I’ve played a few hours of Volition’s new game, Agents of Mayhem, this evening and my feelings so far are pretty “MEH”. I was never blown away by the Saints Row games, but they certainly had style and some pretty good voice acting for what they were. From my time with Agents of Mayhem so far I can’t say much of anything has stood out. If anything, I’ve felt like the dialogue and voice acting so far has been entirely generic and at some points the lines feel outright forced. It seems like there’s cursing just for the sake of cursing, and I can’t tell whether the characters are supposed to come across as funny or serious most of the time. It would seem they’re going for a Saints Row kind of attitude, but everything so far has missed the mark.

As for the missions, again I feel like I’m running through things I’ve done hundreds of times before. You run (or drive) to a point, hack some stuff, defend it, and move to the next point. It feels like something I’ve already done in Saints Row IV. I’m not even two hours in and there’s already been a capture an outpost mission which is as dry as missions come in my book, and they mention there will be more outposts to capture as the game progresses (oh goody!).

The actual gameplay leaves much to be desired as well. Something just feels off about the shooting and abilities. They almost seem like they were just slapped into the game without a lot of love. I haven’t gotten any satisfaction from taking out enemies, firing weapons or using abilities. Rama’s bow seemed like it would be fun to use at first, but it became frustrating before I even finished her mission. To make matters worse, her dialogue during her mission has been some of the worst yet. Maybe it’s not necessarily bad, but it feels like there’s no purpose to it, it’s so generic you could ignore it altogether and not be missing anything.

The progression between missions doesn’t feel good either. You go back to a central hub and can initiate a new mission from there, or visit a few different shops, but it all feels so already done. The open world so far hasn’t done anything for me, and even recklessly mowing down civilians has no impact at all. Nothing feels alive, and there doesn’t seem to be much reason for it to be an open world game at this point.

I’m left not sure that I even want to launch the game again. Maybe it gets better, but so far it seems so generic that I think I’d be better off moving on to something else.