough to fund 5aint's Row.

Rembrandt · Jan 13, 2018

idek why they made this game, tbh. nothing about it makes sense unless they want to push all the weird shit from SR into this series and reboot SR.

weird choice all around.

ronaldthump · Jan 13, 2018

Rembrandt said:
idek why they made this game, tbh. nothing about it makes sense unless they want to push all the weird shit from SR into this series and reboot SR.

weird choice all around.

its got very little weird shit so far, someone up top said it gets weirder as it gets along but right now, its very much what they've telegraphed and branded it as - an agency based 3rd person shooter.

There's some cool ideas here - fuck my lair post: I closed my tab - the issue with repetition and how I'd fix it

Lairs are all the same. Its a slog to enter this boring metallic bunkers and basically race through doors, shoot some shit and get to the end.

1) Have different coloured lairs + different architecture

2) Have different elevations - some can go down. Right now, its all the 1 level more or less

3) Different challenges - some arena, more challenging hacking, puzzles might even be good. shooting puzzles etc. Some Lairs can be a platforming maze challenge. etc. Trap based lair where you have to get through it with precision

There's lots they can do here but they didn't. I initially was excited about visiting a Lair but after 4 I was like urgh and just race through them if the door is open and don't bother fighting enemies.

PuppetMinion · Jan 13, 2018

Bought it during the sale as well. Just checked, have put in 16 hours so far and I am fairly close to the end now I think.

Starting to get boring now but I feel I have already gotten my moneys worth at least. Doubt I ever replay it though.

Jimnymebob · Jan 13, 2018

ITBEATS said:
I'm playing this now after picking it up for 20 euro and think, while not in any way perfect, it's a competent game that has moments of super fun gameplay. It shouldn't have flopped as much as it did.

This is where I stand with it from what I've played. It's just one of those things that immediately got dismissed by people because:
It wasn't Saints Row
It didn't have customisation
It didn't have multiplayer

And it didn't recover from that.

matimeo · Jan 13, 2018

I just finished this game and enjoyed it way more than I expected to.
You can tell it was a framework for something more, and they didn't have the funds to quite reach their full ambitions. Shout out to my fellow UI comrade Jeff. Great stuff as always.

CommandThrower · Jan 13, 2018

I played it for a good long while when it launched, and I enjoyed myself. I like how each character differed in playstyles when equipped with their perks.

But...I just sorta stopped. I stopped after having unlocked Scheherazade. I'll go back to it sometime in the future, because I genuinely did have fun with it. Other things are holding my attention right now.

TheBeardedOne · Jan 13, 2018

They should've just made another Saints Row game instead. Agents of Mayhem was far from anything special and will be forgotten quickly.

I've completed it, myself. I did a full play through, trying to do all of the missions and a good amount of side content as well. I liked some of the Agents, but the gameplay that surrounded them was terribly repetitive and far from exciting. Just the same thing over and over again, for the most part. Kill these enemies, enter this lair that looks like every other one, repeat.

A couple of the missions were neat, but those tried something different.

mas8705 · Jan 13, 2018

Got the game when it came out.

I'll admit that when Crackdown 3 got pushed back, I put a bit more pressure on Agents of Mayhem to deliver the goods, and while I was able to tolerate the game until I beat it, interest for the game dropped substantially due to how it felt... lacking. The lack of variety murdered it for me and it is unfortunate since I felt like this had really good potential. Every Agent was decent, but some were better than others. For some reason, I kept coming back to Oni since it felt like he was the best character at getting critical hits.

Wish the game was better and it was so disappointing that the game got traded in when there was a fair chance for replay there too.

Indelible · Jan 13, 2018

This game was the definition of middle of the road for me, I didn't find anything bad about it but it lacked everything you expect from volition like a interesting world and a fun story. I don't regret playing it but I'am so glad I sold it when it had some value.

Springy · Jan 13, 2018

I really thought I'd like AoM, even months after release after all the negative reception, but it was really hard to swallow when I did finally play it.

It's full of jokes without punchlines, the missions are boring, the open world is a husk and I never, ever want to see one of those dungeons full of identical, pasted together modules ever again. Some of the characters are fun to play as, like the Cold Warrior, but it's just not worth it. I have rarely felt I've been wasting my life playing a video game, but as I was playing AoM that thought struck me hard, so I uninstalled it.

It also runs like complete ass on XB1 S.

ronaldthump · Jan 14, 2018

I think I beat the first boss. Hammerhead. Then the next mission lets you unlock some female character. The prequest, involved driving around, then some shooting and hacking and then... they took over a base I already took over (I did 2 towers not long before the hammerhead quest) and I looked at the tower and in my head, I could see me doing the same thing I did already twice. I was like "fuck this game" and turned off the PS4. It's going to be like all game hey? It's funny how its repetition is so annoying to me; because when I played Crackdown 1, I didn't actually mind it. This is just so .... boring.

I think I'm done with AOM.

Muhammad · Jun 29, 2018

I have a problem that I hope some people here would have a fix for.

Using the latest drivers, it appears PCSS or HFTS shadows in the game are bugged, they appear pixelated in a grid pattern, it's really annoying, Normal shadows don't suffer this bug, only PCSS or HFTS. any fix for this issue?

Dringus · Jun 29, 2018

For whatever reason, the character swapping was a huge turn off for me. That and the lack of coop. Actually the coop thing is probably the most offensive since it's a game with a bunch of different characters and abilities. I'm just hoping it did okay because I'm dying for a Saints Row 5.

Binhoker · Jun 29, 2018

I'm gonna give it a go at some point, it's going for like 5quid physical in the UK. I'm assuming it'll be gwg/gamepads or ps+ soon enough. It really must serve as the biggest flop this gen? After evolve perhaps?

Alek · Jun 29, 2018

Aside the obvious lack of features, there's just not many fun ways to interact with the world or your enemies. You just attack them with whatever your basic attack is, most of the time, the feedback the game provides isn't interesting, just chipping away at their shields until they die. It's just the core gameplay that isn't all that much fun, in my opinion. That's in spite of many positive things like the core controls feeling pretty good too.

Vaelic · Aug 26, 2018

Whenever I try enabling hdr mode in this game on PS4 pro the game crashes. Any ideas?

Addleburg · Aug 30, 2018

I got this on sale during the most recent sale and have actually been having fun with it. But I can't get past the mission with Daisy (after you defeat the the robots in the circular arena) because the appropriate cutscene/transition won't trigger even after defeating all the robots.

Apparently, this is something that other people have also experienced. I've tried aborting the mission and starting over twice, and it still won't let me proceed.

I only paid $5 or $6 for the game, but if this prevents me from proceeding for good, I'm going to be pretty pissed.

JaggedSac · Aug 30, 2018

Lairs are so damn repetitive and the traversal isn't great or enjoyable. Game is moderately fun though.

LTTP: Agents of Mayhem

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