Intro

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Some game franchises go on for so long that they end up with a “black sheep” in their roster, an entry that stands out in a very negative way, these black sheep can either seriously damage or destroy the series and leave bitter resentment among fans; There’s Postal 3 with the POSTAL franchise, Duke Nukem Forever with the Duke Nukem games, DOOM 3 with the DOOM games, Call of Duty Ghosts (although arguably given how many games Call of Duty has, it probably has a whole flock of black sheep by now) or PAYDAY 3 with the PAYDAY series, which is steadily becoming a black sheep deserted by its community because of its online-only model and chaotic server problems, although since that sheep is fairly young maybe there’s still time to turn things around.

In this article I want to talk about one particular black sheep - “ Saints Row” of the Saints Row franchise - No, not the original that came out in 2006, the 2022 reboot.

Saints Row is a series I’ve followed for just over 7 years now, I got Saints Row 2, 3 (no, I’m not calling it “Saints Row: The Third”, I don’t care what the store page says) and 4 on Steam back in November 2016 and played many many hours of the games over time, I never played the first game because it’s a console exclusive.

Saints Row 2 was very much my favourite, I loved its crime sandbox gameplay and its personality where lots of humour mixed with genuine drama and an exploration of what gang violence really does to people, it had some flaws like a “Respect” system which forced you to complete side activities to play through the main story, but was overall an extremely fun game.

_{My one screenshot from Saints Row 2, my glorious protagonist, possibly the greatest character created in the history of mankind}

3 went more on the wacky end as a followup, it was a game where you could upgrade a flashbang into a fart in a jar, where a floppy purple dildo is one of the game’s signature melee weapons, where the Saints went from a gang to a celebrity conglomerate and where the government has sci-fi laser guns and hovercraft, its setting of Steelport was also much more lacking in personality, but it was still a very fun game and still held on to the Saints Row core of gang warfare, I ended up playing it through twice in singleplayer and going at it again in co-op.

Then we have Saints Row 4, 4 made the wacky elements essentially the entire game, you start having been elected President, then aliens invade, then you get kidnapped and put into a Matrix style simulation and you have to escape and take revenge on the alien overlord, they also added superpowers that immediately defeated the point of the vehicles in the game except some of the aircraft, because who needs a car when you have super sprint? I only played through it once and that was with cheats, I’m not ashamed to admit that, I just couldn’t be bothered to play it properly.

4 got a lot of support with many DLCs, and it did receive a standalone expansion called Saints Row Gat out of Hell, but it basically sent the franchise into a hiatus for a long while, when it came back it was revealed that the series would be getting a reboot.

First Impressions

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When the game was announced in August 2021 it was barraged with negative reactions from the community, but I wasn’t part of that backlash, I was fairly neutral.

I was happy that the superpowers of Saints Row 4 were nowhere to be seen and thought that a reboot probably was needed, while a lot of the feedback from the community was that the reboot looked nothing like Saints Row I asked: What does Saints Row actually look like?

after 3 kinda messed with the tone and 4 left it mangled on the side of the road who’s to say

After feeling like I got burned by 4 I wasn’t jumping with enthusiasm and I knew I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, the SR2 style, but I thought that the game had potential, in a conversation at the time I summed it up as:

I saw kinda dumb responses to this SR game reveal from both sides

People showering it with praise or sinking with despair after seeing it

It’s a short reveal trailer, nothing more

Until there’s some proper gameplay it’s not really fair to judge one way or another

I get the people who say it doesn’t look like Saints Row, especially since half the trailer was half set in the middle of a desert unlike SRs usual big cities

But I also think it’s dumb to say it’s not Saints Row after seeing just under 4 minutes of it

Which wasn’t even gameplay

It was a cinematic

So I’m just looking at it with curiosity and hoping they don’t screw it up

But then late in the month it emerged that the game would be an exclusive to the Epic Games Store, and not releasing on Steam at launch.

This instantly killed any chance of me getting the game day one for a simple reason, I will never buy from the Epic Store.

I’m not really a believer in boycotts as I think they very rarely have an impact, they usually go nowhere, but I do boycott the Epic Store for a simple reason, it’s crap, compared to Steam the store is severely lacking in features and I despise Epic for trying to force people onto their platform by buying up games with exclusivity deals, rather than just improving it, for that reason if a game is Epic exclusive I’ll either wait until it gets a Steam release or just never play it.

