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Rating 2
2
Bad

Saints Row - Review

An awkward return to hyper-stylized gang violence
Score: 2/5
Reviewed by Carter Barnes on PS5 - August 26, 2022   



Originally considered a Grand Theft Auto clone back in its infancy, the Saints Row franchise has come a long way from its street gangster origins. Spanning multiple mainline entries, spinoffs, and countless DLCs, Saints Row managed to break out of its GTA-centric roots and create its own wacky and eccentric identity that fans came to love over the years. Here we are, in 2022, with a new entry in the series, yet it’s not the same identity we’ve come to know and love. The historied Saints Row developer Volition returns to their flagship series with a fresh restart, an arguably warranted one due to the complicated nature of the original series’ story up to this point. While this allows for a whole new array of design choices, character reworks, and overall clean slate for a newly designed Saints gang to wreak havoc in, the execution of this new reboot comes with plenty of hiccups and missteps that hamper this new attempt at another open-world sandbox game.

Saints Row (following the trend of titling your reboot the same as the original game, confusing anyone looking into the series in the future) follows your own customizable character in the new city of Santo Ileso, a southwestern desert city modeled after many cities close to the western Mexico border, a breath of fresh air when it comes to sandbox environments, as most often these types of games are in metropolitan-esque cities that look the same, including past Saints Row entries. With the help of your down and out friends looking to make something of themselves, you form the series famous gang “The Saints”, looking to rival the towns other gangs and take over the city to run it yourself. For the series, this story is pretty much the same as the original titles, even for any gang uprising-related story in any media, which is fine. Painting a down to earth, gritty gang story is not what the Saints Row series has every truly been about, it’s about putting your character and gang in the most crazy and outlandish situations that require crazy and outlandish solutions.



As mentioned earlier that the series was prime for a reboot, as the last main title, Saints Row IV, had you going up against intergalactic aliens, fighting in a simulation of Earth with superpowers after the real planet was completely blown up by said aliens. It’s safe to say that the series didn’t have many options for another sequel. Which leads me to say that I was completely fine with this fresh start of a reboot, it gave the series an opportunity to build a whole new cast of fun and memorable characters, just like the last set of characters.

Those hopes were crushed pretty early on, as each cutscene with the core set of characters had me constantly face palming over incredibly cringey and ham-handed dialogue that never let up for a second. Saints Row as a series is nowhere near award-winning auteur writing that makes you think; it’s meant to be crass and insensitive as that’s what they were always going for in the gameplay as well. This reboot feels like it was written by a bunch of cable sitcom writers that are appealing to a younger crowd, which comes off as feeling like that Steve Buscemi "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" meme. Every joke feels like it requires a canned laugh track at the end, and not in the ironic way that it should be for this series. It doesn’t help that the voice acting feels so forced by some of these characters, like you’re basically listening to them read the script for the first time. These conversations and remarks from each and every character really take you out of focusing on the story, and just leave you focusing on how awful these “relationships” feel.

And we haven’t even gotten to the gameplay yet, which is not a good sign. Being an open-world sandbox series known for its odd and wacky weapons, outfits, and set pieces, they managed to keep that feeling and provide the player with plenty of options to choose from. The free reign of having your character run around in a cowboy hat, jean jacket, underwear, and ridiculously large cowboy boots, smacking pedestrians with a pickaxe, is something that feels just at home in a Saints Row game.



Each gun category has a wide variety of options that don’t just serve as different skins. If you want a new kind of assault rifle, try out the military laser burst option, or maybe the western bolt action repeater rifle is more your forte. Alongside the various melee weapons that range from machetes to a literal giant bone bat, there’s lots of room to build your own personalized weapon cache.

The series’ activities are one of the most famous parts of the games, providing breaks from the main story to mess around and take on silly opportunities. While this new entry doesn’t have some of the fan favorites such as Insurance Fraud or Septic Avenger, the game has created new activities that feel fresh, albeit few and far between. Activities such as @TCHA have you giving bad reviews on gang-owned businesses, and depending on the rating you give, the difficulty of said enemies will increase. These new activities are fun and its good to see new ones after every past entry in the series seemed to just rehash the original ones, these new activities get old pretty quick, as they don’t provide variety between them across the map.



The return of brutal execution moves leads to some inventive little physical diatribes that keep the past humor of previous entries, which is very much needed amongst the sea of unfunny humor that this game holds. Building up your flow meter will let you use either these execution moves or other abilities you unlock as you complete challenges and missions. Examples such as strapping a grenade to a grabbed foe and tossing them into a group of enemies, only to see them all go flying in different directions is some of the game’s few moments of satisfying combat experiences.

Take note when I say “few moments”, as the rest of combat is bogged down by the incredibly clunky and somehow laggy feeling controls that persist throughout the whole game. While this game does have online co-op, I entirely played in an offline, single player game, yet I constantly found it hard to ignore the awkward feeling of moving around and shooting. It almost felt like there was this lag delay when trying to aim, especially when zooming in on specific enemies. I would consistently be waving back and forth on an enemy, trying to stay focused on them, and struggle with the delayed camera movements of aiming.



This is a far cry from the past games, which had tight and solid movement, with combat that was incredibly satisfying when fending off hordes of enemies being sent at you. In this new reboot, going up against a measly small group is way more of a struggle than it needs to be, and not because of difficulty selections. Even on easier difficulties, I still found my health getting shredded by only a couple enemies, leading to constant running and hiding, just to wait for a smidge of health to come back, which breaks the flow of combat every time.

Which leads me to the biggest elephant in the room for this reboot: it is plagued with loads of glitches, bugs, and oddities that can take you out of the moment and ruin some of the great experiences that the developers clearly had planned out. From glitching and various texture pop-ins, menu and UI text not showing up, audio/music just completely stopping for no reason during pivotal moments in gameplay, to every kind of game-breaking bug that you can think of that halts what you’re doing, it was consistent enough to make me not want to continue at certain points.

Now I can’t say this without pointing out that past Saints Row games were not a programmer’s dream in comparison to this reboot. This is the same series in which one could jump on top of a car and instantly clip into it and start driving just by hitting the enter button. In no way has this series been clean of glitches. But the difference is that none of the past glitchiness of previous games ever held back the player from enjoying the game, if anything, the jankiness of classic Saints Row is what made it fun and memorable for so many.



Fast forward to now, with this reboot, and you can see that none of these glitches and bugs provide any kind of fun or memorable experiences, only ones that hinder the game’s presentation, making it feel like a newly established developers first outing. But it’s not, this is the same developer that made every single game in the series, so it brings into question, was this game just not finished or we’re they only trying to capitalize on the familiarity of the Saints Row name with a subpar sandbox experience?

It's a shame to ask this, but I bring into question because of Volition’s past repertoire of titles, especially in the Saints Row franchise. They’re clearly capable of making incredibly well-designed sandbox games, not just in the Saints Row series, yet here we are with a broken game full of bugs and oddities that make it hard to continue playing. If anything, it makes me want to go back and play the past games in the franchise again, which shouldn’t be the goal of a newly released reboot.

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