Agents of Mayhem is long, boring, and seems to lack the spark that made Saint’s Row special.
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By Hayden Dingman
Games Reporter,
PCWorld | Sep 2,2017 4: 00 AM
PT
Saint’s Row ’s Achilles heel was always combat. It hid this fact by peppering each game with a handful of absurd weapons, from a recliner that fired missiles to the Dubstep gun to the iconic purple dildo bat—still the weapon I most associate with the series.
But even armaments that creative couldn’ t hide the fact that combat was often a by-the-book affair. Enemies were brainless, and each encounter involved simply trying to get through it as fast as possible without dying. It’s telling that most of the memorable moments in Saint’s Row had nothing to do with combat, be it the Tron -esque “Deckers Die” mission, singing Biz Markie in a car with your friends, or an Aerosmith-backed rocket ride into space.
With that in mind…why build a Saint’s Row game around combat?
Okay, it’s not “technically” Saint’s Row. That’s the most technical technicality I’ ve seen in gaming though, given Agents of Mayhem ’s propensity for purple fleur-de-lis, as well as the crossover presence of multiple characters (including face-of-the-series Johnny Gat if you get the DLC) .
Agents of Mayhem is a spin-off, abandoning the Third Street Saints to focus on a G. I. Joe -style conflict between the good guys at M. A. Y. H. E. M. and the evildoers of L. E. G. I. O. N. Headed by Dr. Babylon, LEGION’s goal is the usual take-over-the-world nonsense of Saturday morning cartoons, and the game has you traipsing around Seoul, South Korea trying to head off various doomsday plots.
It’s a stellar concept, and props to Volition for leaning into it. Nearly every mission begins and ends with a short hand-animated cartoon, and I can’ t imagine how much work went into these. Battleborn had one short segment like this. Agents of Mayhem must have nearly an hour of cartoon in its 15 to 20 hour runtime. The quality ranges from excellent to lackluster, but in any case a lot of effort went into presentation.
If only the rest of the game were as creative.
Agents of Mayhem is boring. There’s no way around it. My first instinct was to blame the writing, because there are certainly a bunch of story beats that don’ t land. (More on that later.) After thinking on it though, it’s clear that the bigger issue is the rigid and repetitive mission structure, which completely undercuts any potential strengths in the writing.
There are 57 story missions in Agents of Mayhem. At least 45 of them are clones. You go to a marker on the map to begin the mission—a start point that is always, inexplicably, at least a minute’s drive from wherever the real action of the mission is, so every mission begins with a lengthy drive to your true objective as MAYHEM’s handlers chatter in your ear. Wasted time.
Upon arrival, there are two ways it could go:
1) You enter an area and are forced to hold off waves of the same five enemy-types for some random period of time, then go to another area and do the same, then go to a third area and kill more baddies, maybe blow up a couple of random items, and the mission ends.
2) You go underground into a LEGION lair, which is actually maybe a dozen copy-pasted rooms snapped together at random with no interesting features or regard to level design, with hallways that literally end in dead-ends if you go off the beaten path, so you follow the mission marker from room to room and kill all the enemies inside or occasionally “hack” three terminals by doing a button-timing minigame.
The other 12 or so missions aren’ t much better, but at least end with some sort of climactic boss fight or try to break out of the box. One mission, for instance, has you retracing your steps the day after a drunken bender, trying to figure out what you did the night before. Each moment still breaks down to “Kill lots of random enemies, ” but at least the setup is slightly more creative than just “You’ re in this generic lair, now shoot stuff.”
Non-story missions and side content are even less inspired, seemingly just spawning into the world at random and consisting of either car races, foot races, or “Kill all enemies in this area.” Worse: They come back. You never really make progress on this front, because LEGION is constantly retaking the outposts you’ ve conquered and repopulating the map with meaningless #content.
This is a side effect of the central hook. See, in Saint’s Row you played as a single character. In Agents of Mayhem, you’ ll notice it’s “Agents” plural. There are 12 characters on offer (13 with the Johnny Gat DLC) , and you can control three at any given time. Like Overwatch or another hero shooter, but a singleplayer open-world game.
Each character is, in Saturday morning cartoon fashion, a standard stereotype. There’s chaingun-wielding roller derby player Daisy, shotgunning ex-sailor Hardtack, ninja Scheherazade, and more. All 12 have unique weapons, as well as unique secondary and ultimate abilities—actor Hollywood, for instance, causes action-movie pyrotechnics to explode around him during his ultimate.
