The overwhelming wealth of customizability and personality will be Agents of Mayhem’s strength.
Deep Silver’s Agents of Mayhem will be coming to a console near you in just two short months, but the publisher revealed a few more of the open-world adventure game’s secrets during a preview appointment I attended at E3 2017. The primary focus of the demo was to give a general sense of the game loop; if earlier previews had focused just on missions in Seoul, this opportunity to view Agents of Mayhem wanted to give a full sense of the gameplay experience, which we previously described as a blend of Overwatch, Saint’s Row and Crackdown. But I also got to meet August Gaunt, a newly unveiled member of Legion who is a particular fan-favorite of the staff.
I started my demo in the Ark, which is where those who play Agents of Mayhem will find themselves spending a good chunk of their time. This is the common area, and it’s where every modification between missions can be made at the Ark’s various stations. There’s a vehicle bay, armory and “Wreck Room,” which comes complete with a “VR room” that allows you to test out various agent team loads. There’s an agency upgrades station, research and development area (replete with a Cabbit throwback to Deep Silver’s Summoner days) and the intriguing Global Conflict station, which allows you to send out the agents you aren’t bringing in your squad on their own solo missions to earn new items and unlock dungeons.
The Ark seems like an area I’d sink way too much time into, and felt like I barely scratched the surface of it during my demo. The preview I played already had all the stations unlocked, offering an overwhelming amount of customization opportunities for the various agents available. But that is one of the downsides of trying to get a full sense of a game loop during a one-hour demo.
I talked a bit with producer Kate Nelson about how the areas in the Ark will roll out during a normal playthrough, and she described Agents of Mayhem as being designed to slowly introduce these areas. You’ll start with the armory and Persephone’s station unlocked, and throughout the game will also get the Wreck Room, Vehicle Bay and later Global Conflict stations opened. It seems like each addition will feel a lot more seamlessly integrated into Agents of Mayhem; by the time you hit level 10 and can start sending agents on Global Conflict missions, for example, you’ll probably have a few extra agents in your arsenal who aren’t a part of your core crew who you want to keep busy.
There was plenty to explore in the Ark that I didn’t get a chance to dig into. I could have spent the entirety of my hour playthrough just watching all of the agents’ animated cut scenes that introduced them and told snippets of their personal stories. I saw one, which introduced me to Hollywood, the “face” of the Agents of Mayhem — or so he liked to remind everyone. This is where the personality of Agents of Mayhem shines through as it hearkens back to its ’80s cartoon inspiration.
“We’ve had so much fun playing back to our childhood of ’80s cartoons and Saturday morning cartoons, but taking that mature spin on it,” Nelson told me. “It’s a more mature theme, so we like being able to explore that. Sometimes when people see it, they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a cartoon. It’s for children.’ It’s like, no, your children should not play this game. It’s for you for nostalgia, but even for people who didn’t grow up with Saturday morning cartoons, there’s still that love of the humor and the cheeky characters and the over-the-top themes.”
But there was more to do beyond just exploring the Ark: I had to assemble my team and start Operation: Star Power, because it was finally time to go after Gaunt.
There are 12 agents total, and part of the replayability concept of Agents of Mayhem is learning which agents each individual player leans towards and wants to pair with one another. In this playthrough, I opted to go with the three agents selected for me: Hollywood, my soldier; Hardtack, my tank; and Fortune, a hacker whose play type is most similar to a rogue. These are the first three agents you’ll have access to. In-game, Hollywood has dubbed this squad the “Franchise Force,” but in reality, they’re one of several of Agents of Mayhem’s squad teams, or pairings that are especially balanced.
Our mission was to track down August Gaunt, a technology-happy pop musician who the “youths can’t get enough of” and who is effective as an agent of Legion despite his “extravagances.” (He’s also one of Nelson’s favorite characters in Agents of Mayhem.) In Seoul, I tracked him down by using Fortune to hack into one of his car warehouses and stealing his favorite ride, Tiffany, and then tracking him back to one of his exclusive parties where he was using his VR-like tech to control his rabid fans’ minds.
Swapping between my three agents led to different opportunities throughout the mission. By using Fortune, I was able to circumvent the hacking minigames needed to get through some of Gaunt’s tech, but I tended to rely on Hardtack and Hollywood for the bigger fights. And cycling through them allowed for each of their personalities to shine through. As Nelson told me, “We wanted these personalities to be able to clash with the over-the-top personalities on the Legion side.”
The Operation: Star Power mission was one small segment of the “critical path” core storyline, which is taking around 20 to 25 hours for players to work their way through. But there’s plenty of supplementary content to explore, like each agent’s two personal missions, all of the Global Mission options and the later Legion dungeons that can be unlocked. Then, of course, there are the many hours you can sink into fiddling with the many options available at the stations in the Ark.
It becomes clear once you get a small amount of time to engage with Agents of Mayhem that this is a game which will reward replays. It’s not something that you’ll fully be able to absorb in a single playthrough — and especially not a single hour demo session. The personality of Agents of Mayhem will shine through once you get into the nitty gritty of mixing and matching characters, or tweaking equipment and weapons, or completing every Global Mission so you’ll unlock the ultimate Legion dungeons. The overwhelming wealth of customizability and personality will be Agents of Mayhem’s strength for those people who commit the time to learn its language.
Agents of Mayhem is available for pre-order now. For more on Agents of Mayhem, check out the complete guide to its pre-order bonuses, including where you can get the 13th Agent of Mayhem, Saint’s Row’s Johnny Gat.
Terri Schwartz is Editorial Producer at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
Source: IGN Video Games
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