Saints Row

 

I really liked Saints Row 1 & 2 back in the day. The first one I have a lot of fond memories and nostalgia for as at the time it was an exciting new GTA clone in an age where we didnt have that many. And Saints Row 2 was a great co-op game that had a perfect balance of serious Gangster stuff and more random wacky stuff. The franchise lost me as a fan after SR3, 3 lost its way with any hint of seriousness and was cringy zaney humor and bad aesthetics. It only got worse then there with 4 and the weird spinoffs like Gat out of Hell which I also hated and even went more stupid. Now, after some downtime Volition has returned and released this sort of reboot of the whole franchise with this game titled ... Saints Row. When devs do stuff like this are they like trying to rewrite history and pretend this is the REAL SR1? Why is it just called "Saints Row"?  Saints Row was already released, in 2006. I don't understand it. Well I heard through the grapevine that this new reboot is a total sham and a joke and everyone hates it. Still, I had played all the other games in the series, and at least they are co-op. So I figured worse case scenario I'd just be able to laugh at a stupid over the top game with my friend and we would crack jokes about how bad the game is the whole time, or even be pleasently surprsied if the game turned out to be any good.

However it didn't take long for even my low expectations to be met with disappointment and frustration. First, the game has muliple difficulty levels, and you can even adjust a bunch of silders yourself to tweak it even further. But thats kind of a red flag almost like the devs couldnt really figure out a perfect balance for each difficulty and just said "You know what, fuck it. Just let them do it themselves" Still, you can pick predefined difficulties, so we just put it on the second hardest one. Now you have the typical character creator, and theres lots of wacky ridiculous things in here, from penis size, body sliders, all sorts of wacky gestures and animations you can do, to even choosing different voices and even changing the pitches of them. But beyond the first 10 minutes messing with it, it didnt hold any lasting excitement for me.  Then, the introduction of the game has you playing these almost sci-fi soldiers going into this desert Western village and killing baddies. And it drags on for far too long. What game am I playing? The introduction doesnt feel anything like even the worst of the Saints Row games. Its like some weird disconnected third person shooter game that seems like some generic military shooter like "We want the Call of Duty audience". After the disappointing, generic, and bland introduction we meet the games cast and supporting characters. And its...really bad. Its this strange mix of preppy, 20 something college kids who are all hecking wholesome and friendly and overly friendly and tight-knit. Its all eyerolling shit. The games writing and cast is devoid of any amount of cynicism, grit, or real character depth. All the writing and characters are one dimensional "Best frands for life" childish and lame stereotypes. This shirtless guy, some generic nerdy woman, a nerdy geek minority token black guy, if there was another one I cant remember now. These guys will constantly be yapping in your ear nonstop and none of it is funny or interesting or have any weight to it, its all shallow annoying bullshit trying to get cheap laughs out of you but its never funny. The writing is just tone deaf.

Then you just go around completing random missions by opening your phone and choosing the Missiosn menu and picking them as they appear. Theres not much more to the game. There is this big open world, and at some point we stopped doing main missions to check out what you can do in it, and we quickly decided that none of it is interesting or worth doing. Basically all there is in the open world is clothing store after clothing store , cosmetics stores, and gun shops. Then you have the side activities, but whats the point of doing them? Atleast in earlier games they were sometimes mandatory for progression or to get interesting unlocks, but the problem here is that the gameplay is utterly trivial and shallow (I'll get to that in a minute) or the side missions are just not interesting, at all. There are other collectables you can get, but really who gives a shit. So we just started grinding all the main missions back to back.

Remember I said the game starts off with this sci-fi space warrior kind of shit? Yeah, that keeps draggong on well past the intro. First quarter of the game youre going around as a sort of Mercenary for this company killing all sorts of soldiers and it feels like a really medicore, dull third person dollar store game. Its not awful, its just extremely bland. The game uses a lot of On-rails sections, too. Parts where you just hang on the back of a vehicle and shoot cars and stuff. Very boring. None of it is even partciularly over the top, too. Thats the biggest disappointment. Like, previous Saints Row games like 3 & 4, while they were stupid and I didnt like them, atleast it was so absurdly over the top that it was a spectacle of stupidity to laugh at, while here its just so medicore, bland, and uninspired that you cant even laugh at it, you're just half asleep the whole time. Like what game am I even playing?