Characters are a mixed bag, with some (angry Russian guy) being a complete dud, but again it’s clear Volition put a ton of work into this. Every character has a unique response for every single line of dialogue, so depending on who you’ re playing as you’ ll hear entirely different conversations. Pretty cool, though in practice it means dialogue varies wildly from “Solid” to “Lowest-Hanging Fruit, ” and when you’ re playing a dud character and a line dies on the vine it’s frustrating to wonder what better responses are hidden in the dialogue banks of characters you weren’ t currently playing. It also means you’ re likely to ignore some fun- playing characters just to hear decent dialogue from the handful of better-written characters on offer.
The variety of characters on offer brings me to my point about side content though. There’s never any real progress in the city front because Volition clearly wants you to run missions repeatedly, leveling up every character over time. There has to be enough stuff on offer to get all your characters to Level 20—an undertaking that, I think, would take anywhere between 30 to 50 hours. Whether anyone will actually do that? Well, I’ m sure someone will. I won’ t though, and so it just leaves the city feeling painfully lifeless and nonreactive. Beginning to end, basically nothing about Seoul changes.
To be clear, Saint’s Row ’s side content also got repetitive, but ideas like Insurance Fraud (where you ragdolled your character into traffic to score points) had a spark to them. Agents of Mayhem ’s side missions are just bland, padding out your time in the game to no purpose.
The writing shouldn’ t get a free pass. There’s an arrow-in-the-knee quip that’s impossible to miss, which in 2017 is even lower than low-hanging fruit. Many of the jokes don’ t land, and the pacing is all over the place. It feels disjointed, jumping from villain to villain with no real build-up or climax and leaving plot threads twisting in the wind. A heavily foreshadowed revelation about the figure leading MAYHEM goes precisely nowhere at all, and that’s just one example among many.
There are problems.
But thinking back to Saint’s Row and analyzing the setup of Agents of Mayhem, I still can’ t help feeling that the repetition is the real issue. Saint’s Row had its fair share of stinker missions and uneven jokes, but you always knew genius was right around the corner. In Agents of Mayhem there’s nothing to look forward to. It feels like the writers just weren’t given enough to work with—none of those tentpole «Deckers Die» missions that completely change up the formula and stand out in your mind.
Agents of Mayhem is the same flat experience for hours on end, and then it fizzles its way into the credits. In my case, quite literally—a glitch in the last boss fight meant it kicked me into the final victory lap cutscenes before half his health bar was gone. No climactic kill, no daring comeback. Winner by accident. A fitting end, I guess.
Side note: It’s also baffling that, with missions so interchangeable and so many characters on offer, there’s no co-op mode. That would’ ve alleviated some of the repetition, in the same manner as Ghost Recon Wildlands or Borderlands. Alas.
Anyway, for a game called Agents of Mayhem this is surely the least chaotic game imaginable. Volition finally got combat up to par, but to the detriment of literally everything else. It plays like a B-tier open world game circa 2011, prone to the excesses of Assassin’s Creed III or the first Watch Dogs and equally as lifeless.
There are the seeds of something good here. Even at my most critical I can see where Volition hoped to take Agents of Mayhem. But the finished product is a muddled mess, somehow both too bloated and too empty—and worst of all, boring.
This story, «Agents of Mayhem review: Not-so-super heroes» was originally published by
PCWorld .
Hayden writes about games for PCWorld and doubles as the resident Zork enthusiast.

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CNET brings you the most interesting gadgets from Europe’s biggest tech trade show.
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For a vestige of the past, the password has managed to hold on and remain alive — even though some of the top people in computing said that it had already died over a decade ago. In one of his more famous predictions, Microsoft founder Bill Gates…
For a vestige of the past, the password has managed to hold on and remain alive — even though some of the top people in computing said that it had already died over a decade ago. In one of his more famous predictions, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said that passwords were on the way out already in 2004. Problem is that Gates, for all his wisdom, didn’ t tell us what to use to replace passwords.
“There is no doubt that over time, people are going to rely less and less on passwords, ” Gates said at the RSA conference in 2004. “People use the same password on different systems, they write them down and they just don’ t meet the challenge for anything you really want to secure.” How prescient he was, it turns out. There were hackers back in 2004, but hacking was nothing like the major international industry it is today — responsible for tens of billions in losses every year, and endangering businesses large and small. Gates said
That there is more than mere correlation between the ubiquity of password authentication and the high levels of hacking today is clear from a Verizon study, which shows that four out of every five data hacking-related breaches are due to stolen passwords or misused credentials. It’s a grim statistic, but one that shouldn’ t surprise anyone; a study by SplashData shows that the term “password” was the second most stolen password in 2016, right behind “123456” — which means that despite extensive education on password security and endless nagging by CISOs and security teams to users, there are plenty of people who are not listening. And for passwords that aren’ t easy to guess, hackers have a slew of tools — from phishing e-mails to malware like keyloggers — that lets them steal what they want. Verizon study four out of every five data hacking-related breaches SplashData
With all their drawbacks, passwords have remained popular mostly because people are used to them. User experience, it turns out, is a major driver of security for users. To replace passwords, you need not just tight security (any new solution should outdo passwords as a protection system) , but a positive user experience as well.
