I was probably going to get the new Saints Row eventually as a fan of the franchise, but luckily, it was the free game of the month on PS Plus. I went into this game knowing the reputation it had and was expecting a front row seat to a circus sideshow.

The gameplay of Saints Row will feel familiar to anyone who’s played a previous entry in the franchise. It’s more grounded like a Saints Row 2 or 3, you don’t develop superpowers, but there’s also not much innovation on the formula. That’s not a terrible thing necessarily, I will go to bat for solid AA games that are just fun. Not everything has to reinvent the wheel. The game design is very reminiscent of the early 2010s. Driving is fun and arcade-y, though the drifting takes a bit to master. When you are in a police chase, the police cars do have a habit of dogpiling on you, which is inopportune during timed events. The shooting is a bit stiff. I did start this game after coming off the buttery smooth movement of DOOM Eternal, which isn’t entirely fair to Saints Row. I did get used to it after bumping up the aim sensitivity a good bit. Once I learned to work with the auto-aim I was able to nail head shots reliably.

A lot of the classic Saints Row side activities return here. There’s Mayhem, Riding Shotgun, and the ever-frustrating Insurance Fraud. They haven’t changed much from the original series, that’s a common theme with this reboot. Each of these activities is tied to a business you run which helps give these side jobs context. There are some newer jobs to that add a bit more flavor to the game. Things like staking out banks and being a getaway driver or going on a scavenger hunt. I remember the side activities in older Saints Row games getting a bit chore-like after a while, but there’s enough variety here I never had that issue.

You also have your phone to access a variety of apps. Half are just used for tracking things like collectibles, challenges, and music. There’s one app that serves as your bounty board. The bounty hunting missions vary from “go here, kill him” to having more steps and flirting with a more Hitman-esque type of assassination. Of course, you can also call in friends from your phone. Your contacts include your three gang members and the car delivery service. I think the car delivery should’ve been a separate app. Many of the missions lock your contacts app, so you can’t call your friends when you’re already with them, but it means you can’t catch a ride either. I had to carjack a lot of vehicles to get to the start point of a mission because I couldn’t call in my personal cars. Another app lets you edit your character on the fly. It’s handy for changing outfits, but they don’t give you an option to save outfits, but I got around this by simply saving 12 different versions of my character, which the game does allow.

When you’re riding around in cars, there’s a wide selection of music to choose from. The only songs I recognized were the 90s hip hop songs and Shadow of the Valley which made me nostalgic for Fallout New Vegas. The big set piece missions often had those catchy hip-hop songs backing them. The other radio music was enjoyable, with a mix of vaporwave, classic country, hard rock, and Latin music. The soundtrack music is good too. Most of the music that plays in store menus is annoyingly catchy. The main menu theme is a modern dubstep twist on classic spaghetti western music.

The Western and Latin themed music is in service to this game’s setting. Saints Row takes place in the city of Santo Ileso and its surrounding areas. This world space is my favorite part of the game. Santo Ileso isn’t just a generic major city in the middle of the desert, it feels like a mashup of all the Southwestern town archetypes. There’s the outsider art scene, the kitschy Old West history, the local lore of alien abductions, and Route 66 tourist traps; all things I’m a fan of. There’re historic areas around town that have panels where you can read about the city’s lore, and I made it a point to complete all these historic markers first. Learning about this fictious history was great.

Now the reason I expected this game to be a sideshow is because of the characters and humor. Volition made sure to alienate fans of the older games & many reviews balked at the “sanitized, Gen Z” humor. I’ll be honest, while I enjoyed the humor in the old Saints games, I’m not going to sit here and claim it was the pinnacle of humor. I found the toilet humor of SR3 to be a bit juvenile and enjoyed the wittier humor of SR4. There were plenty of moments in this reboot that got a laugh out of me. One of my favorites was escaping a prison by ramping off the roof onto a cliff, only for the cliff to loop around and send you right back onto the prison’s roof. And yes, there were some bits of humor that didn’t land, one of the worst is your first introduction to your friends. It’s this weird, “Hello fellow kids” moment where there’s a dumb conversation about waffles. It feels like a sitcom, but they don’t act self-aware about it. Being it’s one of the first “jokes” in the game, it does start off on the back foot. There is still a few dirty jokes, but they are hidden way in the background on billboard adverts or random NPC dialogue.

