Agents of Mayhem

After buying Agents of Mayhem in a sale, I let it gather digital dust for a few years before I was ‘forced’ to start playing it by the UHH contest. Initially I thought it was okay – I wasn’t required to play more than half an hour of the game for the contest and while that can be enough time for a game to shit all over itself, Agents of Mayhem delayed this for a good four hours or so.

I recently created a list of my games that require some kind of online involvement and aimed to prioritise these achievements over others for fear of server shutdowns causing yet more unobtainable achievements to appear. Rather annoyingly, Agents of Mayhem has one achievement with such an online requirement and it took so long to get that I thought I would finish the game off in its entirety while the control scheme was fresh in my head.

Agents of Mayhem is almost a spiritual successor to the Saints Row game series given that it’s similar in style and developed by the same company, Volition. The basic elements of gameplay are that you have a group of Agents that you select three of to undertake missions to stop the dreaded Dr Babylon from taking over Seoul – and by extension, the entire world. You run around Seoul with your three agents, shooting a bunch of ‘bad guys’ called Legion in order to stop Dr Babylon from taking control.

Now, I started asking the question of the game – exactly who are the bad guys here? Legion soldiers tend to show up when you hurt innocent people in Seoul so it’s almost like they are the police force. When this happens, you build up a wanted level and when you max it, a giant robot shows up to kill you. In this element, it’s just like Gat out of Hell but instead of being set in hell, it’s set on planet earth… so the Agents of Mayhem are the equivalent of Team America for all intents and purposes.

Before getting on to the achievements, the game had so many glitches that I stopped counting them. During my time playing the game, there were countless graphical fuck ups that affected gameplay but the worst of these included, not driving over a ramp and treating it like a wall, falling through the floor of the game forever (there’s no benefit to this like in Mafia II) and proper game crashes which happened to me on two occasions. Essentially it feels very broken and almost rushed into release and considering its age, it seems that it won’t be improved.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 49 Achievements

I would say for the most part, it’s an easy list with the exception of 5 or 6 achievements. Completing all of the missions in the game will net 11 of the 49 on offer and you will get a load by wandering the environment and completing small side objectives.

Outside of the main missions, each agent gets a personal mission that you can complete. Doing this with all of the agents gives you additional missions with three specific agents who have been put into arbitrary groups. You then get a special mission for the three agents in question and there are four special missions encompassing the 12 non-DLC agents for a further four achievements.

The driving in the game sucks balls but there are a few achievements for driving around, namely for jumping over 50 meters, doing a 360 and finding 10 jumps in the city.

There is also a weird kind of mini game called global offensive where you can send your agents off to other areas of the globe to do… something. All you have to do is sit back and wait for them to complete their objective. Once you’ve cleared the whole map of ‘missions’ it will unlock a Legion Lair which needs to be completed at difficulty level 10. This is probably the hardest thing to do in the game difficulty level wise, but once you have levelled your agents enough, it’s still fairly easy, you just need to not run in to loads of guys guns blazing. The VR simulations which are required for another achievement only go up to difficulty level 9 so are slightly easier than this.

While talking about difficulty specific stuff, one of the more taxing ones requires you to complete all normal missions at difficulty seven or higher. Once again, with the right level agents, its pretty easy and the difficulty goes all the way up to 15 so there’s a lot of leeway here. The difficulty lies with the game’s general shitiness as loads of people have reported this one not unlocking when meeting the requirements for it.

The online one is probably the most taxing but only because of how poorly designed it is. The idea is that you work with 5 other people to complete contracts and you get three of these contracts offered every day. The achievement is awarded for completing 15 of these contracts. However, what people do is set them up then do fuck all towards their completion. While I was doing this, I think I only had one person help in any noticeable way on one contract. And you can imagine how fucking irritating it is doing the job of six people by yourself. Thankfully some of the goals are more achievable than others and some of the online community highlighted some decent grinding spots but it still took an hour or two a day to get one of the three completed. Needless to say, it took me a lot longer than 5 days to get 15 done.

The last achievement I unlocked was for getting all agents to level 20 and completing their personal missions and this is only because outside of three or four agents, the others are redundant so you won’t use them. Grinding out the last lot of experience points didn’t take too long after completing all the other objectives, but was still a noticeable, unwanted grind.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Agents of Mayhem was a terrible game to play due to the issues mentioned above. It doesn’t have many redeemable qualities as it feels shallow when it’s trying to be funny and the gameplay is mega repetitive. It’s a real shame after the strength of the Saint’s Row Series too, and I think that Saints Row The Third is probably the best game put out by Volition.