Summary
Lets start at the one of my two big gripes: Performance. Its not acceptable. Its fairly simple – If a 1080TI cant run your game at a stable 60FPS (not even on maxed settings), then your title is not optimized properly. Its not all horrible, but the frequent drips below 60 (or even 40!) are annoying to say the very least. Further the title has some of the worst pop-in I’ve encountered in ages – which coupled with the performance issues is just very much a disappointment.
Now – The good bits are very good though, and the various characters you can play and unlock are great from top to bottom, each having unique quirks and facets to their mechanics and how they interact. Especially on higher difficulties you need to really mix and match abilities to survive with your tag-team of 3.
Further, the actual world is a ton of fun. There is nothing boring about blowing up endless waves of minions for an endless number of hours… endlessly!
Sadly, the content does get very repetitive after a while, with enemy lairs all looking the same and the few enemy variants available quickly outpacing their welcome. No amount of Uranus jokes can make up for limited set of variants in the gameplay worlds side objectives and mechanics. Every lair or objective is either “Blow up the glowing red stuff”, “hack this console” or “kill his bunch of enemies”, and while that’s fun initially, no further depth or exploration of these mechanics does leave one wanting.
Conclusion
Which is the crux of Agents of Mayhem – It leaves you wanting. It leaves you wanting more depth to the story, more depth to the combat mechanics, more depth to the character customization. Very few things, outside of performance, in the game are bad – but few are truly excellent.