You and your friends also had personalities I’d describe more millennial than zoomer. They had issues that I could relate to, like student debt & apathy. Yeah, it’s a bit cliché at this point, but it’s still true. Eli is your money man who is all about that self-made man lifestyle. He’s a nerd that listens to economic podcasts, that contributed to a fun joke during the final mission. Not an original character, but I didn’t hate him. Kevin is your shirtless DJ/cook friend. Most all of the jokes that fall flat involve him. Neenah is your fiery Latina wheelwoman, which I have a weakness for. I’m not entirely sure what their age is supposed to be, I’m guessing late 20s, because they are finished with college, but they’re still portrayed as young & hip. Knowing they were my roommates; I tailored my player character to fit the setting. It was very limiting in some aspects of character creation. It would be odd for three 20 somethings to be rooming with a 40-year-old fat guy, so I went with a 20-year-old English lady. Outside of cutscenes, your friends are quiet. In old Saints game, I enjoyed riding in a car with two friends and listening to their banter, but that’s completely absent here.

The story is a bit uneven in its pacing and themes. You’re all scrounging for rent at the start and suffering under the weight of dead end 9-5s. You end up losing your job when a gang steals a codex you were in charge of guarding. With no legal income, you all decide to leave your respective gangs and start your own. After you attain your church hideout, the game goes from being about making money to live to becoming famous & wealthy. Now, you guys are the bosses over a gang of Saints. The game tries to frame it as “we’re all a family” here vs how the other gangs operate, but there’s definitely a bit of our heroes becoming the thing they hate that is never addressed. Your group feels more like they should’ve become a major heist crew instead of gang leaders. They aren’t street toughs or interested in the power of leadership, they just want their slice of the pie.

When you plan a big train robbery you bring in a world renown assassin and arms smuggler, the Nahuilia. His character design is a bit “edgy cool” but I still kinda liked him. He could easily have been a character in an early Robert Rodriguez film. He works alone, but you, in an extremely millennial way, try to show him the power of friendship. At the end, spoilers, you start to feel you’ve let your friends down, but throughout the whole game there’s never been anything that’s challenged your friendship. Any hardship encountered was quickly brushed off, so the stakes are non-existent. The Nahuilia betrays you and buries you alive as he wants to take your place among the friend group. There’s not a lot of build up to him deciding this, as his character is underdeveloped. I expected he would simply convince your friends you were gone and go on leading the Saints, instead he captures them and locks them in an abandoned studio to reenact being friends. It’s an odd twist as he has been built up as being pretty no-nonsense and not crazy. The final battle with him is a pretty great Western standoff.

All in all, I ended up coming away from Saints Row, a game I expected to grate on me, with a positive opinion. I did encounter a few bugs, but not near the amount there were at release. The game ends with dance party and I had a dumb smile on my face as my crew tried to sing Love Shack. It's a shame this game faceplanted so bad, because I think there's something here. As is the danger of reboots, I think Saints Row (2022) is handicapped by its name. If this were "Santo Ileso: A Saints Row Story" or "Saints Row presents..." it may've helped dampen the backlash from the fanbase. If you are a Saints fan, but not a diehard one, I'd recommend giving this a go. And that's review #200!

I downloaded this one on a whim, looking for something hopefully fun but not too much of a commitment to play in the wee hours, and I'd heard this was the goofier version of this particular game premise, compared to...that other series. I had The Third and IV, and I knew that this reboot was not well-received, but having never played a Saints Row game I figured best to start here rather than in the middle of the series.

Let's start with the obvious: the jank is strong with this one. The first time I broke the game was right after the opening tutorial mission. The game wanted me to go to my car, but I wanted to test out the character creator that you can access at almost any point in the game and which lets you change literally everything about your character's appearance, from body to personality to wardrobe, at the drop of one of many, many, mostly boring hats. So I'm in the character creator marvelling at my ability to tweak my facial structure in the middle of the game, when suddenly my character answers their phone. Like, their face is moving while I'm messing with it. After a brief conversation, they hang up. Well, that was weird. Anyway, I'm done, guess I should go get in that car now. So I close the app, but the game immediately goes into a cutscene in which my character gets home from work and talks to their roommates. At the end of the cutscene it goes to loading screen. And stays there. For three hours. At which point I shut the game down and assume I'll never play it again.

Then the internet in my apartment went down for 5 days. And so I played a lot of Saints Row. Like, too much. Waaaaay too much. And I'm here to say that I think this game is...fine?

