Saints Row Review

Despite some grave reservations, I am pleased that Volition’s 2022 reboot of the Saints Row franchise finds a sweet spot between the series’ best two titles, Saints Row 2 and The Third. In the arid desert city of Santo Ileso, we follow our player-made character and their three housemates as they try to navigate the struggles of rent and employment dissatisfaction by ‘becoming their own boss’ and laying the foundations of a profitable and self-serving criminal empire. 

After players have created their bizarre, cartoonish boss in the impressive character creator, events kick off with the player in the employ of a questionable paramilitary company called Marshal Defence Technologies in order to make ends meet. 

The very best of friends and better housemates than most could want, here enters our accompanying gangsters. Neenah is a member of the Los Panteros, a beefy street gang with a fetish for low-riders, monster trucks, and lethal blockbusters. Kevin is our shirtless sweetheart who is affiliated with the Idols – a gang of Daft Punk helmet-wearing influencers and DJs who are all about neon flair and dancing till they die. Lastly is Eli, a rather goofy and awkward bowtie-wearing nerd who is into LARPing and shows all of about five minutes of trepidation before gunning down bystanders in the name of profit. While introductions are initially promising, none of these characters have any arc to speak of beyond ditching their respective gangs at the drop of a dime, because no bond is stronger than that of easygoing roomies. 

Tow an apple a day to keep the mechanic away

There are few laughs to be had within this crew, other than a series of forgettable quips exchanged on drives to mission locations that allude to in-jokes the player is not privy to. One instance has the whole gang in the vehicle to do a ‘corporate retreat’ day, and the humour is nauseatingly Whedon-esque. References are made to a chilli night ‘that we don’t talk about’, an overplayed bit where we are given no indication as to why it is not spoken of beyond one character getting some pepper in their eye and another spending a couple of days on the loo. All scripted jokes seem referential but lacking in any punchline, or at best, are throwaway sarcastic quips. 

This is a far cry from the memorable bits from the Saints of old. Does anybody remember the auto-tuned pimp from The Third? That shit was absurdly funny and the bit endured an entire mission, often playing off the events that occurred within. There is a complete disconnect between the crew quips and the activities occurring this time around, meaning these characters are ultimately forgettable. Worse still, the audio mixing is so frequently awful that often the only character who can be heard clearly is the player character, with the supporting cast often registering barely a whisper. This can be slightly redeemed with the subtitles, but they don’t always appear when they should.

For better and worse, this game looks and plays as the series did a decade ago. Rusted-on series fans may be overjoyed to hear that this game could have easily been released on the PS3. Weapons handle the same as they did in Saints Row 2, but driving is the best in the series so far, with tight movement and one of the best dedicated drift buttons I’ve yet seen. Side-swiping shunts that cause enemies to erupt into fireballs are also consistently satisfying.

The Idols are the only faction with interesting design

Overall, the open-world design is smaller and denser than today’s contemporaries. The smartphone menu is ripped straight from The Third, right down to ventures generating income that can be cashed straight to your wallet and being able to call in assistance from your crew. On the downside, the weapon arsenal is sparse, with only three weapons available per category on average, with the bulk locked behind the last handful of main missions. Vehicles don’t fare much better, with the vast majority of tanks, bikes, and sedans little more than reskins of what we’ve already seen.

While the lacking variety of interesting new weapons and vehicles is a bit disappointing after five entries in this series, these are somewhat redeemed by the customisation suites on offer. Take for instance the weapons, which allow for layers of colours to be added to various different components. On top of this, gloss and metallic sheens can be applied, as well as deeply customisable image sprays that can be morphed and rotated to suit your flavour. Then there are the vehicles, that also have a satisfyingly large range of body modification options. Nitrous, tow cables, and more can be purchased, as well as unlockable special abilities that are earned by pulling off challenges such as barrel rolls or shunting a handful of enemy vehicles. I am a big fan of randomisation options, and Saints Row doesn’t disappoint. Whether weapons or vehicles, hitting square produces vivid and varied aesthetics that never failed to impress. Players will be able to produce some stunning personalised loadouts with the tools on offer here, which is easily this entry’s most substantial innovation. 

Wheelie shot? Wheelie shot!

Saint Row’s open-world design initially seems to forgo the Ubi-fication that undercuts many action adventures, but it soon rears its ugly head. Almost all missions will be conducted from your HQ in one corner of the map. The objectives are often in the HQ’s immediate suburbs, meaning that by the time the credits roll, the critical path has given the player little reason to explore the dense city that lies on the western half of the map. An inability to explore indoor locations and nearly every shop being a copy and paste means that the world is largely a facade with considerably less depth and character than San Andreas achieved on PlayStation 2. 

The empire table is introduced partway through the game and allows the player to build criminal ventures on properties around Santo Ileso. The promise here is that players will have a personalised world. The reality is that these ventures plague the game with repetitive side activities, such as delivering trucks with volatile toxic waste or driving vehicles around police radars to disposal locations within a countdown timer. At first, these businesses increase your passive income which is great for upgrading weapons, vehicles, and buying perk slots to add some additional player benefits such as increased ammo gain and slower notoriety build-up. Before the game’s end, these ventures’ side activities become compulsory and lead to a cardinal sin of open-world adventures: mission gating. As it turns out, Saints Row’s critical path is rather short, and before rolling credits, players will spend literal hours forced to complete as many as a couple of dozen of these lengthy and monotonous chores in order to continue the critical path objectives for absolutely no reason.

Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation…

The last whipping this Saints Row reboot shall suffer is with regards to its frankly appalling lack of polish. We like to keep things brief here, so tune in to our podcast later this week for my laundry list of bugs and issues. In short, my hopes for a day one patch will do little to mitigate these issues as they plague every inch of the game. A series of side activities that involve reclaiming territory from police and gangs to boost your venture profits would frequently not activate, or when they would, they’d have the wrong objective information applied to the mission at hand. Restarting main missions because characters or enemies wouldn’t spawn. The character creator locks up and forces a restart. Being unable to fly helicopters for half the game because the camera would turn into a 100x telescopic first-person zoom. An inability to turn on adaptive triggers as it would instead invert the movement controls. Perhaps most egregiously of all is the frequent deaths that occur to object clipping or the player locking up and subject to enemy onslaughts, to then have a checkpoint take you all the way back to the start of the mission – back at fucking HQ. 

To add insult to injury, the game runs terribly in 4K and in 1080p with raytracing on. This is unforgivable for a game with this little detail in its textures and with frequent ugly pop-in – in a world that is mostly sparse and with a low density of vehicles and pedestrians. It is no exaggeration to say this game looks like the last few Saints Row titles, albeit with slightly better lighting. I don’t know what happened during this game’s production, but with a game this dated, the critic’s advice of “more time needed in the oven” is a damning catch-22 when this already feels a decade late to the party. 

Only the best open-world action games include a nautical shoot-out

Final Thoughts

As a reboot that is all about capturing the series’ spark all over again, it is immediately recognisable. Building the Saints from the ground up retreads gameplay and story that fans have experienced before. However, the bombastic spirit of the earlier generations’ stripped-back open-world antics is woefully undermined by a plague of bugs and an overwhelming sense of deja-vu. The older Saints titles have more arsenal, activities, and humour than this half-baked reboot.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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