Saints Row Review

Ali Hasan August 28, 2022

When developer Volition first teased a brand-new entry in the long-running and highly beloved Saints Row series fans were divided. Between a new entry in the series and a complete reboot of the existing games, players were unsure what to expect. A new storyline coupled with a fresh direction seemed like a gamble. But did it pay off?

Saints Row, for all intents and purposes, manages to take one step forward and two steps back. While it isn’t a terrible game by any means it certainly is a rather unnecessary one. There are enough flashy and over-the-top moments to keep new players satisfied but for long time fans hoping for a return to form will be severely disappointed.  

Welcome to your own Criminal Empire

Saints Row kicks off at a flashy party scene where you first meet the saints who are clearly several months into their crime career, with the power, influence, and hold necessary to control the city. It’s here that you are prompted to create your character, simply referred to as the Boss.

The character creator includes a multitude of options to craft the perfect player character. From crazy and over-the-top hairstyles to snazzy-looking suits and even prosthetics, the game makes good work of carrying on the legacy of letting you be who you want to be.

Realistically you could spend several minutes creating your character with the sheer number of sliders and toggles. I know I did. You can also create and upload your characters, allowing other players to use your creations, little community-centric features like this are always a nice touch and work very well for Saints Row.

You then flashback to an earlier point in time to see how the team came together. The use of non-linear storytelling works very well from a narrative standpoint. Saints Row puts a heavy emphasis on the rags-to-riches storyline, and when you flashback to see where the saints start and then learn about their struggles and motivations, it adds a sense of nuance to the way the game plays out.

The Saints of Saints Row

Apart from the player character Saints Row features three companion characters. Eli, the logistics and setup expert, Neenah, the saints’ mechanic and driver then finally Kevin, the muscles. Each character has their own motivation as far as why they’re joining the boss to build a criminal empire. Whether that’s crippling student debt or just looking to hit it big.

The game features two, technically three types of missions that players can complete. One of which progresses the story and the other two act more like side content.

Loyalty missions are a series of mini story arcs made for you to better understand each one of your crew mates. There aren’t many loyalty missions but, in my opinion, they offered some of the best character moments anywhere in the entire game. They really allow you to understand the different layers of each character whether that’s Eli’s aversion to using guns or finding collectibles for Kevin it all melds together perfectly and gives you more of an emotional hook and a better attachment to your companions.

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Missions

The other side content is named Criminal Ventures. These missions act as side content that does not really progress the story but are pivotal in finishing the main game. In Criminal Ventures the player invests in businesses dotted around Santo Ileso to generate a passive income.

These ventures include a laundromat and working for a fashion designer. Completing some criminal ventures unlock side quests but the road to get there can be tedious, repetitive, and outright boring. While the idea of these ventures sounds cool on paper in reality, however, they often involve the same mission structure, which mostly boils down to just stealing trucks. There is variety but there just isn’t enough there to keep you wanting to go back and complete all of them.

Main story missions also grow stale very quickly. Most objectives are seemingly just copied and pasted; fetch quests, go from A to B, take down hordes of enemies, seem to make up the bulk of the mission content in Saints Row. There are some highlight set piece moments that I found entertaining and fun but there just weren’t enough of them to cut through the oft-present monotony. There are very few ideas or stories that lift Saints Row beyond what the previous entries have done.  

Perhaps the biggest disappointment for me was the heists. Games like GTA V and its online counterpart laid the perfect foundation work for how heists should be done in video games. Simply putting a twist on said formula would have elevated the gameplay and the overall replayability of the games to great heights. when you get to the heists in Saints Row, you can’t even take part in them. You simply wait outside the venue while your crew does it for you.

Whether this was a result of a time constraint or just lazy development work (or both) remains a question in my mind. For a game that builds its entire narrative around crime and vice, this is perhaps its biggest pitfall.

Even when playing co-op there’s no workaround for this. It is actually kind of hilarious how when you do set up a heist you and your co-op buddy (like in the single-player experience) just sit around and wait. That is if you can get co-op to work because in my experience there were constant connection drops and connectivity issues.

Santo Ileso… All Glitz no Glamour

Santo Ileso is a sprawling sandbox covering a wide area of land. Each district feels unique, whether is the residential areas with low buildings, wide open plains, city areas, or desserts. The city feels fresh and cool, but unfortunately, pretty visuals do not make up for an extremely lacking world.

There are giant buildings dotted around the world that are simply inaccessible. Obviously, it wouldn’t be feasible to make every single building accessible but maybe a few would help the world feel deeper and more dynamic. The static nature of the world just stems from a lack of interactivity inherent in the game.

While in games like GTA you can pick up a bike off the street and drive it along the sandy shores of Vespucci beach, the bikes in Saints Row exist only as an art asset. Cafes and restaurants are often empty, while the NPCs you encounter utter the same lines over and over again.

Driving around Santo Ileso is somewhat fun but not nearly to the same level as other open-world games that are similar to Saints Row, like GTA 5. Driving is subjective and Saints Row takes an arcadey approach as compared to a more realistic one. I didn’t mind the driving but it did feel very floaty and inaccurate at times.

Two new driving mechanics were added to the game which I did find very enjoyable. The first lets you lay on top of the roof of your car and shoot enemies to your side. You can also perform jumps from one vehicle to another which makes for very enjoyable chase scenarios. The second lets you open a wingsuit right from the roof of your car and fly off into the winds Just Cause 3 style. It’s ridiculous in the best possible way but oddly enough it works

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Combat

The hallmark of any good third-person shooter game is, well, in its shooting. The feeling, systems, and weightiness of it can make or break a game. Sadly, in the case of Saints Row, it definitely breaks it.

Five games in, I was expecting volition to have nailed the combat in this outing but it doesn’t even come close. Like the driving, the shooting feels very floaty. No weapon packs a significant punch or recoil that makes you feel like you’re using a certain gun over another.

On top of that, there is a considerable lack of a cover system, which seems to be a major oversight on the part of the development team. This is especially cumbersome when you have multiple enemies on screen and this situation presents a lot. Instead, I had to rely on strafing to make sure my bullets would connect, which is just a terrible way to go about combat in a game like this.

You can unlock new abilities and perks as you level up that can add new and oftentimes hilarious ways to go about changing up the combat. Including stuffing an enemy’s pants with grenades. The skill tree is pretty lackluster, however. There are just 19 skills to unlock, which for open world game is very underwhelming. The whole idea just becomes very forgettable, unfortunately. With most skills just boiling down to health and flow buffs or passive damage increase.

The game does add a few new rechargeable ultimate attacks that can break up the flow of combat, but all in all, combat feels bland, uninspired, and just a mess. The AI seems to be just as bad as the combat. Enemies would oftentimes just stand around as I mowed them down, not really reacting to what was going on around them.

I’d argue that previous Saints Row games had better AI implementation. I wouldn’t expect Volition to pull out an AI system as sophisticated as one found in The Last of Us Part II but something even half as good would have been enough and could have added some much-needed depth to enemy encounters.

Verdict

What could have been a fresh start for the Saints Row series is marred down by dumb AI, basic combat, and a host of bugs and glitches. The excellent opening minutes and the set piece moments in between long stretches of repetitive storytelling aren’t enough to keep the game afloat. Forgettable quests, lackluster combat, and a tacked-on skill tree along with lazy development choices tell me that this series should have been retired after the fourth entry.

Saints Row is now available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X & S, and PC.

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