Saints Row (2022)

This is free in the Epic store today only:

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/saints-row

There's also 5 free DLCs. To claim them you want to stay in the same tab and click addons each time. If you open a new tab you'll have to confirm your age again (at least, i had to).

It's a disappointing game after SR3 and SR4, which were so much fun and had so much character.

The first mission in this game (that you start out in) is horrifically bad. While there is a lot of shooting in the Saints Row games, it is not the focus of the engine. Focus may be a bad word, but it isn't like they developed around you shooting. It's an open world game with focus on open world mechanics. Shooting is a lesser focus. That said, 99% of what you do is shoot and the game play is abysmal. You shoot countless copy and pasted NPCs for 20 minutes before a million cut scenes. The graphics are also dull, lifeless, and just bad. I legitimately almost quit playing the game during this mission.

Then I got to the main meat of the game (basically, after this introduction level) and things got MUCH better. The graphics, the details of the buildings and the streets, had a massive upgrade. Running around felt fun. It felt like Saints Row again from way back when. I haven't gotten super far into this, but it is a massive step up from the opening level which should have been considerably cut. Unfortunately, based on reviews this game has, the opening level is more accurate to what the game will probably feel and play like. Devs got lazy and didn't bother to use dynamic scaling, for instance. I chose "1440p high frame rate" as my graphics option (there are four or five). I hear this is the best one.

It's something to do at least before I tackle Jedi Survivor.

I don't get why people complain about Stagger Row. It's a perfectly decent beta. I'm sure once they spend some of that $100 million budget on Q&A it will be a fine game.

Seriously though, this game is fun despite clearly being unfinished/poorly tested. It's just not nearly as good as SR3&4. The characters especially are a downgrade. Also, wow, this game really loves to make you stagger.

About finished with this at 88% completion. The campaign is a blast, but too much of the open world content ranges from underwhelming to bad. There are only so many variations of "drive here" that need to be in one game. The two minigames carried over from Saints Row 3, Mayhem and Insurance Fraud, are the only ones that are actually fun. I feel like this is similar to Mafia III in that the game would be vastly improved if you simply removed 20 hours worth of content. Virtual tourism was cool and I like the collectible system, but the overwhelming majority of what I did outside of the main story felt like it was a waste of time - and I spent more time on it than the actual good parts of the experience.

Love the characters, though. There's some snappy writing, and it feels like a solid middle ground between over-the-top action and grounded character motivations. Shame we'll never see a sequel, although thankfully this stands on its own well. I'd recommend it, but with the caveat of sticking to the main story missions as much as possible. Unfortunately you're roped into dealing with the criminal empire system to progress past certain points, and it's also the only realistic way to have the 8 million needed to unlock the true ending, but this is definitely not one to go completionist on. Insistently trying to finish everything was a bad decision on my part.