It will be the wave of almost forced goodism that we are going through in recent years, or the simple desire to create products appreciable by any generation without controversy of sorts, but from video games has largely disappeared “the brothel”.
You got it right, the brothel: the mess, the chaos, the pure and brainless devastation. There are many titles on the market where the spectacular and the excess are part of the formula, of course, but you do not see almost any more where everything runs exclusively around that.
And in all sincerity it is a sin, because while it is nice to see the medium evolve, expand and experiment between a myriad of genres and hybridizations, the other is not the case of abandoning all those games designed simply to make you turn off the brain and combining disasters, also because precisely because of their rough nature can be developed in a myriad of interesting ways.
Volition must have guessed, or would not explain the rowdy drift of his products after the third Saints Row, culminated in the production of the video game we talk about today: Agents of Mayhem.
Abandoned in fact any ambition to challenge the common open world on their own field, the titles of the house have focused entirely on action and on dementia, while maintaining a certain general concreteness of universe and characters. However, Agents of Mayhem is not just their new project … it represents the test of nine to see if the house – after the THQ disaster – has really found its way.
AN IP NOT SO FRESH
Do not be fooled by the name: Agents of Mayhem is not a new intellectual property, but a game closely related to the Saints Row series, whose universe derives directly from one of the end of the Gat Out of Hell expansion.
Characters and situations in part coincide, as is the crude and disgusted humor with which the brand has conquered many of its fans; So expect double meanings, rivers of imprecations, almost cartoony ultraviolence and a general lack of brakes during the campaign.
What you should not expect, however, is a narrative centered on gangs and neighborhood crime like that of the first chapters of the saga: with this product the Volition have kicked the Saints’ past, focusing all on the pushed humor and the characters.
The end result is pleasant, because the game does not hold the shots and makes use (not to say abuse) of racial stereotypes, hilarious jokes and memorable characters; yet we are a span under the mix of metanarrative and parody of the gaming of the fourth Saints Row, who could even hide some of his flaws by force of absurdity and found brilliant.
Agents, in a nutshell, tries to be a caricatured version of a 90s action film, with comic characters and references to the Saints thrown into the mix: enjoy from the beginning to the end, but it is not as memorable as its predecessor.
The plot, however, is less solid due to the absence of a single customizable hero, replaced by a myriad of playable characters that represent the core of the experience. This title is in fact completely built around the Mayhem, an organization committed to saving the world from the evil forces of the LEGION, and populated by fighters to say the least “eccentric” that you can unlock and use as a mission mission.
