Ever since Volition announced it might be rebooting Saints Row, the large open question among fans has been which game in the series this new version would most closely resemble. Wouldn't it aim for the relatively grounded take of Saints Row 2? The balls-to-the-wall silliness of Saints Row IV? The middle ground between the two which was Saints Row: The Third?
Well, after spending per week with the game, I have my own surprising response to that question. As it turns out, the sport the 2023 Saints Row most jogs my memory of is the 2006 original. Like the first Saints Row, this reboot seems like an obvious riff on another series of games, with some minor improvements to gameplay but hardly any in the way of original ideas or personality. The main difference is, whereas the '06 Saints Row cribbed heavily from 3D-era Grand Theft Auto, the '22 Saints Row feels like a pale imitation of the original Saints Row games.
To be clear, I am not saying those earlier Saints Row games are the best to play today. I haven't touched any of them given that they originally launched, and so i can't speak to how they've aged, but I know I enjoyed them enough at the time these were released, poor where open-world games were at that time.
I can't say the same about this reboot. To provide credit where it's due, Volition has been doing a fine job of giving some modern polish to much of the core gameplay-namely shooting guns, driving cars, and, uh, shooting guns in the surface of moving cars, I suppose. And the game's open world, the Southwestern city of Santo Ileso and the surrounding desert, is handily the best within the series-brimming with fun little details and personality. But all these positive elements exist in service of open-world game design that feels quite dated and a story you will have a difficult time purchasing.
I have no idea how much time I actually need to spend explaining the basics of gameplay, if you've played any open-world crime game previously decade . 5, you most likely already have it. There is a city to explore, cars to hijack, stores to look at, and a mixture of story missions, side content, and collectibles. The only real things that Saints Row really increases the mix to stand apart are a wingsuit, that isn't actually that novel anymore and proves only situationally useful, and the capability to make your “Criminal Ventures” at certainly one of several preselected lots on the open world map. At first this sounds like a neat idea, that you could reshape the city while you progress through the game. However the only actual impact it's, apart from the location of a few buildings, is the fact that on a few of the side missions you'll be finishing at a slightly different location.
Besides, whatever value the Criminal Ventures system adds to the game is undone by the way it's implemented into story progression. At a few points, the game gates from the next main mission until you've built and completed a particular number of Ventures, meaning you're often either saving up cash to construct them-frequently a matter of just being patient, since your existing businesses bring in revenue while you play-or completing Venture side mission chains that are usually the exact same thing over and over inside a different location. Obtaining a truck full of hazardous waste and driving carefully to some dump site isn't actually much fun, but having to get it done more than Ten times is really a whole new level of hell. The most brazen example is a mission chain that's literally just driving around waiting for a particular model of truck to spawn, and then driving it to your business-12 times.
Also egregious would be the challenges you have to finish to unlock new perks. For many of those challenges, the requirements are ludicrously high and never the sort of thing that you would work toward during normal gameplay. No one's getting three full minutes of airtime in a firetruck, garbage truck, and bus throughout a normal playthrough-and that's three minutes apiece, for one single challenge. Who's going to melee kill 12 enemies with every of three different cosmetic variants of the same weapon? Not all the difficulties are that bad, but there are so many perks to unlock that you're not going to get all of them without grinding out at least a number of the really annoying ones. Plus, the challenges unlock gradually throughout the game, without any clear indication of how several positive aspects you've left, so you're motivated to grind whatever annoying ones you have to progress your character. There's a lot in the game that simply feels like busywork made to pad out your playtime without bothering to become fun.
It's not only along side it content, either. All things in Saints Row gets repetitive before long. In addition to those challenge-based perks, you unlock special abilities while you gain XP, not to mention a wider number of weapons, but it is hard to wish to experiment much when firefights are easy to conquer with similar basic tactics. Among the early abilities lets you temporarily give yourself another health bar by spending some of the “Flow” you get during combat. But there's no cooldown apart from waiting until that health is depleted, and it is pretty much given that you'll earn back the Flow you spent when that occurs, so you essentially have an endless way to obtain health as long as you spend the money for slightest attention. When you understand that, the whole game is simply slight variations on a single firefight or chase sequence with minimal challenge.
Even the main story missions, where you'd expect the majority of the budget to visit, don't mix things up around you may hope. There are other cutscenes, sure, but rarely will the gameplay extend beyond what you've already done. Sometimes you're watching cool things happen, but they're rarely in control once they do.
All that will probably be excusable, to some extent, basically were at least engaged through the story, but I struggled with Saints Row there too. The truth is, next to nothing actually happens in relation to plot or character development across the story missions, and also the climax and also the motivation from the game's ultimate villain are extremely rushed it almost seems like a parody of how bad game narratives can be.
The new Saints aren't unlikeable, however, you don't spend very long with them, and they're not cartoonish enough to create a big impression in the limited screen time they are doing get. Generally speaking, Kevin likes cooking and being shirtless, Neenah likes art and cars, Eli likes business, and also the Boss likes murder. Apart from that, whatever you really get is that they're young and experiencing student loan debt, that is pretty relatable, but it's a concern that truly evaporates two missions in, and also the only relatability available next is that, I'm not sure, they are a number of friends? And when you want to know how good they pulled off young millennial/elder Zoomer authenticity, likely to entire early mission that's just you driving while hearing voicemails out of your friends. Sure, voicemails. That's a thing young people love.
