In 2003, Volition, with the help of THQ and Deep Silver announced their newest game, an open world action adventure game. This game, known as Saints Row, was slated rapidly as a Grand Theft Auto clone. As time progressed through the development of Saints Row 2, 3, and then 4, Volition worked hard to separate the franchise from Rockstar’s juggernaut by giving it it’s own flavour of comedy.
Still, to this day the two franchises are often compared, dominating the open world action adventure criminal RPG scene. With no mainline release for either franchise in almost ten years and the anticipation for Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 6 building, Volition re-emerged with a new game, a reboot of the beloved Saints Row franchise.
This reboot follows a new group in a new location, entirely unrelated to the Third Street Saints of Steeleport. The question, even this closely after launch is then this: IS Saints Row (2022) worth the £50 base price tag, or should avid fans of both Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto wait until Grand Theft Auto 6 is released?
The start of Saints Row brings us a cut scene, a man with a briefcase entering what is evidently the headquarters of The Saints for business. It’s during this opening that we create our character, The Boss.
To the returning player this is a beloved friend, welcoming you back into the fold after a decade apart, to the new player this is just another character creation. The first noticeable change is the removal of the “sex appeal slider” instead separating into both a chest and genital slider, for those wanting a Boss with big chest and big genitals. Another change is the option for replacement limbs, a subtle yet welcome addition as it affirms that you can be a quadriplegic and still run a crime syndicate.
Once our Boss is made, the cut scene continues before fading back to two months later, throwing the player into the combat tutorial. This tutorial is reasonably paced and does a good job teaching and familiarizing the player with the mechanics, flow, and style of combat.
However, once the tutorial ends the glamour and excitement start to fade rapidly.
Santo Ileso, the games world, opens out to you with a fleet of vehicles and choices. It’s just a shame none of them are inspiring. Running through the first handful of missions you’re introduced to your housemates and your relationship with them. I would run through them briefly yet through the 30% of the game I got through none had any particular development that made them stand out.
The rags to riches story the game intends to tell, of you and your housemates going from knocking over payday loan shops to make rent to being a criminal juggernaut, is entirely overshadowed by the games biggest mechanical failing: the driving.
Any open world game has to contend with the space, making getting from A to B enjoyable, or at least not overly a chore. Many games cover this with the use of fast travel but Saints Row, like Grand Theft Auto, makes little use of this. Instead, driving is the dominant mode of transport and travel.
Even without comparison the driving of Saints Row is awful. The various vehicles all have a homogeneous handling profile. Whether it be a go-kart, a super car, an ambulance, an APC, or a truck carrying twelve barrels of toxic waste, the amount of understeer is the same, making driving clunky, drift dependent, and unexciting.
This failure in creating an engaging driving experience undercuts the entire game, more so when you reach the main progression sequence.
The core gameplay loop is to buy enterprises which earn you money. This money can be used to buy outfits and weapons, upgrade and customise weapons and vehicles, and obviously, buy more enterprises. However, buying enterprises isn’t enough as the game forces you to complete enterprises to progress.
The issue is the enterprises are creatively uninspired. Whether you help JimRobs, the vehicle customisation place, the repo company, the food stands, whatever, each mission follows the same base structure with little superficial changes. You drive to a place, get the mission vehicle, and drive back.
This emphasis on driving, the total reliance on it for both traveling to places and doing missions drags the game down. I would not spend so long emphasizing the poor implementation of driving if the gameplay loop wasn’t so dependent on it.
The world of Santo Ileso is a strange one too. For the bustling city it’s supposed to be, I found numerous periods where it was empty, sometimes ten minute stretches would go by where there was nothing. No pedestrians, no npc vehicles, just me driving one of many near identically under-performing vehicles through the abandoned city center on my way to the next driving based mission.
There reaches a point where such a fundamental mechanic, such a core system, being as underwhelming as this ruins the game and makes it feel more a chore to play than a joy. Buying and completing four enterprises in near identical missions to unlock one mission to then have to do four more enterprises stops being fun.
The writing which, while toned down from Saints Row 3 and 4 still has Volition’s particular styling is enjoyable and comfortably Saints Row. The actual writing of the story is fine, not excellent, not terrible, but fine, but when sandwiched as it is being slogging through such underwhelming open world tasks it becomes a breath of fresh air in a landfill.
Back to the combat, one of the games stronger suits, the fighting feels reasonable paced and the slew of skills you can unlock as you level can be fun. However the combat is not without fault. For the range of weapons you can buy and customise and upgrade is nowhere near as diverse as in Grand Theft Auto, it still feels like it’s more than necessary. The base pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle are fine, holding their combat effectiveness well into the midgame where I stopped. At no point did I feel the weapons were under-performing, in need of replacing or upgrading.
This isn’t as much of an issue as the driving but the combat never feels too much, the weapons feel fine, competent, and as the game progresses there is no curve to difficulty, no segments where I felt I needed to improve my skills or equipment.
Instead, what I found was a flat world, devoid of the vibrancy that previous Saints Rows had combined with palatable combat, a fine story, and bogged down immeasurably by the worst driving mechanics I’ve experienced in a video game since Tony Hawks Underground 2.
This doesn’t take into account the almost softlock-esque bugs I’ve encountered. Take, as an example, Drawing Heat, one of the earlier missions. There’s a stage where you have to kill police, however due to poor programming and what can only be described as a failure of beta testing, some of the police will spawn on a nearby overpass where it is impossible to kill them. The only fix for this is to restart from checkpoint, kill the first set of police, and then stand by the street rpgside so the police on the overpass don’t spawn.
This lack of beta testing, underperforming core mechanics, creatively uninspired gameplay loop, and overall feeling of mediocrity that permeates the game is honestly disappointing.
Is this game worth the £50 minimum price tag it comes with? Absolutely not. All I can do is hope that Volition, if they continue to reboot Saints Row, learn from what they have done here and perform better in the future.
