To be perfectly honest this was not a game I was expecting. All I knew before lunching it was that it's not your average GTA-like game. But in the end I must admit I enjoyed it quite a bit. In short this game feels like GTA on mods with a pretty stupid, absurd story line and weird game play.

In the game you control the president of united states. But this guy was previously a gang member with his homies being the staff members. Planet earth gets attacked and destroyed by aliens, people get kidnapped and put into a matrix like pods aboard the alien spaceship and you get put into a computer simulation where you try to defeat the bad alien boss. This gives the ground to you having all of the absurd powers.

Game plays actually like GTA on mods. You can jump high, stomp, fly around, throw cars and other heavy objects, run like flash and shoot fire bullets.

The game is not very unified and feels like a collection of mini games where you get to use your powers one way or another. There are events where you have to scale towers, other places you will race with your super speed. In other instanced you'll do some hacking, throw cars through virtual hoops and so on. On their own the modes are pretty fun to play and there is really a lot of them. If you're not looking for anything serious and just want to enjoy yourself with no thought involved - this might be the right fit. The main story missions make a bit more sense but not that much - just feel like a different mode from the rest.

The progression and upgrade system does not feel very rewarding - though you are able to update your powers to make them more effective. Guns are strange and most of them are pretty useless. You can drive around in cars but since you're faster on foot it doesn't make any sense to do so aside from the special missions.

The game graphics are pretty decent although constant night time feels boring after a while.

In the end it was fun playing. A rather light game but fun nonetheless - surprisingly so to be honest.

Intro

The Saints Row games are third-person shooters in which you drive/fly/sail around a city and kill/destroy/buy stuff.

The Good

SR4 is extremely similar to its predecessor. As i wrote in my Saints Row 3 review, the devs generally care more about what players would want rather than that they get off on how great they think they are.

Like SR3, SR4 is weird, fun, crazy and bizarre. The superpowers are fun. You can freeze things, stomp the ground to blow stuff up or suspend it in the air, fly around, run superfast, et cetera. Zinyak is a fun big bad with his love for English literature and language. The game also gives you solid backup in the form of (super) homies and even the crew of Hey Ash Whatcha Playing.

Also you fight alongside Santa in DLC missions and at the end of the base game You've Got The Touch starts playing and you & Zinyak repeat some of the dialogue of the Transformers movie (this really cracked me up).

The Bad

• It's overall not as a good as SR3.
• They added some Quick Timer Events. Ugh.
• Missions are mostly tied to activities, so if you already did this you get a really schizophrenic experience where you constantly skip ahead in dialogue.
• Some activities kinda suck (like racing).
• Upgrades are still too expensive, i didn't even have all of them at the end of the game while i had been max level for hours.
• Collecting power upgrade globes seems like an artificial way to extend the fairly short length of the game (20-30 hours).

Conclusion

I've completed this game twice. The first time i got 94% completion, this time 97%. I'm not a completionist, SR4 is just a lot of fun. Fly around like Superman, throw enemies with telekinesis, shrink enemies, you name it. Fun.

I recently picked up the 'Re-elected" edition on a PSN sale for $5. I had played the original SR4 on PS3, and wanted a refresher on it. This game is something else, that's for sure. I suppose when you start out as a legit GTA clone you have to think of a way to differ yourself, and they went with batshit crazy humor, to satisfying results. And versus SR3, I find the humor better in this one. Less dirty jokes, more smart wit.

A lot of the humor, and plot, to this game revolves around references, especially of the video game variety. There are levels dedicated to MGS and Streets of Rage parodies and lots of easter eggs for other games, films and pop culture icons. And these parodies work because it's not Saints Row trying to take a piss on these franchises, just making good hearted fun of them.

I also like the main villain, Zinyak. With a bunch of comedy characters on the side of the Saints the best villain for them is a comedic straight man. The banter between him and the Boss has some of the best moments, such as when he quotes MacBeth. The rest of the cast of villains are oldies they've pulled from previous games, which is kinda neat to see some of those characters make a return. I'd also say the other half of this game is a "Saints Row Greatest Hits" with most of the levels that aren't parodies being based on previous games. I'd almost say this game was meant to be the final in the series, a love letter to all the past entries and a wrap-up to the Saints story. I mean, blowing up the Earth is a pretty ballsy move.

With the addition super powers, it'd also be interesting to see where they go for a 5th installment. You can't get rid of them. I did enjoy the superpowers, though I usually found the blast power to be the most useful and hardly ever used the stomp or buff power-up. And the super sprint makes cars pointless, which creating custom cars was one of my favorite activities in SR3.

Speaking of activities, those make a return in Steelport. They can get very tedious if you go after them in one sitting, but there are enough variants of activities that it doesn't feel totally boring.

All in all, this was my favorite Saints game I'd played with good humor and lots of zanny moments. One thing I wish they'd kept from SR3 is the Saints penthouse. I know we have the ship as a relax zone to meet the team, but it'd be nice to have a place in the simulation to hang out. And while your character is the President, you don't get to do a lot of presidential stuff before you go back to being a standard thug. I think it would have been cool to play in the real world just to see how the country would react to such a president.

I have pretty mixed feelings on this one. I still enjoy it, it was still fun to play through the first time, but by the end I was so burnt out on the repetitive missions. The character missions were fun, but to get to each one you have to first make your way through about 20 different "Go here and kill aliens", "Go here and kill aliens some more", "Go and hack something while killing aliens", "Go and protect your companion by killing aliens while they hack something". It was a serious chore.

Graphics aged fine, though they're not much better than Saints Row: The Third's already were. Soundtrack is good, but again a step down from The Third in my opinion.

The general tone is a little disconnected from what I like about the series. I liked that The Third was still somewhat grounded in reality and centering around gang wars and street crime etc., while IV is completely gone from all of that and is full sci-fi and aliens and spaceships and... it's fine, I can vibe with it, it's just not what I was into the series for.

Ultimately, it's decent fun to play through when I'm in the mood for it, but when I replay the series I tend to skip this one.