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Agents of Mayhem |OT| Ain'ts Row

Alot of people that play games seem to be reeeally into schadenfreude rather than realizing that good games selling poorly makes other companies less risk averse in the future.

Look at Battleborn, Lawbreakers and now Agents Of Mayhem, people WANT games to fail so they can get a smug sense of satisfaction rather than seeing these games they were never interested in succeed.

See I don't think this deserves to be compared with Battleborn or Lawbreakers at all. It's very much it's own thing and not trying to take on a genre (like I guess open world, but every game is open world now). I don't know if it was the marketing or just the general tone of the humour, but I just really don't think this game deserves to be dismissed the way it has. Hopefully enough positive word of mouth will push people to try it because it's incredibly fun
 
Whoa, I just noticed that every character's voicelines for every quest are animated (and done well). Guess I hadn't paused to look...
 
Or. Each of those games failed to excite or even interest gamers due to a combination of poor marketing and a failure to stand out or demonstrate what is so different/good about the title.

Or. Each of those games are excellent and people were just unwilling to give them the time of day, especially when they were all very upfront about what made them good/stand out.

See I don't think this deserves to be compared with Battleborn or Lawbreakers at all. It's very much it's own thing and not trying to take on a genre (like I guess open world, but every game is open world now). I don't know if it was the marketing or just the general tone of the humour, but I just really don't think this game deserves to be dismissed the way it has. Hopefully enough positive word of mouth will push people to try it because it's incredibly fun

Why would BB/LB be considered trying to take on a genre but AOM not be considered taking one on? I'm guessing you mean that the specific genre that BB/LB are in, which is "multiplayer shooter", is harder to find success in than an "open world" title.

I assume that part of the reason the genre of "multiplayer shooter" is so hard to capture/retain players is because the nature of a multiplayer title usually means most people only have the time to dedicate to one title at any given time so its more common to see games pit against eachother like BB/LB VS Overwatch often are. This could very well lead to games failing to catch on simply because other games are already taking up peoples' time. If I understand you correctly then I do see what you mean by saying BB/LB had to "take on" competition in a way that AOM didn't have to due to it's genre.

Despite being different genres, I think it's fair to compare AOM to those titles as they are all fantastic games that have fought an uphill battle since reveal that had nothing at all to do with merit. Nobody has judged these games based on how good/bad they are, they've judged them based on "How similar they are to Overwatch" (Lawbreakers) "How bad previous Gearbox games like Aliens:CM have been" (Battleborn) and "How this game that wouldn't work with Co-Op has no Co-Op" (Agents Of Mayhem)

THOSE are the reasons these games have had a poor reception, it had nothing to do with marketing or tone of humor or even quality of the games.
 

Enduin

No bald cap? Lies!
Got a weird/annoying bug. Now every time I go to the Ark I get a mission to go to R&D and build Hollywood's Crow Pleaser Legion Tech, but the problem is I already have it built and so the mission locks me out leaving the Ark unless I do one of the VR missions which is the only way to temporarily deactivate the Legion Tech mission.
 
Is it even possible to hold all 4 legion towers at once? They always get taken away from me, it's very irritating.

Nah, they'll only stay held for a little bit before one inevitably falls. Another one of my minor quibbles with this game: I'm very much the type of player who, when given a map full of random side-quests to do (especially in the past Saints Row games), likes to go out and knock out a lot of them before tackling the actual story. But in AoM, none of the side activities actually are ever done, and either regenerate after a few minutes or never go away at all. Heck, even for the race missions it would be enough if it did like other open world games and recorded your fastest time in the description, so at least I known I've done it, but there's no indication at all that you've done a side activity until you start it and realize that it looks familiar.

Also, just finished one of the boss fights (the
fake Justin Bieber fight at his concert
and whoah, buddy, single-digit FPS pretty much the whole time. Normally I'm the type of player who doesn't mind a little bit of a FPS drop every so often, but this was so bad it rendered the fight almost unplayable.

Still enjoying myself with it, but I'm at that phase I reach with a lot of open world games where it's time to mainline to the end and ignore any side activities, before I get sick of it.
 
I'm having fun with this game too, but let's not pretend it's perfect and void of flaws.

The performance (I'm even on a PS4 Pro) is not great and hurts how fluid the game feels in my hands. The combat instances can get relatively samey, and the traversal is at this weird inbetween point. What I mean by that is that they don't have crazy Saints Row 4 ways of speeding around like a crazy person, nor is it Crackdown's superhero leaps and bounds, but it's ALMOST that. You can go kinda fast and jump kinda far, but most characters move similarly with minor differences.

