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.

Saints Row: The Third

After the heavy shit that was Call of Duty 2 I fancied a bit of rest and relaxation or in other words a completely crazy gaming experience that couldn’t be further from reality. Saints Row: The Third delivers this with aplomb.

Now, I’m not one to play games out of order normally and this is no exception. I just simply haven’t finished the other Saints Rows because they have multiplayer elements that I have not done. Also, Saints Row: The Third was lucky to even make it into the console to start with. As you may have seen, companies that discontinue content that disable achievements are not getting on my Christmas list any time soon. However, Volition and Deep Silver have gone a ways to repairing some of the damage.

There in an achievement called Jumped In which became unobtainable when THQ when under back in 2013. Their website went offline and this was required to get the achievement. Deep Silver spent the best part of a year trying to apply a fix and they finally did it in September 2015. This was the catalyst that made me play the game.

On to the game itself, you play as the leader of the 3^rd Street Saints who looks...exactly how you want him or her to look. I spent the best part of my play time as a girl but more on that later. The story follows the standard story arch of ‘fall from grace.’ The Saints have everything. Then they lose it all because some other crime syndicate tries to take you out. Saint’s Row main stay, Johnny Gat (who looks completely different) gets taken out at the start and the rest of the game is basically about avenging him.

Lots of wacky shit happens along the way which is all in the name of fun... but after a while it starts to wear a little thin. Everything is over the top stupid to the point where the main character can be on TV talking about robbing and murdering like it’s cool and something to aspire to. I’m all for humour, and the first ten hours is pretty funny, but after that it goes too far in what it’s trying to do.

The same can be said of the soundtrack and unfortunately, Grand Theft Auto, has the edge here. There doesn’t appear to be very much in terms of variety either and it’s all very underwhelming and disappointing. It does have the edge over Sleeping Dogs though, as at least the Saints Row radio stations actually play different songs instead of glitching out and playing the same bit over and over.

The gameplay is the main area of excellence. It’s very fluid with combat and driving and they link together well. I don’t recall having any issues with navigation, however the game does suffer from the age old problem of sandboxes where lampposts are made of paper and trees will totally wreck your car.

As you play, you can improve your character with abilities and you can actually do this to the point where you can’t die or run out ammo. I’m not sure how I feel about this as it’s a reward for playing the game but it also removes any challenge from it. I was grateful for this towards the end though, especially when things got totally fucking ridiculous.

Achievements – 1,300 Points – 80 Achievements

There’s nothing I like more than a load of easy achievements that provide fun and variety to obtain. That’s what Saint’s Row the Third offers and it’s also very balanced. There is an achievement for playing for 30 hours and it’s possible to get all of the achievements in roughly this amount of time. No overplaying, no underplaying. This includes the DLC missions as well but more on that later.

The base game has the very standard 50 achievement haul. There are achievements for completing the main story, getting all the collectibles and completing all of the activities spread across the map. The activities are normally the hardest part of the Saints Row single player experience but these seem to have been dumbed down a bit. The hardest one I found was the trailblazing activity which involves racing through checkpoints while on fire (standard) but even the trickier course only took me three attempts once I got used to the direction I needed to go in.

A lot of the achievements rely on you having to get lots of money, for example upgrading all of your weapons, upgrading your stronghold, pimping out vehicles and the like.

Another one of the more bizarre achievements is for playing 2 hours as a male and 2 as a female. Obviously, when I started the game I created a male character and as soon as I realised there was an achievement for playing as both sexes, I went and got a sex change from the plastic surgeon and played the rest of the game as a woman. This also comes with its own issues because there is a limit to how many times I can hear the phrase, ‘I’m always on when it counts.’ Knowing exactly what this is referring to.

There is only really one missable achievement at the end of the first act as there is a multiple choice and an achievement for each option. A strategic save before can allow you to replay the mission to get the alternate achievement but considering it’s earliness in the game, there isn’t a huge time cost for missing it.

The last achievement I unlocked was for completing all the challenges which is a total ballache in reality. One of the challenges is for taking 50 hostages and to do this you need to steal a car with a passenger in it. You have to search the roads looking for these vehicles and 50 is very excessive and repetitive. Another is for destroying 30 Emus which are pieces of shit cars that are also few and far between. I got this one done by grabbing one and storing it in my garage and then continuously blowing it up – boring but the quickest way of doing it.

Downloadable Content

There are three different DLC extensions to the game and in my opinion only one of them is worth getting. I mentioned earlier that after you have played through the game, it starts to feel really silly. The DLCs take this to the next level as well.

Gangsta’s in Space I can only assume is a joke. The Saint’s as gang members gaining celebrity in itself is a ridiculous concept, but to actually have you play out a movie based on the Saints finding an alien and trying to do... something? I don’t know. It was so stupid I stopped paying attention.

 

The Trouble with Clones was equally as dumb. Some idiot supposedly creates a clone of Johnny Gat and you have to track him down and save him or something? Whilst drinking Saint’s Flow, the Saint’s Row custom energy drink. Bizarre and over the top so I didn’t find it at all funny.

 The only one worth playing is Genkibowl VII as it offers some semi-sensible fun, in Saint’s Row terms anyway. You basically have to play through variable instances of Professor Genki’s Super Ethical Reality Climax from the main game which just so happened to be one of the most fun parts.

So to sum up, Saint’s Row the Third offers 30 hours of play time of which about 15 to 20 will actually be enjoyable. If you are going for all achievements, the DLC will feel a like a poor addition. On the whole, I would say it is a solid seven out of ten and the average gamer will get to the end of the story before get bored/fucked off with the characters.