The Saints Row franchise has been around since 2006 when it wanted to place itself next to its biggest competitor Grand Theft Auto. Compared to the GTA franchise, Saints Row wanted to be a bit crazier, more fun, and not as serious. Something that worked in the first two games but quickly went completely over the top in the third and fourth installment. It looked like the Saints didn’t really know what kind of game they wanted to be. It was time for a reboot, enter Saints Row!
Create your own empire
In Saints Row, you start the game with a nameless hero which you can create in the customizer. This customizer is perhaps the most impressive one ever created as it adds a tremendous amount of options. From the normal settings to the more obsucre ones where you can even pick the size of your character’s genitalia. It’s a bit weird and over the top but that’s Saints Row for you. Besides the character creator itself, you’ll run into multiple stores in the game where you can alter your appearance even more. Creating your own hero and style is crucial here and it’s good to see that the developers really went all out in the options. If you take your time for it, you’ll be playing as a unique and original hero. Everything you change will also be visible during the cutscenes so the game never breaks the illusion. Talking about cutscenes the story is all about you and your little gang of misfits.
You and your friends Kevin, Eli and Neenah are nobodies who are trying to score some money both legal and illegal. At the start of the game, you join the Marshall Defense Industries as a mercenary, a dirty job that pays the bills. It all starts out pretty happy and the future looks pretty bright until it all collapses. When everything collapsed, the team of misfits where basically on their own. Sure everyone had ties with some kind of gang, but none of the gangs will help you out, they’ll even screw you over. It’s here where the true story of Saints Row kicks in. It’s your job to form a new gang and take over the land. You’ll need to find a place to hang out, need to think about the gang’s branding and become the most feared gang of them all. It’s your job to create and run your own empire, in Saints Row style of course.
To to get going
In order to create your own empire, you’ll have to fight off rivaling gangs and create certain buildings which will bring in some money. Defeating the rivaling gangs form the main story mode in the game and will offer some crazy missions. It’s never as serious as the GTA franchise but it never gets as absurd as the last two Saints Row games. The team really found the right balance between having fun and never going over the top, which takes away the fun again. There’s a wide variety of actions and goals in missions so you never really know what to expect or what to prepare for. The more you advance and the more power you’ll get in Santo Illeso, the more thrilling and challenging the main missions become. It all starts off rather straightforward with some hit and runs but deeper in the game, you’ll encounter some of the most original and iconic missions that ever graced the franchise. Discovering those is part of the game’s biggest charm so I won’t go into spoiler territory here. Just be prepared for chaotic fun and some weird missions. Although I liked the missions a lot and I’m glad they toned tone the humor a bit, I do admit that this game won’t be for everyone. It’s still not as serious as you might have hoped and the story itself can easily be cleared under ten hours. If you’re looking for a sandbox game with deep lore and captivating story, this Saints Row still isn’t that. It’s a more compact open-world experience and although not everyone will agree, I liked the fact that I didn’t need to spend countless of hours in a vague storyline. In my opinion, the story checks a lot of boxes while still focussing on having fun.
Since the story mode is rather short, it’s good to know that the game has tons of side missions to keep you entertained. If you want to really advance in the game, you’ll spend a lot of time building your empire and taking over crucial buildings. It’s a fun thing to do and when you see your influence and power rising, it’s also very rewarding. What I like the most is the fact that you’re entirely free to play the game how you want. You don’t need to play through the story or side missions first in order to advance. You can pick your focus yourself and create your empire the way you like most. There’s a lot of freedom and the map itself offers some interesting vehicles, guns, and hidden secrets to encourage exploration. At its core, this certainly is a very fun game to play, it’s a shame that it doesn’t perform the way it should.
Technical issues
In a game all about fun it’s a shame to see that they didn’t invest more in the technical aspects of the game. When it comes to the graphics, it looks and plays like something that belongs in the early days of the previous generation. I’m playing this on my powerful PlayStation 5 console so it’s a shame it looks like an early PlayStation 4 game. You can increase the graphic settings in the settings but if you do so, you’ll drop the frame rate to 30fps instead of 60fps which can hurt the experience of playing such a fast-paced game. Besides this, the game also suffers from countless bugs including popping in textures, randomly appearing cars and enemies spawning on places where you can’t reach them. It’s clear that the game needs a lot of patches to run as intended but at the moment of writing, the gameplay experience isn’t what it should be, which is a shame of course.
Conclusion:
Saints Row is a fun game with a fun open-world to explore and unique and creative missions to keep you entertained. It’s a shame it suffers from too many bugs to become really entertaining. With some updates and patches, this is a solid game but as for now, it’s just underwhelming.
