As the cycle of rehashing the not so distant past continues, another studio and intellectual property falls victim. This time it's Volition with Saints Row, and just as the cycle demands, this zombie corpse shits all over the grave from whence it came. With it's creators seemingly not understanding what made people love the Saints Row to begin with, in fact, often portraying the exact opposite. Such themes as friendship... and friendship... and insert what out of touch olds think are pop culture references, are prevalent, forced, and really fucking annoying throughout. For those that don't wish to waste any time, which I'd recommend you do to this game as it's a very weak 3 out of 10.
For those that wish, we'll be getting into the meat and bones of why this game should be buried alive and forgotten about. Before anything else, we're going to get into the basic systems of the game, the shit that you would have to do in game for the length of a solid bender, around 20 hours or so. Which basically consists of just driving and shooting, spoiler, they are both terrible. I'm not sure how they've managed it, seeing as they had four previous games to base it off of, but they fucked the dog on this one, the combat is terrible. For one thing, it's buggy as all hell, I've had RPGs phase out of existence, take-downs fail, shots missing constantly for no reason, a host of physics related combat bugs, armor bars not show up until you shoot them and a bug I affectionately call the fisting bug, which makes it so you can't fire your weapons as your hands are stuck in the fist fight position. All that and it doesn't even touch on just how bad and rough combat feels, especially melee combat. Playing with a controller was frustrating as all hell between the weapons constantly missing and the auto-aim, which I highly advise turning off as its impossible to work with. Thus, I resigned to mouse and keyboard, which once again auto-aim made near impossible and needed to be turned off, while a significant improvement over the console peasant utility, it still feels like making-out with your cousin, a bit off.
Then there's the skills system, which is mostly just useful for hurling out grenades, or people with grenades shoved up their asses, that's pretty Saints like at least. Generally though, its just more efficient to shoot them in the head with the Tommy gun, than to use any skills, and they had the the selection tree tied to the mouse-3, which is so stupid because half the time you just end up changing your weapon (tied to the mouse wheel). Really this system seems unnecessary and just like they looked at Saints Row 4 and thought they needed to check the powers box off the list with this useless garbage. While we're talking about useless, the perk system is as unbalanced as a fat man on a unicycle. Most of the perks are total crap, with a few being obviously better than it's peers. For example, two 'Major' perks; Juggernaut: You gain more flow when your health is low, or Lust for Life: Your health starts to regenerate as soon as you kill an enemy. With flow only being useful for the shit skills system, and health being most important in combat.
Sub-Par Combat All Around
Aggressively Shitty Driving Mechanics
Next on the docket is driving and transportation in general, it's fine... mostly. The actual navigation of the map to get to missions is fine, you get a helicopter relatively early in and cuts down on a lot of the tedium. The problem with driving, specifically, is the car chases and the car combat. No matter how fast you're car is, enemy cars always catch up, and worse is that physics don't apply to them, only to you. Which means you can swerve through traffic dodging cars like a coed dodging dick at a frat party, only to have enemy cars come barreling through everyone and smash into you and everything else, like a blacked out bro at a frat party. To which your only recourse is to use the vehicle combat system of sideswiping, which will often also throw you off course. It is truly a well thought out system with no faults in the slightest, especially when the game throws a never ending stream of cars at you during said chases. The best way to travel is to fly, by far, as long as you don't get too low, as the janky-ness of the physics and world objects can decide it wants to fuck you.
Boats aren't even worth mentioning as you literally almost never use them, nor should you with how the map is designed. That just leaves the wing suit, which is pretty much a waste of time to use, as long as fast travel exists and you can just always go get a helicopter. I suspect they knew this as well, because they force you to use the damn buggy thing for one of the ventures later in the game. That pretty much sums up what you'll be doing the entire game, other than listening to annoying characters and participating in a gang bang story that will leave you unsatisfied, annoyed, and disgusted with yourself.
Which brings us to the most annoying part of the game; the writing. Much like an excellent whore house, it's difficult to pick which part to fuck first. Much like 'last summer, we'll just take all of it once, and probably blow our load early. This game is an invariable bukkake of annoying, whiny characters, bland story, and and cringe-worthy dialogue. The characters are whiny, annoying, stereotypes that are wholly unfit to hold the original Saints' dildo-bats. The story opens with a party at a church and you're already running the Saints, then get hit over the head tossed into an open grave and get buried alive, only for it open up to a few months earlier... This is the first sign that you're in for metric ton of hot garbage. The story revolves around four stereotypical millennials, or at least what people think is the a millennial, who are just the super best friends and are struggling to pay rent after you get fired on your second day with the big bad Marshall. Paying no mind to the fact that I racked up 50k in the first hours of the game negating the premise entirely, you all resolve so start your own street gang/apparently legal corporation. One that's gonna be different, or the exact quote “We want this to be more than a street gang, we want it to be an institution.” The dialogue is so damn bad it, its like it was written by high schoolers, and the ones that enjoy listening to mumble rap. Who could ever forget such lines as “Can we take a hybrid?”...“Your carbon footprint always matters” “Don't yuck someone's yum” “Hey everyone learns differently› (in regards to not wanting to shoot a gun while trying to learn to shoot guns); “How does that work?” “It works.” “How?” “It just works.” (Fuck off Todd); “Being an idol is so amaze”/ “There are no little guys, just idols and tools of the system”; and “What about the Roommate code?” That last one was clearly written by someone whose never had roommates before, as their just as likely to take a shit on the counter you just cleaned while chugging those special beers you were saving. Seriously though, the dialogue makes it so abundantly clear right off the bat that the developers had no idea they were making a Saints Row game.
