Agents of Mayhem: First impressions

I've been meaning to get this game for a while, but held off until it went on sale and I had a bit of spare time. Well, it's my holidays and it just went on sale, and I'm certainly glad I didn't pay full price for it. Actually, it seems like it might end up being pretty fun, but it's hard to tell I've played an hour and a half of it, and I'm just sort of starting to figure out what's going on and what I'm doing.

First up, this game throws a lot of complexity at you right from the start. The tutorial rushes by very quickly and throws a bunch of jargon at you without really explaining any of it, and you're required to play as three different characters right from the beginning rather than giving you time to figure out the basics with one and then switch to the others. There's a lot on the screen and it's not clear what most of it is. Part of that's the user interface and part of it's the graphical style. It's all very visually noisy and it's often not clear what's happening or what you're supposed to be doing.

There are also frequent interruptions for short cutscenes. And not good or funny ones like in Saints Row either. This is pretty much your standard video game storytelling where you watch it because you want to know what's going on and what you're supposed to be doing, but you really don't care and just wish they'd get on with it.

Screenshot shamelessly stolen from GamingBolt.

On top of that, the controls are really weird. You seem to have unlimited sprint, but there's no "always run" option so you have to keep holding the run key (or pressing the "toggle run" button, which only lasts until you stop moving). Then there's "dashing", which is a short, rapid movement that you kind of need to use all the time but which is bound to Ctrl, an awkward key to reach with your fingers on W, A, S and D. You can rebind that, of course, but you've still got the issue of needing constant access to both Sprint and Dash.

The weapon/attack controls are no better. There's your primary weapon which has a button to fire (LMB) and a button to aim (RMB). There's your special attack, (Q), your melee attack (F) and your special power-up mode (G), and those all do different things as each different character. You can make this a little easier to deal with by changing the keys, but it's still a lot of complexity for this early in the game.

Image stolen from How Big is the Map on YouTube.

Ironically, things get a little easier once you finish the tutorial because you can stop and take a moment to understand what the fuck is going on and try things out in isolation, but the game world is kind of hard to look at and basically impossible to navigate. The map, pictured above, is fucking useless. Not just because of how it looks like nothing but also because the icons disappear when you move too far away from them, so good luck finding your way back to anything.

It's impossible to say at this stage whether or not I'll end up enjoying this game once I get into it, but it makes a really bad first impression. And it's really weird how hard it's shoving Saints Row references in your face while not actually seeming to have anything to do with Saints Row. I guess there might be some explicit connection that comes up later on, but at this point it seems more like they just couldn't move on despite clearly wanting to move on.