That's my biggest issue with the design, I think. There's something inconsistent about what they can do. Hardtack has a harpoon that can teleport enemies to him, a few characters have gear that let's them triple jump, but these things don't effect much in practice. The strongest gameplay difference among characters really comes down to the enemy types they're strong against rather than getting players to adhere to certain styles.

I don't want to use X character to beat the enemy that has weakness to X. I want to use X character because they speak to me.

I almost wish they leaned a little more into the team of heroes thing, and less into them being a team of soldiers. Give me a character that can take off and fly for a bit, or another with a short range teleport. Give me more creative powers and abilities outside of "shoots this gun" and "shoots a special blast"

Agents is close, but not exactly what I want.

Sidebar: on the ark do things look weird and full of bloom effect to anybody else?
 

gogosox82

Member
So I played for about two hours and man it is a slog right now. The first three characters you get a kind of boring and their upgrades aren't interesting at all. I don't really care about having faster reloads or more ammo in my clip. That's just boring. Hopefully the other characters will have more interesting upgrades. I also am not understanding why we have three characters we can switch on the fly yet. I guess its cool but I keep thinking this would be a lot funner in co op. Anyway, I hope it gets better but I wasn't impressed by the first two hours.
 

Lijik

Member
I've had all four towers held for awhile and haven't had any of them taken from me. I didn't even know that could happen
i dont think its possible until you finish hammersmith and do the missions to unlock daisy. legion will take back the relic/gremlin buildings too after that point
 

B-Dex

Member
i dont think its possible until you finish hammersmith and do the missions to unlock daisy. legion will take back the relic/gremlin buildings too after that point

Yeah it's really annoying. Really makes me not want to even finish since it all gets randomly taken away and you gotta spend time re taking it all back.
 

MaLDo

Member
Game has some serious performance problems. Had to modify a lot of settings to achieve locked 60 fps in most intense battles.

On top of that, when the game saves there is a hitch. I will try with a RAM disk to store checkpoints because that worked with Gat out of Hell from same devs.
 
Yeah it's really annoying. Really makes me not want to even finish since it all gets randomly taken away and you gotta spend time re taking it all back.
I just don't bother. I have two ATM things making money and it's slow but it's better than doing the tower again then doing the ATM thing again.
 

Nowise10

Member
This game has to many audio bugs where sound effects will continuously play until you restart the game or find some kind of workaround that stops it. Like the fifth time its happened all with different sounds.
 

Enduin

No bald cap? Lies!
Welp now I can't play the game as this dumb R&D Legion Tech mission bug is preventing any new main missions from being posted so the entire Mission board is "Offline" until I complete this thing I've already done. So all I can do are VR missions...
 
I've unlocked all the early agents and it seems Yeti is super op unless the later agents you receive are even better than him. I don't even need to use the other agents with him around.
 
Welp now I can't play the game as this dumb R&D Legion Tech mission bug is preventing any new main missions from being posted so the entire Mission board is "Offline" until I complete this thing I've already done. So all I can do are VR missions...
I think the same glitch happened to someone on Reddit but once they did a vr mission the regular ones came back.
 
I hope by some miracle this game sells well. I'm really enjoying it. I've only played for 90 minutes so far. If people say it starts off slow and I already like it, then that's awesome.

I love the single player focus, as I don't play multiplayer games. I also found Saints Row 4 way too ridiculous, silly, ungrounded. Agents of Mayhem is way more up my alley. It's fun to switch between characters, upgrade abilities, etc. The gunplay is great so far. I enjoy the art style. Performs well on PS4 Pro. I'm happy so far.
 

Enduin

No bald cap? Lies!
I think the same glitch happened to someone on Reddit but once they did a vr mission the regular ones came back.

That's what I mentioned doing before. But after completing the last main mission to get Daisy now that trick doesn't work anymore. Seems the mission to build Legion Tech is gating future main missions from populating making the entire mission hub offline.
 

benzopil

Member
Don't understand 4/10, 5/10, 6/10 and other mediocre reviews. Just like after playing Yooka-Laylee I just don't understand why some games don't "click" with so many reviewers.

I can't argue when something like Homefront of Ghost Warrior 3 gets these scores, but Agents is a fine and fun game. Opinions and all, but after I played for 10 hours I'll definitely platinum it without getting bored.
 
Don't understand 4/10, 5/10, 6/10 and other mediocre reviews. Just like after playing Yooka-Laylee I just don't understand why some games don't "click" with so many reviewers.

I can't argue when something like Homefront of Ghost Warrior 3 gets these scores, but Agents is a fine and fun game. Opinions and all, but after I played for 10 hours I'll definitely platinum it without getting bored.

