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