Agents of Mayhem expands the Saints Row universe into the world of secret agents

While lots of open world games tend to focus on characters and stories at the expense of giving the world itself personality, the Saints Row team at Volition has spent time over the last four games broadening the world their characters run around in. It makes sense, then, that that same world is exactly where protagonists of Agents of Mayhem will be running around.

Agents of Mayhem is a mash-up of comic books, Saturday morning cartoons, and all the goofiness that comes with those things. And purple, because if there’s one thing developer Volition loves, it’s the color purple.

I had a few minutes with the game this week to check out what Agents of Mayhem has going on.

Like Saints Row before it, Agents is an open world game. But it’s not Saints Row all over again, either. This time the game is set in Seoul, South Korea, a pretend take on a real place, Instead of playing as one character, you’re playing as three at any given time. Story segments are delivered through short animated sequences that match the tone of the game perfectly.

Like any good Saturday morning cartoon, there’s a diverse cast of anti-hero type characters, so no matter what team you end up putting together, you’ll be hearing a few different voices. While you only control one at a time, switching between them is as simple as hitting the left and right directions on the directional pad. You’re encouraged to pick characters with varying abilities and switch between them as you progress through the mission.

There’s a lot of fun to be had here, but I can see a few issues I’m hoping they’ll be able to improve on.

The first is to better differentiate when to use which character. I didn’t feel like I was switching between them to best suit the situation as much as just for the sake of pure variety

The second is traversal. The characters have dashing and double jumping, but if the game is open world then we’ll need some new ways to get around. Traversal powers or specialized vehicles would be much preferred over more cars, and I wasn’t able to find out what the plan for this is during my time with the game.

The thing is, Volition is good at over-the-top games, and just running around wouldn’t fit that vision at all. I expect they’ll be able to take care of this stuff in the interim. The team has plenty of time – right now the game is set simply for release sometime in 2017.