Agents of Mayhem

Agents of Mayhem is a 2017 open-world action-adventure game developed by Volition and published by Deep Silver. Released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, it was designed to be the glorious, Saturday-morning-cartoon spiritual successor to the Saints Row franchise. However, despite an incredibly stylish aesthetic and some genuinely fun ideas, it suffered from a bizarre identity crisis, repetitive design, and a baffling lack of multiplayer, ultimately becoming a massive commercial disappointment.

Core Concept and the Saints Row Connection

While it drops the Saints Row name, Agents of Mayhem is actually a direct spin-off. It takes place in the newly rebooted timeline created by the “Recreate Earth” ending of the Saints Row: Gat out of Hell standalone expansion.

The game fully embraces the aesthetic of 1980s animated shows like G.I. Joe and ThunderCats, complete with flashy 2D animated cutscenes. You take control of M.A.Y.H.E.M. (the Multinational Agency Hunting Evil Masterminds), a global strike force funded by the Ultor Corporation and led by former supervillain Persephone Brimstone. Your singular goal is to deploy into a futuristic, neon-lit version of Seoul, South Korea, to stop the supervillain cabal known as L.E.G.I.O.N. (the League of Evil Gentlemen Intent on Obliterating Nations) from taking over the world.

Gameplay and Features

Instead of creating one highly customizable protagonist like in Saints Row, Volition attempted to capitalize on the booming “hero shooter” trend popularized by games like Overwatch:

• The Squad Swap System: You deploy into the open world with a squad of three distinct agents, but you only control one at a time. The core mechanic relies on seamlessly teleport-swapping between your characters on the fly. If your nimble assassin’s shields drop, you instantly swap to your heavy-weapon tank to absorb the incoming fire, or to your hacker to inflict status ailments.
• The Roster: The game featured a base roster of 12 highly stylized, foul-mouthed agents, ranging from a roller-derby girl with a minigun to a bow-wielding immunologist. (Fan-favorite Saints Row legends like Johnny Gat and Pierce Washington were also added, though controversially as DLC).
• The ARK: Between missions, you returned to a massive flying headquarters called the ARK. Here, you could craft upgrades, unlock new vehicle skins, and assign agents to “Global Conflict” idle missions to passively earn resources.
• Verticality: The traversal in futuristic Seoul was incredibly fast-paced. Agents could triple-jump, air-dash, and scale massive skyscrapers, giving the game a floaty, arcade-like momentum reminiscent of Crackdown.

The Fatal Flaws and The “Lair” Problem

Despite the flashy combat, Agents of Mayhem quickly fell apart for players due to a few fatal design flaws:

• The Missing Co-Op: This was the game’s most heavily criticized omission. The Saints Row franchise was legendary for its drop-in, drop-out cooperative chaos. Handing the player a squad of three distinct heroes in a massive open world—and then forcing it to be a strictly single-player experience—baffled the fanbase.
• Copy-and-Paste Dungeons: To pad out the game’s length, the campaign relied heavily on assaulting underground L.E.G.I.O.N. lairs. These lairs were procedurally generated using the exact same, visually identical grey modular rooms over and over again, completely draining the game of its colorful personality and turning the mid-game into a tedious grind.
• A Sterile City: While the futuristic version of Seoul looked gorgeous from a distance, the streets were mostly lifeless, lacking the dynamic pedestrian AI, crazy mini-games, and chaotic emergent gameplay that Volition was known for.

The Legacy

Agents of Mayhem was sent out to die in a crowded release window and failed to resonate with either Saints Row veterans or the new hero-shooter demographic.

The game’s severe commercial failure led to significant layoffs at Volition. The studio eventually retreated to their flagship franchise, attempting to capture lightning in a bottle once more with the 2022 Saints Row reboot—which, tragically, suffered a similar fate and ultimately led to the permanent closure of Volition in 2023.

Quick Note

Agents of Mayhem was a colorful, ambitious experiment that tried to blend a single-player hero shooter with an open-world sandbox.

In short: While the seamless character-swapping combat was genuinely fun for the first few hours, its repetitive dungeon design and baffling lack of cooperative play doomed it to become a forgotten footnote in the Saints Row universe.