Eventually you stop doing these stupid sci-fi soldier missions because you get fired from that job or whatever and you go off to start up the new Saints Row gang in some church main headquarters , then the game branches off to where you are doing more 'normal' missions but things really dont pick up. None of the missions in the game are memorable, exciting, or fun. Most of them are just extremely mundane shit like driving to a location and doing combat with a group or two of enemies then driving to another place and doing it again or picking up some object. Yeah a lot of open world games are like that but theu underlying mechanics  here are so unengaging it just doesnt work at all. Even worse, a significant chunk of the missions have you doing just tedium and busywork like minimum wage jobs type stuff just cleaning shit up or doing unfunny 'ironic' collectable minigame stuff. I finished the game just a few hours ago and I cant even remember any of the missions, really. It's all so bland. You hardly even notice the police in the game at all, either. Like it felt impossible to actually make the cops mad at you and get into any sort of meaningful police chase or consequences for your action...they just do nothing. It makes everything you do feel irrelevant and the game is just trivial.

The actual gameplay mechanics are so plain and unexciting that its hard to care about anything. The shooting, is as barebones and middle of the road as possible. I only used two guns the entire game, the SMG and 3 round burst assault rifle. It wasnt until almost halfway through the game I cared enough to even go to the gunstore and buy a new weapon or upgrade. The driving feels extremely arcady and stiff and doesnt have much weight to it, made even worse by the atrocious physics system the game has to where you will frequently run over fire hydrants that for some reason launch you 50 feet into the air  randomly its just stupid. Atleast compared to previous Saints games you actually have to drive vehicles in this game, unlike having all sorts of stupid superpowers that render them pointless like other Saints games, but still. The real huge issue with much of the gameplay is twofold: A) The AI is complete fucking dog shit and are brainless and barely pose a threat, and B) the game is extremely buggy, like maybe one of the buggiest games I've ever played. Constant problems connecting to eachother, crashes, missions breaking, AI breaking, scripts breaking which increasing made the game more and more intolerable to sit through.

Even on the second hardest difficulty the game was a joke, hardly any challenge or threat at all. This is mostly because the enemy AI is so poor that all they do 90% of the time is stand still out in the open and dont even move. Most of the time I barely cared to even get anywhere safe and I'd just run straight up to the enemies and shoot them in the face point blank, its laughable. Goldeneye in 1996 has better AI than this. DOOM has better AI than this. Really I cant think of a game with worse enemy AI than this one? its that bad. How did they make it so shit?

Not sure what else to say about this abomination of a game. The Saints Row identity has been brutalized since after SR2 but this is a whole new level of lame. Like I keep saynig, atleast 3, 4, etc I can laugh about how stupidly over the top they were, but this one just does everything so safe and dull that I was either falling asleep the whole game or just feeling pain by playing it from all the bugs and medicority of everything. The constant cutscenes and tone-deaf vibe of "Hanging out with the gang" was constantly eyeroll, the game has this weird disconnect of trying to be a gangster game but at the same time being really politically correct, safe, and non-offensive that it just comes off as worthless poser shit appealing to the lowest common denominator. Like its trying to sell some "moral of the story" to you, it makes me cringe. The fact that I cant remember any specific missions just after beating it is pathetic and an indication of how boring it was. I mean, theres a significant chunk of the game where you have to go around doing these pretend fight missions where you LARP and dress up in this stupid cardboard box Knight outfit and attack waves of enemies with these toy guns...as if the base combat could of gotten any worse this is even more boring and stupid. And It just goes on..and on..and on. You cant even use your special abilities on these segments. Oh yeah, the game has perks, unlocks, and special abilities but they are so worthless that I barely gave a shit. Like on the second hardest difficulty the game is already a joke so why do I need to even care about unlocks and skills? I just used the one skill that makes you tank more damage and thats it. The rest was neither here nor there and its so half-assed and barely fleshed out it didnt matter.