You proceed to do a couple side quests with them, dealing with the Panteros street gang with super best friend Neenah, whose personality is cars. The Idols (another idiotic street gang) with super best friend Kev, whose personality is mostly just not wearing a shirt and wanting a waffle iron. Teaching super best friend Eli to shoot, and larp'ing an apparently city wide desert kingdom scenario, and his entire shtick is that he's a nerd taking business classes... It's all as bland and much of the time as stupid as you think. You go on a train heist with the Nahualli, a psychopath that you put in jail in the first mission of the game, kill off the Panteros and Idols, briefly get labeled the Purple Shirt Mafia, then basically immediately get rid of the task force assigned to you.
Seriously?
Then comes the stupidest shit of all, you lose the Saints to Marshall, because of the non-compete clause in your hiring contract with them before you got fired. Which totally makes sense that you can apparently legally own a street gang, oh that's right we're not just a street gang, we're an institution. An institution that openly commits crime and literally kills hundreds of people... No matter which way you want to cut this it's just plain stupid. Then you play around in corporate politics, somehow get a board seat on Marshall to vote out Atticus, their big bad, you get the option to shoot him, or just fire him, but it literally never came up again so was just pointless. That pretty much wraps all the factions, all that's left is that party from the beginning. Which ends with the Nahualli being extra crazy and the one that hit you over the head, tryng to replace you literally. Holds your friends hostage in a weird sitcom set scenario, and you come and save them and finally kill the Nahualli, in part with the power of friendship! Which, don't get me wrong Saints Row always had a theme of friendship, all previous protagonists would do the same, but that was just a part of it, it didn't make it the main focal point of the story and hit you over the head like an overzealous horny caveman with it constantly. But wait, there's more, sort of... there's one last thing, the endgame content, you have to buy the Saints skyscraper, which is a second “base” if you could call it that. Since you can't go inside, and its useless since you can fast travel to the church. It does however, unlock the final scene of the game, which is the most cringe-worthy karaoke scene I may have ever seen and I regularly go to karaoke. If that all seems a bit rushed and like the story is super short, that's because it is, it's rushed, bland, and devoid of what made Saints Row fun.
Which leads us to what you'll be doing the other 15 hours or so, aside from the 5 hours of the main story, the mythical open world. This is honestly most of the content, it brings back old diversions, adds in venture activities, which are mostly just old diversions, and some collectibles. Couple other things like armored cars, and crimes of opportunity, but as my mom used to tell to me, are basically worthless and a waste of time. Much like the rest of the game, and that rebound you brought home last week, its a significant downgrade of the previous iterations. Mayhem, Insurance fraud, Riding Shotgun its all worse, though riding shotgun is far easier. The bonus objectives attached to these things are also worthless, a small irrelevant flat xp amount. There is a couple things of note with collectibles, though not in a good way, the hidden histories and the shooting galleries. They're fine content wise, but they, like the rest of the game and doing your taxes, are painfully tedious. Ventures end up being aggressively tedious, steal this truck 10 times and the carjack mechanic is terrible and bugs out constantly. Drive this truck of radioactive material across the map 13 times, but the NPC driving AI is trash and they will fuck it up for you constantly. Take pictures of cameras for heists, then engage in car chases, but the picture system barely works, slowly at that, and car chases as described earlier are atrocious. Bounce off antenna with the terrible to work with wing suit, drive car, more driving car, and really a lot of just drive the car. Then there's the stores, I found myself not wanting to really buy any of crap they were selling, and there seemed to be significantly less content than previous entries. They didn't even have the balls to bring back Rimjobs, now Jim Robs or Freckle Bitches, now FB's, and Let's Pretend's stock is severely diminished and is crap.
There is one more note that needs to be made on this game, as you might expect its the bugs. Unless you're a blind orangutan not to notice the mess of bugs in the game. Poor optimization, like piss poor, the kind what makes you go “This is a game from 2022, right?”. Then makes you think, “Right, this is the state of games in 2022.” Everything from driving, shooting, ventures, graphics, sound, the wing suit, physics, hell even the subtitles in this game are covered in bugs, it shouldn't have released in this state, but here we are in 2022, where companies are just put out shit and think, “Eh, just send it, maybe we'll fix it later, those idiots will buy whatever we sell 'em.” Which, I think, perfectly encapsulates what this game is.
To say anything else about this game would be giving this game too much of our time, and the game has already squandered enough of it. The best description I could give about it is that it is a buggy game of busy work, unlikable characters, bland story, god awful dialogue, tedious open world, and just flat out not a Saints Row game. It's a bit like the developers only read the descriptions of the previous games, because it's pretty clear they don't understand them. It is for all of those reasons, that this game earns its rating of a 3 out of 10.