Review for Agents of Mayhem. Game for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 15/08/2017 The version for PlayStation 4 came out on 18/08/2017
How hard can it be to change for a studio that has been working on the same series for over ten years? Let's talk about the guys from Volition who, after reaching the border of human fantasy (or madness) with their Saints Row have finally decided to change the register, giving life to Agents of Mayhem. Prepare yourself a nice unmixed shaken martini, put on a good tuxedo and find out our opinion on this new IP.
Last Action Hero
There is an action movie actor, a sailor with an eye patch and a Brazilian thief. Quiet is not the beginning of some stupid joke but the description of some of the powerful agents on duty at the Mayhem agency, engaged day and night in the fight against evil. To give them a hard time with his evil plans Dr. Babylon, evil mind in command of the criminal organization Legion.
The agents, led by the busty Persephone, will have to thwart the dark projects of Babylon and its minions, intent on destroying our reality thanks to the power of dark matter. The narrative plot certainly travels on the tracks of a B-series action movie, but Agents of Mayhem wants to be for players of "good mouth" and imagination in many occasions is not lacking at all: from singers with autotune who throw hordes of lobotomized fans at the player, to cyborg weddings between artificial intelligences and virtual K-Pop dancers, there is something for everyone. The narrative will then walk on the double thread of the agency fighting to save the world and total madness, with the recipe packaged by Volition which is always magnetic and pleasant.
Between one boss fight and the other against the upper echelons of Legion, we will have to fight against platoons and platoons of soldiers, well differentiated in their attack patterns and their weaknesses, even if the types of enemies will not be many. The Fights against the Legion will therefore seem seen and reviewed in the long run, but the agents of Mayhem will make the difference, which we will talk about later. Honorable mention for cutscenes made entirely with cartoons, which give an extra charge of charisma to the production that we are not sorry at all.
Double team
If we were to compare Agents of Mayhem to other titles, the Volition project would surely remember Crackdown, or at least even a Borderlands. The game is a TPS that will take us to visit the futuristic city of Seoul, capital of South Korea, in the distant future to Minority Report, with robots at the service of man. For most of the adventure we will command a team of three agents, with the ability to continuously rotate the trio in real time to face the different challenges that the game will put in front of us. The Mayhem are made up of the créme della créme of chosen soldiers: a German hooligan, a ninja, a genetically modified Soviet soldier and many others, for a total of twelve agents at our disposal.
Each character will have their own attack and movement patterns, it will also be equipped with a special ability (throwing "pelvic" grenades is our favorite) and a Mayhem ability: a very powerful status with which to defeat dozens of enemy soldiers in one fell swoop, to get you out of trouble in the worst moments . The game in fact has many levels of difficulty and in the final sections it will be particularly difficult, so it could happen that you lose some agents on a mission. In this case it will be enough to collect a particular object to resurrect the dead (the game over comes when the whole trio passes to the other world). Having twelve different approaches to fighting manages to partially eradicate the underlying repetitiveness, and there is no shortage of secondary missions built ad hoc for each member of the agency, thus allowing you to become familiar with the whole roster.
There are platform and driving sections, both quite rough, especially the driving system in drifting. Of a very different invoice is a particular management mode that allows you to entrust tasks to people not involved in the team to collect information and resources in the world, as well as to have a room for combat simulations. Contracts are also present in this mode, secondary missions to be completed during the main campaign to obtain new items. In fact, each agent will acquire experience from the fighting, to be spent in a mini skill tree up to the level cap set at level 20. Once this limit is exceeded, special crystals will be required to acquire further levels. These crystals can also be found throughout the game world, representing the main collectible, through hundreds of fragments scattered around Seoul.
To further enhance our heroes we will be able to find personalized gadgets that will enhance skills in different ways, or consumable items to be developed at the agency's base, the Ark. The contents are therefore not lacking in Agents of Mayhem: the simple discovery of all agents, their secondary missions and the main campaign will occupy you for over twenty hours.
Commando
If reading up to this point has left you positive feelings, now is the time to dampen the enthusiasm, the technical sector of the game is in fact rather lacking, with not a few optimization problems in the PlayStation 4 version we tested. Let's start from the key point, the frame rate: Mayhem is a title made up of 80% of copious and colorful explosions, and it has happened more than once that the game suffered the most excited situations showing dramatic drops. The general quality certainly does not leave you speechless, we trust in the usual post-launch corrective patches, but at the moment the situation is rather unsatisfactory. Also counting that there is no lack of polygonal interpenetrations and various bugs (never at the level of game braker but still annoying), the final feeling is a bitter taste in the mouth for the wasted potential.
On the audio front, the dubbing in the original language (the only one present, assisted by the subtitles in Spanish) stands at excellent levels apart from a small flaw: someone tell Volition that if it has to create a character, the spoken language cannot be a maccheronico italic idiom, who turn to good professionals next time. For the rest, the soundtrack is certainly tasty, composed of “heroic” themed music mixed with techno futuristic tracks.
We chose to reward Agents Of Mayhem, both in the hope that the technical problems will be solved, and because Volition has given birth to another interesting universe. If the commercial success Agents of Mayhem arrives it will surely be the beginning of a new series. The developers must undoubtedly be credited with having created not one, but a whole group of charismatic and memorable characters: each player will find his darling within the agency and the rotation between the agents partially eradicates a certain repetition in the play structure. . We would have preferred a debut with a bang but, you know, evil never dies and the world always needs new heroes.
► Agents of Mayhem is a Shooter type game published by Deep Silver for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 15/08/2017 The version for PlayStation 4 came out on 18/08/2017