There is just one method that fits both bills — password-free mobile push-based authentication systems, usually in the form of apps that do the authentication automatically, with no excessive demands on users. Push authentication involves sending a notification (via a secure network) to a user’s device when accessing a protected resource. With push, possession of the device itself becomes a prime method of authentication — and if you add a secondary authentication element (passcode, gesture or biometrics) , you have an almost foolproof authentication system that is far stronger than password authentication, and easier to use.
Insecure they may be, but online services and network administrators just can’ t seem to give them up. Why? It’s probably due to ennui. Although a user has to devise, remember, and type in a password — which seems like a lot of work — they are used to how password authentication works, and they’ ve made passwords a part of their routine.
So any authentication system that seeks to step up and replace the password needs to be easier to use than passwords (i.e. no devising, remembering or typing needed) , as well as more secure.
Among the candidates for a more secure and user-friendly experience are biometrics (Apple, for example, has adopted the use of thumbprints to authenticate users of iOS devices) . In a biometrics-based authentication system, all a user has to do is touch the device. However, according to NIST (the US National Institute for Standards and Technology) , biometrics alone is not the way to protect a system. Biometrics, says NIST, “shall be used with another authentication factor; ” as an authentication system, it is not accurate enough to stand on its own. iOS says NIST
NIST further states that biometric characteristics “do not constitute secrets. They can be obtained online or by taking a picture of someone with a camera phone (e.g. facial images) with or without their knowledge, lifted from through objects someone touches (e.g. latent fingerprints) , or captured with high resolution images (e.g. iris patterns) .”
Another potential candidate to replace passwords — and a very strong one at that — is hardware tokens. But again, user experience is an issue; carrying around a token in order to connect as needed is a hassle. What about text messages — where a user types in a four-digit code sent by a site to a device via SMS? While easier to remember than passwords, this method too is insecure says NIST, which is why the industry is increasingly shifting away from this method of authentication.
The primary reason passwords are so problematic is that they constitute a single point of failure (i.e. a point at which a breach could take place that would compromise an organization’s entire security system) . If hackers steal/crack/phish their way to a password, the only thing separating them from a user’s data — or a corporate server — is no longer standing in the way.
Any method that we would want to adopt would have to be equipped with more security than is available in password or authentication — utilizing multiple channels to authenticate users and/or devices.
To boost security, many organizations have adopted two-factor authentication, usually based on a code sent via SMS. Google has embraced this authentication method; when a user wants to log onto a service or website, they provide their username and password, and the Google Authenticator sends a six digit password via SMS, based on a shared secret between the device and authentication server. While better than just a single-factor authentication system — especially one based on usernames and passwords — NIST says that as SMS messages can be hijacked, a more secure second-factor authentication method would be preferable. NIST says
Mobile push-based authentication, which enables users to sign on to services with one action, and without passwords, is perhaps counterintuitively, more effective both in terms of security and user experience. A ‘Great Authenticator’ of this type enables users to access multiple services/domains. The authentication is triggered when the user taps the requested key on their device. There is no need to keep logging in or repeating the authentication; it is passed on for that session to multiple environments.
In a push authentication scenario, a notification (via a secure network) is sent to a user’s device when they access a protected resource. This method verifies the position of an authenticated device by the user. Initially it is used to verify “something that the user has” (the phone) instead of “something that the user knows, ” both valid ways to authenticate. Since it’s reasonable to assume that users protect their devices and close or transfer their accounts when devices are lost or stolen — and possession is not something that can be faked by a hacker — push turns out to be far more secure than passwords or text, while being far easier to use.
Realizing that this is where things are headed, Microsoft recently introduced its new Microsoft Authenticator, which uses push authentication, by “shift [ing] the security burden from your memory to your device.” Instead of typing in a password, “which can be forgotten, phished, or compromised, ” users simply respond to a push notification when they try to access their Microsoft account. Besides being more secure than a password, push authentication “is easier than standard two-step verification” as well, says the company. recently introduced
Push-based mobile device authentication is a trend that is already taking hold — and is set to grow, according to Gartner, which says that 50 percent of enterprises using mobile authentication will adopt mobile push as their main authentication method by 2020, compared to the 10 percent who are using it today — a 500 percent increase by the end of the decade. according to Gartner
To a generation of security-challenged users, it sounds almost counterintuitive to get rid of passwords, however, even the longest, most complicated passwords are not as secure as a strong authenticator. For companies and employees, and for web sites and clients, push authentication provides a great leap forward by providing better security that is easier to use. Contributors
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