It's also a great first entry into what is essentially a new IP. There is plenty of room for improvement but it establishes a really nice foundation that can easily be built upon. I think sometimes it's hard for reviewers to separate things because they review so many games whereas the average consumer plays like a third of the games that most reviewers do. What seems stale to a reviewer can absolutely feel fresh to anyone else.
 
It's also a great first entry into what is essentially a new IP. There is plenty of room for improvement but it establishes a really nice foundation that can easily be built upon. I think sometimes it's hard for reviewers to separate things because they review so many games whereas the average consumer plays like a third of the games that most reviewers do. What seems stale to a reviewer can absolutely feel fresh to anyone else.

Far too many people thought this would be Saints Row with a different name. That probably hurt the game's critical reception quite a bit.
Sad, because it's a genuinely fun title on its own.
 

Drewfonse

Member
My copy is in my mailbox at home. I'm pretty excited for this. I just want a straightforward, fun action game that makes me smile.
 

gogosox82

Member
Man this game is really fucking buggy. Already had 4 or 5 really annoying bugs and I've lost probably 30 minutes of playtime because a quest bugged and I had to restart the misson all over again.
 

DirtyLarry

Member
I played a good 3 hours yesterday. Unlocked Braddock I think her name was. I like her Mayhem Air Strike.

It is just a silly, fun to play game. Not serious at all. It is all a bit floaty with the controls, but it still works overall. Driving is perhaps the least fun thing as the controls are REAL floaty with driving.

Overall got it for $42 thanks to Best Buy and a $5 GC, so I am not going to complain at all.
 

Wagram

Member
I can't speak for anyone else, but I would rather watch paint dry than play anymore of this. Graphically, I think it's decent, but everything else is....bland or uninspired.
 
Or. Each of those games are excellent and people were just unwilling to give them the time of day, especially when they were all very upfront about what made them good/stand out.

Yes. You're right.
Looking at the reviews (sub 70% for 2 of them), all of these games are 'excellent' and that just means they've been treated unfairly.

That's far easier to believe than the notion that the same games are good but flawed, and that they failed to ignite excitement though marketing, previews and betas/demos.

I haven't played Agents of Mayhem yet. However I played a fair bit of Lawbreakers and Battleborn, and you're crazy if you think that both games failed soley because of how they were treated.
 
Just three more of the agents to unlock! I guess Scheherazade is unlocked through story progression.


I just unlocked Red Card and I can already tell that I'll be using him a lot. 'Dat shotgun/assault rifle combo!
 
That's what I mentioned doing before. But after completing the last main mission to get Daisy now that trick doesn't work anymore. Seems the mission to build Legion Tech is gating future main missions from populating making the entire mission hub offline.
Ah that really sucks. 😭
 

Buckle

Member
Sucks to hear it might be underperforming. I wasn't all that interested in it (although planning to buy eventually) but Voliton release nothing but quality.

Looking forward to Saints Row 5 though if thats what they fall back on. See them get back in the custom character creation game, they had always had a fun take on it.
 

B-Dex

Member
These buff troopers are way overtuned. Also invulnerable enemies that don't drop invulnerability just kill any enjoyment.

Also snipers that one shot your shields and leave giant debuffing aoes.... thanks game.
 

Grisby

Member
i dont think its possible until you finish hammersmith and do the missions to unlock daisy. legion will take back the relic/gremlin buildings too after that point
Yeah, I went to collect some money today on the ark after leaving it overnight and it was like, "nah dawg, you don't have any pimp businesses going."

Sure enough, those Legion guys must have taken it back. I understand why they did it, since they want you to have bases that keep respawning with enemies so you can keep leveling your agents, but man, it kind of makes me not want to take over the towers since they'll just be retaken at some point anyways.
 
Is there any easy way to tell who is strong against what enemy type? I feel dumb but that's the one part confusing me about the game. I see each character is good against a certain type of enemy, but I can't tell when I'm facing that type of enemy.
 

Big_Al

Unconfirmed Member
Spent about 10 hours playing this today alone, couldn't put it down, so nearly 15 hours into it so far. Unlocked all the agents now as well. Great game, I'm genuinely having a real great time with it and I'm loving all the different agents. Hell there's noone that I dislike but I think my favourites so far would be Yeti, Daisy and Red Card but that constantly changes.

Can be very manic and fast paced which keeps you on your toes. I can see this being in my top 10 for year this relatively easily. It does have its issues but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a smile on my face the whole time I'm playing.
 

Nowise10

Member
Achievement art for defeating
Gaunt
is amazing.

JZexIO3.png
 
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