State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem is one of those titles that attempts to keep you on your toes with never-ending action. Enemies will continuously attempt to kill you and the entire planet is snowballing into complete chaos and it’s your job to cause further mayhem.

Offering more content from the original game and serving as a remake, Masters of Mayhem has a variety of activities to engage in, from raiding banks to preventing an alien invasion in outer space. The entirety of the game feels like over-the-top nonsense, but for some that may appeal.

The art style is heavily sketch based and fairly basic.

At all times you’ll be weaponised with guns, vehicles and gadgets, which is a neccessity when you have enemies coming at you every second from all corners of the screen. The story starts off set in your home town and later takes things to outer space, all of which is presented in the basic hand drawn art style.

The gunplay itself is fairly simplistic – aiming and movement locked to analogue sticks and shooting to your right trigger. There are also various gun pick ups and upgrades from defeating bosses, which offer various strengths and weaknesses. There’s not really much to learn with weapons and shooting mechanics, just aim at an enemy and fire! In no time will there be specks of blood flying from those pesky bug-like enemies flooding the area to attack you.

Having played a lot of hand drawn visual games, this is one of the more basic and is quite literally like a computerised sketch on screen, as you can probably see from the screenshots included in this review. It’s not a negative point to raise, but I do feel there are some greater detailed hand drawn graphical games such as Cuphead or The Banner Saga, where more polish and effort has been made visually. At times this just seems all too basic though and for many I think it will lose any immersion to want to play for hours and return for another killstreak session.

Chaotic mayhem is a blast.

State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem is more of a gunplay arena romp. If you wanted you could just walk around the street killing people all day long and the game would do nothing to encourage you to progress. It gives you the control to just shoot at things and cause mayhem through destroying vehicles or exploding barrels.

The game does also touch upon RPG mechanics through an attribute system, whereby each boss you defeat, you’ll grant yourself a new bonus such as faster reload speed or increased damage for your pistol. Although from what I saw as unlocks there was nothing really that peaked my interest and most seemed pretty basic.

Aliens in outer space!

State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem is a half hearted attempt at a remake. Visually the game sees slight improvements and in terms of enjoyment this will offer between maybe 4-5 hours before it begins to feel too much the same. If you enjoy blasting relentless enemies for fun with different weapons and vehicles then this may be of interest.

CX Score
  • 58%
    Overall - 58%
58%

Summary

Pros

  • Chilled chaos
  • Easy to play
  • Straight forward gunplay
  • Cons

  • Too simplistic art style
  • Almost too easy to complete
  • Bonus unlocks are uninteresting
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