If you know me, you know the Saint's Row series is my favorite series of games, the only thing that comes close is inFamous series. When Agents of Mayhem was announced I was excited for the chance to play a spinoff. It would keep the 3rd person action RPG style while focusing more on combat and teamwork. Everything looked like this was going to be a ton of fun for me. As someone who doesn't get much time to play games due to my work, I cleared my weekend to play Agents of Mayhem.
I'll just go ahead and get this out of the way first, because it's the most negative thing I have to say. Technically the game works great or doesn't work at all. I played the intro level 5 separate times getting stuck on a loading screen afterwards. At one point I just let it load and went out to run errands for a while. I came back over an hour later and it was still on the same loading screen. Once you can actually play the game, it's very fun, if you can play it. The problem is this is an issue that didn't just hit me. It didn't just hit Playstation 4 players. A quick Google search showed that this was a frequent problem on Xbox 1 and PC as well. How did nobody see this during testing? Was there testing? The promotion for the game on their Twitter account has been nothing but "we're fixing it, I promise, just wait on the patch." It's sad and ridiculous. No matter how much people complained about graphical glitches in Mass Effect: Andromeda you could at least play the game all the way through from day one.
Once you actually get into the game there's some good and bad. There are moments that are really funny and remind you why Saint's Row was so popular. There's also moments where the humor falls completely flat. You kind of just make the same face you do when your favorite comedian bombs on a joke. The story is much the same, there's moments where it's great but for the most part it misses the mark. There's not even really a story other than there's some evil guys, we're bad guys and it's just going to be bad vs evil.
The gameplay is fun. There's constantly something to do and each of the characters truly plays different. Multiple characters use assault rifles but Hollywood is the only one who is going throw the gun in the air before punching someone in the face. There's designated teams of three but you can mix and match so it's perfectly okay to take Johnny, Gat that is, Kingpin, Pierce from Saint's Row, and Oni, a retired Yakuza hitman. The game play is fun and that's good because it fills in where just about everything else falls short. The action and shootouts
The cutscenes are kind of strange. They're animated in a way similar to the Overwatch shorts. Sadly this game can be summed up like that a lot. If Overwatch had a single player it would be Agents of Mayhem. The strange thing is there's no multiplayer in this when you could complete majority of the Saint's Row series through co-op. It just seems like an odd choice.
There is a lot of stuff wrong with this game. I mean a lot. That doesn't mean it is horrible. When everything works fine it's a really fun experience. I just don't think it's $60 fun. Maybe it's $35 fun. You're going to get a lot of play out of it when it's working but it's not always going to be working until they've put out even more patches. At best, you'll have a ton of fun and waste a weekend afternoon on it, at worst, it'll hold you over until a new Saint's Row game.
You should buy Darrell's Book, watch him on the Blerds Online YouTube Channel or The CP Time and Powerbomb Jutsu podcasts.
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