The humor, another potential saving grace, is extremely a guessing game. Which has been true of Saints Row games for some time, sure, but I always were built with a sense that Volition had a minimum of determined a core identity for the series. I'm not sure what vibe this new Saints Row is going for. It cleans up some of the most brainless and puerile humor from the original, kind of: The car shop has become JimRob's, not Rim Jobs, and the junk food restaurant Freckle Bitches has become just F.B.'s. Then again, there is a fair quantity of toilet humor, some literal. The weapons don't really match the ridiculousness of the old series' weirdest, such as the Dubstep Gun. But there is a gun that shoots explosive pi~natas, and a football you can throw at enemies to transmit them flying with thrusters. It's type of actually just the exact same philosophy, only less frequently employed with less imagination.
But let's invest that aside for now and obtain to another element of 2023's Saints Row that kept reminding me of the 2006's Saints Row: This game is just so buggy.
The most vivid memory I have from the original Saints Row is not actually of playing it (I do possess a vague sense I rented it at Blockbuster, making me feel very old) but of the YouTube video the game spawned, a compilation of glitch footage accompanied by original showtunes called “Buggy Saints Row: The Musical.” It may be the perfect occasion for creator Cabel Sasser to obtain cracking on a sequel, because my experience playing 2023's Saints Row was essentially an endless stream of bugs.
At the start, I saved clips of each and every new glitch I encountered, simply to have a record, but sooner or later I had to stop since it was impeding my progress. What's truly remarkable is that I'd rarely begin to see the same bug twice-like there was some intentional effort to surprise me with the sheer number of things that might fail while playing.
There were, of course, the classics: T-posing enemies, disappearing cars, swimming with the air, running through the air, getting behind the wheel of the car just for my Boss to face track of her torso jutting from the roof.
There were bugs that were amusing but fairly innocuous, like the smoke from my car tires shooting out ahead of me whenever I used nitrous, or the gentle spurt from the fountain I found that did damage and finally killed me. Once, I came across I had a guns permanently fused to my hands like I was Daniel Radcliffe or something like that. Oh, and special shoutout towards the time my game decided that, rather than engaging in a helicopter, my boss would instead sit down on the ground beside it, an insect that stuck around until I reloaded an earlier save. I could not actually fly the helicopter basically attempted to enter (and for that reason sat down) around the left side of the helicopter, but I could basically tried it from the right side, which is a nice added layer of insanity.
Then there were minor frustrations, like when clothes I'd customized changed their colors without any input from me, or when I was looking for a car to hijack downtown simply to understand that simply no cars were spawning anywhere around me for several minutes. There were bigger annoyances, like the multiple occasions when the sport decided to stop registering inputs from certain buttons on the controller, or even the persistent tendency of helicopters to spontaneously explode when I disembarked, without any warning these were taking damage, forcing me to cross the whole map again to obtain a brand new one. Some of the challenges seem to be completely broken right now, refusing to trace how well you're progressing even if you do the thing they’re asking you to.
But the point that I really can't laugh off, in terms of bugginess, is simply just how much Saints Row crashed on me. I’ve been goofing off in the world a little as I write this review, and the game has crashed out to the Xbox dashboard five times, usually when I'm flying within the VTOL jet or wingsuiting. But it is not just a matter of going too rapidly for that game to keep up. I've encountered crashes in all manner of situations. Yesterday, I left the sport idling while doing other work, and the game kept crashing as i banded still, doing practically nothing.
What's worse is the fact that there is no timing-based autosave, so if you haven't done anything that does trigger a save or manually made one yourself, you are going to lose progress. I've been working to knock off the previous few absurd challenges-things like wingsuiting for 100 kilometers on a map measuring only about 7 kilometers wide-and because the game doesn't even trigger a save when you fast travel, I've lost close to an hour's price of cash and progress toward challenges due to crashes. More than once. That's just not okay.
It's worth noting that, by necessity, I'm playing with no the first day patch installed. But Deep Silver provided a summary of known issues included in the review guide, and absolutely nothing I've mentioned is out there. Besides, if your single patch can fix even half of the bugs I encountered, it will be this type of miracle that the programmers at Volition ought to be entitled to actual sainthood.
Before I wrap this up, I ought to note that I can not talk to the game's co-op features at all-because I could not encourage them to work. I spent about an hour attempting to join a friend and having him attempt to join me, with no success. I additionally tried multiple times to make use of the matchmaking feature, but no one in the limited pool of online players ever accepted my request to join. In theory, I think it may well be a large amount of fun to goof off within the sandbox with another person, maybe even more fun than other things in Saints Row.
But I can not review a game theoretically, can one? I can not element in my suspicion that co-op could possibly be fun if I could get it to work or the proven fact that the worst bugs will probably be patched out in the months ahead. I can only judge what's before me. And the Saints Row I played? Not so boss whatsoever.