It's not brilliant. Almost everything it does certain other games do just as well or better. You know, like Cyberpunk 2077 and no other very famous games. And maybe if this game had fewer bugs than CP2.077K (oof, that doesn't work does it) they might be comparable but it doesn't. And even aside from the number of bugs, I would say the bugs in Saints Row actually negatively affected my experience more than those in Cyberpunk. One persistent bug involved doing a mission that was its own instance (i.e. a different version of the world), loading back in and going to the next mission, only to find that mission-critical assets didn't load and in order to do that mission I'd have to fast travel to make the game reload and then go back.

Some of the most frustrating aspects aren't even bugs, like the Burnout Paradise-ass collision sensitivity that would send me flying through my windshield should I merely tap an obstacle, or the I guess impressively realistic difficulty of controlling a helicopter, or trying to switch back and forth between the VTOL's laser and its missiles but not being able to tell when either one is cooled down—I'm starting to sense that a lot of my problems center around the vehicles. Oh and the towing guide just doesn't show up most of the time. And the hoverboard doesn't get over obstacles as easily as it should so you're just constantly losing momentum. And the boats are just kind of there for no good reason.

But setting the vehicular difficulties aside, there's a lot about the game that's fun. The gunplay is serviceable, though why anyone would use anything other than the RPG for groups and vehicles and the burst rifle for everything else is beyond me. And the notoriety system is interesting, the way it differentiates between each faction, giving you multiple fronts of the battle to control. And you can actually fight your way out rather than just having to run, which was one of the most annoying things about Cyberpunk's cops. And I like that you heal automatically rather than with health potions, and the takedown mechanic serving to mediate that so you're still incentivised to fight even if you're low on health.

The ventures are also fun, even if some of them can be a bit tedious and frustrating. I like that each criminal enterprise has its own personality, and you're not just buying things up but actually starting the business yourself and getting involved. It really connects you to the criminal empire aspect of the game. And there are some legit good tunes on the radio. We've got A Tribe Called Quest, Rakim, Cage the Elephant, Modest Mouse, and a bunch of country and synthwave artists I've never heard of but there's some good shit in there.

As for the main story, it's not amazing but it's entertaining enough. I enjoyed the characters, especially my character who had a remarkably specific personality, which was a pleasant surprise in a genre overwhelmed by blank slates. They really know how to make murder fun, you know? Which is the thing about this world, that it's all hyper-violent fun and games, until someone goes actually full-on crazy, which I legitimately did not see coming. And overall the game doesn't take itself too seriously, a trap that both Cyberpunk 2077 and that other series that I've been avoiding mentioning both occasionally fall into.

So yeah, for all its bugs and ill-advised design decisions, I actually really enjoyed my time with this game. But, I hear the cries of the mob outside: "You didn't play the other games! You have no idea how good the series used to be compared to this shit!" To which I say: Au contraire mon frère. When I said I'd been playing a lot of Saints Row, I fucking meant it.

See, it's true that I'd never played a Saints Row game before this one. And I knew that that meant I didn't have the full context for why a lot of people hated this game. So you know what I did after I rolled credits on Saints Row (2022)? I booted up Saints Row: The Third Remastered. And guess what? That game suuuuuuuuuuuucks.

Can't mod your character on the fly. No ventures, just going around buying up businesses. A story that is, again, fine I guess, except this time I don't give a shit about the characters because they're flatter than a board, especially my character who has as much personality as a wind-up doll. The collision sensitivity for most vehicles is better, but motorcycles are unusable. Also, who thought there might be a scenario where I just want to open my car door and not get in. And the music selection on the radio is garbage.

Most of all, though, the combat is bullshit. Nigh on unplayable. Only way to get rid of notoriety is to run away, there's no way to heal, and there are just so many goddamn enemies per encounter, like 5 times more than in SR(2022).

I hated SR:TTR, didn't even finish it, and it only made me like SR2.022K (nope, still doesn't work) even more. I was more confused than ever. I had to dig further.

Saints Row IV: Re-Elected begins with The Saints leading a counter-terrorism mission that concludes with The Boss (you) becoming president of the U.S., and at that point I was wishing that I'd finished TTR because holy shit how did we get here. Well, turns out it doesn't really matter for reasons we don't need to go into because this isn't a review of Saints Row IV Re-Elected. That review will be out shortly, because I'm still playing it and I'm about 60% of the way through. I started it it like 2 days ago.

