Preview – Agent of Mayhem continues Volition’s legacy of goofy open-worlds
Agents of Mayhem takes tons of cues from cartoons like G.I. Joe and M.A.S.K., pitting a ragtag group of heroes with marketably diverse looks and attitudes against over-the-top villains bent on world domination.
Agents is a single player game, which can make delivering that team element difficult. To do that, you’re given a group of 12 agents to choose from. At any time, you’ll have the one you’re controlling and two others in your pocket that you can switch to with a quick click of the left and right buttons on the D-pad (the game is coming to PC, but my playtime was entirely with an Xbox controller).
Swapping between heroes is fast and easy. A quick digital effect gives some visual flair to the swap, but there’s no substantial delay. It’s more like switching between an agility build, a tank build, and a high-damage build of a character.
The combat is fun, and switching between the characters feels useful, but in my short preview with the game, I wasn’t sure the differences between the characters were enough to make me want to choose different ones for different missions. I’d hoped before for some kind of traversal abilities, but that’s not happening. Each character has a look and personality, and that’ll have to be enough to carry them.
That comes through in the game’s vehicles, too. As an open-world game, there’s a fair amount of driving to be had, but the cars really just look and drive differently. This was a big disappointment to me, as goofy, memorable vehicles were at the core of so many of my favorite shows growing up. These, though, are just cars.
One thing that remains to be seen, though, is whether that open world will be fun to navigate. Preview events like these are necessarily pretty guided experiences, and I didn’t have a chance to explore at all.
At moments, Agents of Mayhem looks like it might’ve had ambitions toward multiplayer, but Design Director Anoop Shekar was very clear – this is a single-player game. You can share contracts with friends to make money more quickly in the game, but there’s never a moment where you’re jumping into someone else’s game, Crackdown style.
Those hints come in the form of things like the variety of character skins and emotes. Those elements give players a little room to express themselves, and Shekar envisions the emotes being used in live streams and Let’s Play videos of the game.
Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/04/03/agents-of-mayhem-volition-preview/