Positive things to say about the game? Well at least It was co-op. But again, the bugs made that system barely work. Constant problems of not being able to see eachother or the game breaking. The graphics? They arent impressive. The artstyle is (surprise) especially dog shit, bright neon colors all over everything like the Cops having these stupid Teal colors and pink and purple overly saturated shit, I dont know why modern (especially the BAD) modern games have aesthetics like this but it looks so childish and stupid its hard to respect. The games world takes place in this mostly Desert type place, like why desert? Desert is like the most uninteresting type of game world and thats what they choose to go for? Theres like an overarching Western Cowboy theme going throughout the game and I just dont understand, its not appealing. I just want a Gangster game like Saints Row 1 & 2, What the fuck are they doing? None of the locations in the city stand out or are memorable. I can remember specific locations and places from SR 1 & 2 despite not playing them for over a decade now. Do you think im gonna remember a single detail or location of this game in a few years? Not a fucking chance. Generic as can be.

Probably the most fun and interesting part of the game for me was the music on the radio stations. Theres a station for Nuclear Blast, a metal label, which was fun to laugh at the shitty generic metal music, it was atleast novel to be blasting death metal and talk about the bands with my buddy while playing the game. Other music stations is this like Alt-rock indie thing that had some entertaining bands on it, its got other stuff in it like DMX and other rap artists and stations. yeah most of the radio sucks like annoying Fiesta music station but compared to everything else it was atleast interesting to scroll through the stations, especially when youre just sitting in the passenger seat. Too bad the music isnt synced up in real time between co-op partners, why cant any game do that so we can talk about the music in real time? When the most interesting part of a game has nothing to do with the game but rather just random licensed music they put in it, thats when you know its bad.  There is this other stupid 'pranks' feature in co-op where you can randomly press a button and prank your buddy it does random things to do them like put Shit clouds on them, make it rain money, turn them into a cactus, random goofy shit that was atleast mildly amusing to mess with as well as the other stupid gestures like constantly jerking off gesture, rolling around like an idiot, and playing the guitar gesture. At least gave us some cheap laughs here and there.

The game eventually wraps up with this dumb twist where one of your friends backstabs you and wants to take over the Saints or some shit, you get stabbed then go into this dream sequence where you run around these child playpens collecting fucking baby elephants and giraffes and shit or whatever, like yeah its really trying to solidfy its self as a shit game isnt it? Theres just nothing of value in this game, you never do anyhting cool, interesting, or even stupidly over the top like previous games. You finish the last mission with this joke of a last boss where you just face rush him and tank all the damage, shoot down his helicoptor, End credits roll and then theres another final 'mission' that basically just tells you to 100% the game. Yeah you cant pay me to do that. Somehow this game is maybe even worse than SR 3 & 4 , and Gat out of Hell, and I hated those games. Most people like them, but its just not for me. This new Saints Row? I don't know WHO its supposed to be for. At least I got the game for like $2, I was actually excited to play this game and get it for cheap because I thought maybe there would be a good chance it would atleast be amusingly stupid and bad but really it was just tedious and annoying to get through. So please just stop  with this new stuff and bring SR1 to PC or Remaster SR2.

3/10

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

 

I'm at the point where I'm willing to play basically any co-op Diablolike ARPG. I've heard about Wolcen for awhile, and even leading up to its release I heard famous streamers and influencers call it A "Path of Exile killer" like its going to be this next big thing. Then I heard that after its release, it totally flopped and no one liked it. Thats the extent of the information I had about the game before buying it. I managed to buy it for like $2 so its no real loss to me either way.

