PLATFORM: PC, PS4/5, XBOX ONE/SERIES (REVIEWED) | RELEASE DATE: 23RD AUGUST
Rebooting the series with a brand new cast of characters, Saints Row stars your very own self as a wannabe crime boss who is very ready and more than willing to take over the city of Santo Ileso alongside your three bestest friends in the whole world. Making ends meet in this dusty southwestern American city isn’t easy, and the game begins with your first day working for Marshall, a high-tech military organisation that appears to specialise in murder and destruction. Luckily, those are two of your favourite things. A couple of twists, turns and daring (not to mention highly improbable) stunts later, you’re let loose in Santo Ileso to make top dollar by any means necessary – usually by causing as much mayhem as possible. But building a criminal empire can cause a few problems, not least when you ruffle the feathers of the three main gangs around town – the Pantheros, the Idols and Marshall’s soldiers – who will do everything in their power to get in your way…
Saints Row never forces you to do anything that you’re not ready to do – main missions, when you’re ready to accept them – only begin after being picked up from your in-game phone, which acts as a menu where you can also equip useful perks, assign special abilities (a new one is unlocked each time you level up), track wanted targets and access various other handy tools. Otherwise, you’re free to roam the city and explore the world at your leisure, and Santo Ileso certainly has plenty of sights to see.
Aside from smaller distractions like finding collectibles (dropped drug packages, taking photos of landmarks, dumpster diving), customising your weapons and vehicles and buying an assortment of cool / quirky / completely ridiculous clothes from the many shops scattered around the place, a variety of side hustles allow you to earn experience points and cash. There’s a decent range of activities to take part in, from leaving bad reviews online and facing the wrath of irate business owners in full-on firefights (the lower the rating, the harder they’ll fight back) to riding in (or on top of) vehicles to defend the driver en route to a destination and using a wingsuit to glide between buildings and take out communications antennas. “Criminal Venture” activities start opening up after completing a handful of story missions, and additional ventures become available as you progress through the game and your gang becomes more wealthy and influential. These are where you’ll find a few old favourites like Insurance Fraud (purposely injuring yourself for fun and financial gain) and Mayhem (exactly what it sounds like), along with a host of new additions that get you testing a range of prototype tech, stepping into the shoes of a crime scene cleaner, planning heists with the folks from the local fancy dress shop, training an army and building your own brand amongst many other crazy pastimes. Pretty much everything you do rewards you with new vehicles, weapons or clothing, as well as a bunch of experience points which, eventually, automatically level up your character and granting handy new perks to improve your abilities.
The main story missions are where the meatiest action takes place, with a surprisingly engaging narrative, some genuinely likeable characters and a wealth of cartoonishly exhilarating set-pieces that follow your journey to becoming an all-conquering crime boss. As you progress, you’ll earn all kinds of increasingly outlandish costumes, vehicles and weapons, giving you plenty of options to play the game in as silly or as serious a manner as you like. If you want to switch your brain off and just enjoy the ride while causing lots of fun chaos, Saints Row‘s story is exactly the sort of thing you’re looking for.
Moving away from the previous protagonists of earlier games has provided a huge breath of fresh air. The lead character and their companions are a fun bunch to spend time with (and thankfully much less irritating than the trailers suggested), and there’s a strong sense of camaraderie between them all that helps you to feel like part of a real gang. The bad guys, who provide plenty of willing recipients for your destructive tendencies, are more memorable than those seen in previous games too, with the hunky leather and chains-clad Pantheros bringing the muscle while the Idols – who may well be the coolest faction in the series to date, despite their corny views on pretty much everything – cover themselves and their surroundings with eye-catching pink and blue neon and ultraviolet light while throwing in some neat visual effects along the way. The dialogue throughout the game has taken a turn for the better as well. There’s still plenty of toilet humour and a heck of a lot of swearing (it wouldn’t be a Saints Row game if there wasn’t at least one expletive in every sentence), but the jokes feel much less forced than they did in the last couple of entries in the series and the generally light-hearted and playful tone helps the laughs to actually hit more times than they miss.
As fun as the gameplay is, at the time of writing there are a few technical problems that could do with a bit of tidying up. The occasional character or item might not spawn when or where it’s supposed to, forcing you to reload the mission in the hope that it’ll appear the next time around (it usually does, although a full restart was needed several times). Leaving the garage at your main base currently requires a bit of unwieldy manoeuvring as putting your foot on the accelerator – as you generally would want (and indeed expect) to do – will immediately nudge you into the garage marker, sending you to a loading screen which takes you back into the garage. And those who prefer to do their exploring during daylight hours, when you can actually see how splendid the city looks, could be in for a tough time, as the game has a peculiar insistence on changing the time to the middle of the night at every available opportunity (perhaps more of a personal preference than anything else, but a little more daylight would be much appreciated!)… It’s all patchable stuff of course, and the bugs do at least seem to be squashed by a quick reload, but there are definitely a couple of areas that could be polished up in future updates.
Easily the best entry in the series since the original sequel all the way back in 2008, Saints Row is massively fun to play and growing your empire is both addictive and rewarding. It might not break too much new ground, and there’s a lot of “drive here, shoot this” which could get repetitive if you prefer something a little more involved, but the wild and wacky situations you’re thrown into do a great job of disguising the fact that you’re doing little more than shooting things and blowing stuff up. And who doesn’t want to spend a few hours doing that?!
