Agents of Mayhem

My first few hours with Agents of Mayhem felt like discovering a sugary cereal you'd forgotten existed: bright, loud, immediately satisfying, and probably not good for you in large doses. Volition's Saints Row spin-off drops you into a near-future Seoul as a rotating squad of super-agents fighting the cartoonishly evil LEGION organisation, led by the gleefully hammy Doctor Babylon. The core pitch is a single-player hero shooter where you build a trio from twelve distinct agents and hot-swap between them mid-combat. On paper that is a genuinely interesting design, and in practice the swapping is smooth enough that chaining Hollywood's explosion-heavy assault rifle into Hardtack's close-range shotgun into Fortune's agile drone attacks feels fluid and satisfying when the pieces click. Each agent has a primary weapon, a secondary attack, a melee move, and a signature Mayhem ability triggered by filling a meter through general carnage. There are also passive skill trees that push characters down specialised paths, plus Gremlin Tech gadgets that layer on top of everything else. The theoretical depth here is real. The problem is that the world never challenges you to use it. Enemy variety is thin from the jump, and the LEGION troopers you fight in hour two are essentially the same troopers you fight in hour twenty, just in greater numbers. Underground LEGION lairs, which you run repeatedly to unlock new agents, follow a near-identical layout every single time. Difficulty settings go up to fifteen levels, but cranking them mostly turns enemies into bullet sponges rather than smarter opponents. The individual agent unlock missions are where the game actually comes alive. Daisy, a chaingun-wielding roller-derby brawler, gets an introduction that shows exactly how inventive the writing could have been everywhere. Rama, Braddock, and the other agents all carry personal backstories that surface in dedicated missions, and those moments eclipse most of the main campaign. The animated cartoon-style cutscenes are well-made and the overall visual style is consistently punchy. Traversal feels good too: agents triple-jump and dash around Seoul with enough snap that simply moving through the city is rarely a chore, even if the city itself is noticeably underpopulated and short on ambient life. Where Agents of Mayhem consistently frustrates is in the gap between its personality and its mission design. The open world is small and thin, the humour lands less often than it aims to, and the main campaign is structured around a formula so rigid it starts to feel like a checklist. Saints Row fans hoping for that franchise's anarchic spirit will find a game that gestures at it without committing. Players coming in cold will find a mechanically competent third-person shooter with a fun roster and a repetition problem. A full completion run lands around twenty to twenty-two hours, which is enough game for the price at a discount but a harder sell at full value. The squad-building hooks are genuine; the content that surrounds them is not.

Alex · Scout Team

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