Upon starting it up you get a difficulty selection of "Story mode" and then Normal. I find it funny the game even has a story mode but whatever. I guess Normal is the hardest difficulty until after you beat the game a few times and it unlocks higher ones? Dont know but we picked that. Then you get a simple character creation where you adjust your appearance, but past the first 10 minutes of gameplay we totally forgot about it. The co-op is thankfully well implemented, you just invite your friend to your party from the main menu then upon clicking Play you both start the game. Then the game starts off, first with some lackluster slideshow still images but then the game starts to impress us with these high budget looking 3D cutscenes that look like something out of Lord of the Rings or something. Its a common feature the game has, it presents its self as fairly high budget with frequent use of action packed cinematic cutscenes that other games in the genre don't really go for. It asks you to choose your combat type, like Melee, Ranged, Magic, or something like that. We both just picked the warrior type, as usual for these games. Then the game starts off similar to any other arpg, you have only bare essential simple gear and you go around killing monsters picking up loot upgrading your gear and stats.

At first everything seems promising, the graphics can be stunning, with these amazingly detailed enviornments and cinematic scenes with nice blurring effects in the distance and impressive vistas. The tone of the game is dark and immersive, the overall interface and UI looks well done and more pleasing than a lot of other games in the genre. Then after getting a few level ups I start to notice this big skill tree called Gate of Fates which is this giant web of interconnected passives and buffs, directly inspired by games like Path of Exile. "Wow, thats crazy" I thought, as if the game would be really challenging, deep, and full of interesting puzzles and problems to solve with my build. The sad reality is that quickly the game starts to reveal its self as phony, like an illusion of being this deep game with tons of interesting mechanics but really none of it is meaningful or matters at all - it's all a facade. And I'll tell you why:

Not long into the game I started to wonder if the game has enemy level scaling like some other bad ARPGs do. This means that everytime you level up, the enemy levels up right alongside you - effectively almost making leveling up pointless or even worse, detrimental as the enemies only keep getting stronger. Even if a game has this, it can still be an enjoyable experience, but more often than not ARPG's with this one "feature" makes it a crippling flaw. Turns out Wolcen does indeed have enemy scaling, but it works in certain brackets, I'm not quite sure, but usually every time I would catch up to the zones enemy level, the next loading screen/zone they would be right back alongside me or slightly higher. So, shortly into the game I decided to do an experiment where we just run past every single monster and see how long we could get away with that and how punishing it is. Well it turns out you can get away with it the whole game, and its not punishing at all. You can simply run past every single monster in the game and they wont even be able to catch up to you, stunlock you, kill you on the way, they effectively do not matter. At least in other games like Chaosbane, Grim Dawn, etc, if you try running past every single monster they will frequently corner you, or do so much damage on the way that you'll frequently die. But not in Wolcen, in Wolcen the enemies will barely do any damage to you as you sprint past massive packs of them, its fucking stupid and makes the whole game feel worthless.

The only punishment to simply running past every enemy in the game is that there are mandatory campaign Boss fights you'll encounter. These fights basically gear/stat/skill check you. Thankfully the game has some semblance of difficulty in that these bosses frequently have multiple phases, and if you die on phase 2 or 3 you'll have to redo the whole fight. So what ended up happening is a few times after sprinting past mostly an entire Act/Episode and we encountered one of these bosses, all we would have to do is backtrack a minute or two, kill a few packs of monsters to catch up to the zone level (which didnt take very long as seemingly the monsters were never that much higher than us desipite deliberately avoiding getting any XP for long periods of time, scaling?)  and then going back to town and picking up a few new pieces of equipment like a new weapon or something. Then we could kill the bosses. The bosses are probably the "best" part of the game, in terms of engagement and actually having to do something. If youre mechanically skillful, good at dodging and knowing when to use your health potions, the bosses are fairly doable even if your characters suck. So it was never too much of a problem for us. A few bosses we would fail a few times and get stressed, but it was mostly because we had to learn the attacks and patterns like a lot of bosses will do attacks that light up certain areas of the arena that you need to avoid or you'll pretty much always die. If a co-op partner dies, you can click him to resurrect him over a few seconds. It seems like you can keep resurrecting even if you are being attacked, too. So it doesnt interrupt you, making it even easier.