The point being that SRIV:R-E is really fun. Arguably more fun than the reboot. This is the closest I get to understanding where the hate comes from. While I do think 2022 makes some improvements on the mechanics (e.g. ventures, customization), it's hard to beat having literal super-powers, which kind of negate the need for any of those improvements. It's also the only game in which the "Insurance Fraud* mini game doesn't suck, because your superpowers make aiming unnecessary so it doesn't matter that you can't. And the radio is better, the classic rock station actually has good classic rock and the reggae station is all killer no filler.

But, three points. Firstly, there's still plenty of jank, both in terms of bugs (the game has crashed 4 times to date, and at some point deleted all my clothes from the Wardrobe menu so I had to buy them all again, even the DLC ones, even the ones I was currently wearing), and in terms of bad design (you know how many times I hit a car with my Super Sprint when I was trying to get in it, because once again they decided that the action button just opens the fucking door so of course I'm going to press L1+Action to get in, and you can bet your ass this happened during Chop Shop). The jank is, really, one of the most consistent aspects of the series as far as I can tell.

Secondly, yes this game is very fun. It also would be very difficult to support a sequel. Where do you go from here? Land on an alien planet and set up The Saints as the new global power? Ok, that actually sounds great, I think I just argued myself out of this one. Haven't actually finished the game yet though, maybe there's some reason why that's not doable. Assuming there is, a reboot makes sense. I mean, SRIV came out in 2013. There's a whole new generation of consoles, and a whole new generation of gamers. And I do think, based on what I played of the third game (The Third), the reboot is actually more in line with the spirit of the series than its predecessor. What I see in Saints Row: The Third is a studio that doesn't want its criminal empire sim, no matter how absurd it is, to feel overly gamey. You know, like with health drops and super powers and stuff. I think 2022 actually does a decent job of maintaining the absurdity while keeping the mechanics just grounded enough.

The Thirdly, I still don't like the characters that much. Yes, they are more interesting than in Le Troisième Remasterisé. I mean, fucking Keith David's here (well not, as he makes very clear, fucking Keith David. It just wouldn't work.) And The Boss has more personality as well, at least with the voice I chose (though the pitch shifting is hilariously bad compared to 2022). But they still feel just...lesser than the main cast of 2022. Just a little bit less fleshed out. Though, to be fair, the audio logs and loyalty missions do help.

So where does that leave us. Well, gameplay-wise I don't think the reboot is significantly worse than IV, and I think the ways in which it differs were intentional, artistic choices that I can mostly respect. And it's way better than The Third. Story-wise, it's no The Matrix (unlike IV, which obviously is) but I do find it engaging and entertaining, and there are some really enjoyable character moments. Also it's just, like, pleasant? That's not a requirement, obviously, but was kind of nice to just play a fun murder game where the main characters are mostly just chill people. Just for a change of pace.

All of which is to say, I'm fairly confident that Saints Row (2022) is not, in fact, a piece of shit. And for how much I played it in a very short period of time, it's clearly doing something right, at least for me.

But hey, because of the Embracer Group meltdown Volition doesn't even exist anymore, so we can all be equally unhappy! Yay! Jesus christ this industry is on the rocks right now! How the hell did one conglomerate get itself into the position to fuck over so many studios! The next 5 years are going to have a noticeable dearth of high-quality AA and AAA titles! A lot of our favorite franchises are dead in the water! It just really sucks man! Fuck! I guess what I'm saying is buy more indies! It's not like any one company could have the power to fuck over that entire segment! Let's unite around indies! That'll be our battlecry! Unity! A totally good word with no negative connotations in this specific context! Huzzah!

Ok I think I've spent my exclamation point budget for the year, time to call it a night.

I didn't think I would see another tripple A game launch in this state after the disaster of Cyberpunk. This game is not polished and I think it's fair to say it isn't even finished. It doesn't matter if you're in a mission or just roaming the open world, this game is infested with bugs and a lot of them are game breaking. Especially when playing co-op with a friend.

My friend couldn't use his special actions (like throwing grenades), complete challenges (so no perks for him) or use the Empire Table (permission was on in the settings). The last patch totally broke the game for us. If my friend was driving in a mission the game would crash for him within a minute or two and we both fell through the map multiple times in only one hour of playing.

But there's a lot more wrong with this game. It looks like a PS3/360 era game. The city is dead with almost no pedestrians. The physics are all over the place and the jokes sound like they were written ten years ago. Missions are pretty repetitive and your Saints friends are all really forgettable.

I hope they will patch this game up, but I don't know if they ever will. There's just to much broken and wrong with this game.