The first thing Agents of Mayhem

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it is not Saints Row 5 . Volition / Deep Silver has drawn a hard line between the two, and they’re not wrong to - after having spent a few hours with the eponymous Agents, it’s clear the two will be very different experiences. That said, from the gunplay to the irreverent writing and even some crossover character nods, Agents of Mayhem seems like it could easily exist within the same universe - and that’s not a bad thing at all. If the characters in Pulp Fiction would go see Kill Bill at the movies, then Agents of Mayhem is what the Third Street Saints would watch for Saturday morning cartoons.

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True to their GI JOE / Transformers / [INSERT FAVORITE ACTION TEAM HERE] roots, the core of the single-player story (there are no plans for any co-op / multiplayer that we know of) follows MAYHEM, or the Multinational AgencY Hunting Evil Masterminds (because in this world you need a good acronym), as they duke it out with their archnemeses LEGION ( the League of Evil Gentlemen Intent on Obliterating Nations) in a near-future / alternate reality version of Seoul, S. Korea in the aftermath of a near-doomsday event.

Unlike their do-gooder contemporaries, however, MAYHEM is not all about Truth, Justice and All That Other Stuff - the agency’s founder is a former LEGION member herself, and isn’t as interested in protecting the innocent as she is leaving a big smoky crater where the badder guy’s face used to be. This leads to a lot of what can generously be called “collateral damage” while I bombed around their cartoonish recreation of Seoul - especially when using the locals as fodder to charge each of my Agent’s unique special abilities - and all of them seem A-OK with this darker-than-morally-grey tradeoff.

Screens - Agents of Mayhem 13 IMAGES

The anti-hero team consists of twelve members, nine of which I was able to play as at an event this past week. We already introduced three in our IGN First coverage announcing the game last summer - the reality TV star Hollywood, an ex-pirate known as Fortune and a burly sailor who goes by Hardtack - and while they’re clearly standout personalities they were far from the most interesting or useful agents in the Mayhem bullpen.

Much like their animated inspirations, they’ve all got backstories and joined the agency for their own reasons. As you unlock new operatives, you’ll open up new missions that give you more insight into each character. We ran through one for Braddock, a former USMC training officer who’s chasing down former students who turned traitor and joined LEGION. Others’ origins are more in-line with the “casually bombastic” tone that players have come to expect from Volition’s games. Daisy, for example, is a Midwestern roller derby queen - complete with skates and sporting minigun - joined because she didn’t have anything better to do than getting sauced and picking fights with robots.

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What I find myself most interested in, however, is not MAYHEM’s battle against the forces of slightly-more-evil - though I’m sure that’ll play out with Volition’s patented brand of action-packed ridiculousness. What really pulls me further into the game is figuring out just how all of these anti-heroes’ abilities will mesh together and allow players to tackle the various scenarios that they’ll run into by swapping between different Agents.

For example, towards the end of my play session, I wound up in a boss battle against the zany mad scientist Hammersmith, complete with a giant Space Laser ready to turn me and half the surrounding city into dust. Stopping him required overcoming 3 main obstacles - avoiding the giant lasers, destroying his shield and power generators, and avoiding or eliminating the henchmen who kept showing up to get in my way.

“ A lesson in dumb luck? Definitely... But what kind of unstoppable force could I create with actual effort?

For my squad, I chose: Oni, the ex-Yakuza hitman and stealth expert, Red Card, a stereotypically brutish soccer hooligan who’s special attacks fittingly involve him damaging himself, only to do even greater damage to his opponents, and Kingpin, a record-producer-turned Agent whose very existence is a nod to the greater Volition-verse. The three proved the perfect combo for this particular encounter, since Oni’s ability to enter stealth allowed me to avoid being targeted while I got in position, Kingpin’s high-damage SMG made incredibly quick work of any faceless Helltroopers we ran into, and Red Card’s unique ability to do extra damage against Doomsday-class enemy weapons made even quicker work of the Mad Doctor’s superweapon.

What’s fascinating to me is that I essentially chose these Agents at random, since they were the only three I’d yet to play as, and they ended up being perfectly suited for the task at hand. A lesson in dumb luck? Definitely. But it also begs the question, “What kind of unstoppable force could I create with actual effort?”

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The twelve different agents that will be available at launch all have dozens of unlockable gadgets, passive buffs and active abilities - meaning that equipping my 3-person squad is akin to outfitting an RPG party, and likely to take just as much time and attention to detail. On top of this huge customizable armory and the enjoyable open-world action, Mayhem embodied it's cartoon predecessors well enough to create a bizarre sense of nostalgia for a universe I'd only just entered. We don’t know yet how their individual skills or stories will factor into the whole “Bad VS Evil” theme in the final product, but I do know that I'm keen to find out - and as they say, knowing is half the battle.

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