After finishing a mandatory boss, we just went back to running past every single enemy again until the next mandatory boss. Rinse and repeat until end credits. It was that stupid. The game tries to fool you by making you think it has any depth to it or the enemies are real threats, but theyre not.

To make matters worse, the itemization loot stats, and skill systems are just not that interesting either. The stats work as items you can randomly find, or purcahse from a merchant. Then you consume this item and it permanently unlocks the skill. The skills are broken up into different tabs on the UI like Melee, Ranged, Sorcery etc again. I just simply looked at/used all the Melee skills. But really all I ended up doing the entire game is using the default Anvil hammer skill for the first half of the game, then in the second half of the game I realized you could buy skills from merchants and used another two skills, this jumping spear that generates a lot of Rage, and a shout skill that just buffs you with more damage. Another staple of shit poorly designed ARPG's along with Enemy scaling is the Generator/Spender type skill system that games like Diablo 3 and 4 are now famous for.  Instead of just having mana like traditional ARPG's, you have weak shitty default skills dedicated to generating resources needing to cast your actually powerful main skills, and then you have your main skills that consume the resource. For me, the main skill was this Anvil hammer AOE slam, and the generator skill was by default the sword slash attack. Eventually I just ended up using the jumping Spear skill as my generator, so the gameplay loop just looked like spamming 123 for my generators and buffs, and then holding down Right click to do my main skill. Nothing exciting or fun really, and I hate the entire generator/spender system in the first place. The skills were so unexciting and uninteresting that I never even cared to use anything else than the default. Maybe a big reason why is because your skills simply level up by using them. So that means if you find some new exciting skill, guess what, it will be level 1 while the one youve used the whole game will be level 30. So it felt like swapping to the interesting Level 1 skill would be shit until you've used it a bunch. This isnt nessesarilya bad thing on its own, but I just couldnt be bothered to experiment much when the default Hammer attack worked well enough, especially considering all the enemies are meaningless and you just run past them anyway. Whats the point of even caring about any of the mechanics or character progression in the game then? Nothing even threatens you to make it matter anyway. The skills also use this weird system similar to Chaosbane/Diablo 3 where you get a certain amount of points you can allocate on the fly, to buff the indiviudal skills in different ways. This is just stuff like 15% more damage, add a big AOE explosion, less Resource cost, etc. Nothing super deep, and usually I would swap these passives around every few levels without much thought and it worked fine.

The itemization is not interesting either. Resistances are something I quickly realized I should care about. Usually in other ARPG's you would put on items like +10% fire resistance. And your fire resistance would go up by 10%. In Wolcen its not like that. Items have "resistance scores" that are dozens to hundreds of points, that then get added to this overall resistance pool (I think?) that then raise your resistances. Like you can put an item on that says "Resistance score 200" but your global Fire resistance would only go up by 2%. Its very stupid and I dont like how its done at all. The other stats are stuff like +health, Force Shield (dont know what that is, assumed it was Magic shit) % elemental damage,  Material damage (Why is it worded like this? Is it just melee damage?, it was always tiny amounts like %2 so I barely gave a shit),  % Rage generation, Cooldown reduction. Just really not that exciting itemization or stats at all. I never dropped any unique colored items or anything that made me hyped. For the most part I barely gave a shit about items at all and only used whatever wepaon made my "Average damage' go up on my main skill. Until the second half of the game I was still wearing random Blue gloves that I didnt even care to replace. The game thankfully has a loot filter, and you can go in and disable tiers of items you no longer want. Very soon into the game I disabled all White and Blue items, some of the lowest most worthless tiers. So that meant for most of the game I was barely finding anything. The game really doesnt have that many loot drops, and the ones that do drop just arent that interesting, especially when you realize most of the enemies dont matter.
The health potion system lets you have two potions, they can both be health potions, or you can use other things like a Rage potion. For the whole game I just used two health potions, and you can get better ones as you progress the game which become increasingly important. The health potions recharge as you get kills, so yet another idea taken from PoE. The potion system is fine, it atleast added challenge and excitement during boss fights but other than that I barely noticed.

And that passive tree I talked about? its almost like you cant really go wrong. Its broken up into different colors, Red for melee/warrior type stuff, Green for dexterity Rogue, ranger stuff, Purple for magic (I think) . All I did was go towards all the Red nodes and the bigger passive stuff for like Health regen/damage.. very basic things. I avoided anything with Criticals cause I dont like how inconsistent Criticals are in ARPGs. Worked out good enough. Barely ever died (maybe 5 times total?) and had enough damage to take down all the bosses. There is this feature where you can select parts of the tree and sort of spin the different rings around to almost totally customize your own path and tree, which I'm sure during the marketing for this game they boasted so much about and probably what made people consider this a PoE killer. But really I only even noticed it was a feature more than halfway through the game, and even then it hardly changed how I played the game. maybe its more important after youve dumped hundreds of hours into the game and progressed to the 'endgame' or whatever, but for a casual one-run playthrough it barely matters, like everything else.

The game has impressive amazing production value with all these cutscenes and tons of dialogue and writing, but its such a bizarre mishmash of ideas that it quickly caught me off guard with how awkward and stupid it all is.  The resemblance is uncanny. Like why the fuck does everyone look like they are taken directly out of Warhammer 40k? meanwhile everything else is like dark gritty horror vibes and then the next moment its like youre watching an episode of Star trek? I dont get it.And then after awhile all the constant cutscenes and story interactions start feeling like something out of a Sunday morning childs cartoon with how cliche, generic, and how much of a trope everything is. Like only a few hours into the game we just started skipping all the dialogue (theres tons of it) thats how little we cared.

Not sure what else to say about Wolcen. Sure, I sort of appreciate how there are these ARPGs that don't require tons of brainpower and googling and researching how to play the game without making shit builds or fucking up, but at the same time these games are way too shallow and forgiving. There is zero challenge or difficulty outside of a handful of boss fights, maybe only 3 boss fights actually. You can respec everything at a moments notice, I was able to just constantly respec both my passive tree and all my skills, it costs gold or whatever, but its such a marginal amount I never noticed or was short on anything. After literally running past the ENTIRE last act of the game, I dont think we stopped to kill a single group of enemies, we were suddenly at all these sorts of cutscenes with the characters saying "This is it! this is the end" type stuff.  Wow, we're at the end of the game already? I barely killed anything. The last boss has 3 phases...and we killed him the very first try!....even though we barely killed any monsters the whole game or gave a shit about loot or our characters. That should tell you how pointless the entire game is. Yeah, we had to tryhard and sweat a little mechanically during the last boss, but it was still very managable and doable considering how little effort we put into powering up our characters. Makes me think maybe we made the whole game easier by not constantly leveling up and making the enemies scale up alongside us, Who knows.

Turns out Acts 1-3 is the original release of the game in 2020. But recently in late 2023 they released Act 4 alongside with the Console release of the game. I have no interest in playing post-release content, and for multiple years the games ending was the last Act 3. I'm satisfied with just finishing Act 3, getting the original ending, and not having to play another act of what I know will be more of the same shit. I'm just not interested, I beat the game. Its not good. Its funny because they put out this big advertisement like "Wolcen: ENDGAME update" and stuff. Who the hell wants to play the 'endgame' here? Not me. Wolcen had real potential in the art designs, mostly enviornmental, the UI is decent, great graphics and you can tell a lot of work and money went into the production and cinematics of the game, but the actual core RPG gameplay just totally missed the mark. Also can I point out how the game has a "Story mode" one more time!? The hardest difficulty (by default) is a fucking joke and breeze to play through, so I cant even fathom how easy "Story mode" has to be.
I'm not sure who Wolcen appeals to, gullible people who cant figure out that a game is extremely shallow and is just wasting your time with 'fake' gameplay? Who knows.

3/10