Even so, that didn’t sour me on the game itself, as the first detailed showcases of the game started emerging I was fairly positive, for example when I saw the game’s districts trailer in October 2021 I wrote:

the vibe this game gives me is basically sr3 in the desert

and while sr2 proper gangster shit is what i wanted

that’ll do me just fine too

a big issue in sr3 was steelport was copypasted

it was a trash city

just a bunch of tower blocks ctrl c ctrl v

but this seems to be

a.

fucking huge

b.

much more varied

Later in the month I summed up my impression as:

even if it’s not my ideal saints row it basically gives me sr3 vibes with a way better open world

But the tone of the game was quite hard to nail down, Volition were giving some very bizarre answers when asked about it as the game got closer to its launch, for example in an interview in May 2022 one designer described the game as “pretty similar to SR4 except no superpowers” but “closer to SR2 and 3”, given that Saints Row 2, 3 and 4 are completely different to each other tonally, with 2 being fairly grounded, let’s say on a scale of 1-10 (1 being ultra-realistic, 10 being cocaine cloud cuckoo land) it was taking it up to a 5 or 6, with Saints Row 3 taking it to 8 or 9 and Saints Row 4 going up to to 11, this made absolutely no sense.

And then August came around early previews of the game from review copies were emerging and it was looking very bad, it was absolutely riddled with embarrassing bugs, and then it actually released, I had a very simple reaction:

I’m actually glad this one’s an Epic exclusive

That way I didn’t make the mistake of buying it

The tone of the game was also on full display as well and it was absolutely awful, despite the devs comparing the game to the more grounded nature of earlier Saints Row the Saints were completely implausible:

the fact that they turned the Saints into cringy zoomers who look like they belong on a Reddit forum rather than running a gang is just baffling

There was a Day One Patch announced that would supposedly fix the shambolic state the game was in, but the notes were vague and the game was still in a dire state, I was still hesitant to blast the game too much without having played it, but it was obvious that many aspects were in the gutter, in response to it being called a cash grab I argued:

i don’t think it’s a cash grab no

i think they genuinely believed in this game

they just didn’t execute it well

and got too greedy

but yeah, they should not really be cut slack for dropping the ball with this one

it’s not an indie game or something, saints row is a franchise that went toe to toe with gta

not like it was ever going to really knock gta off its perch but still

to be fair, i didn’t play the remake, for all i know it’s great fun, i enjoyed cyberpunk when many people shat on it after all, although that was after months worth of patches

but it does seem safe to say the game is buggier than older games, and the mission design is worse, and definitely the writing

Cyberpunk had an interesting world and compelling characters, when they patched out many of the bugs that gets to shine

Saints Row, yeah it just doesn’t seem to have that

It seems like SR3 with more awkward execution

Hearing the open world is apparently really empty was very disappointing because I expected it to be the game’s strength

Seeing these desert views, the city vs the outback, it seemed there was variety there which Steelport and its copypasted buildings didn’t have

Apparently not

More and more videos came out and it just got worse: Players and NPCs getting stuck, broken animations, delayed NPC reactions, Cars vanishing and never returning in Insurance Fraud minigame (where the whole objective is to get hit by cars as much as possible), bizarre physics, shockingly underdeveloped side hustles, basically every element of the game being liable to collapse at any given moment, it was a mess.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, the game’s community manager reacted to criticisms by claiming the dislike numbers on the game’s trailers were fake, writing off all of the bad reviews as “review bombing”, celebrating the backlash as a “shedding” of toxic fans and even responding to one person who argued critics shouldn’t be ignored with “So you think we should give in to terrorist behaviour?”. In fairness, a lot of those critics were either dickish or unreasonable, but the extremely unprofessional reaction was making that terrible situation even worse.

And with that I mostly forgot about the game, in the meantime Volition went through some restructuring, being handed off from their parent company Deep Silver over to Gearbox by Embracer Group, the big conglomerate that owned all of them, DLCs and more patches were released, it seemed things were slowly trundling along, on the 24th of August 2023 the game finally got its Steam release and then only a few days later…

Volition were shut down.

That was it for them and Saints Row, ouch. The reason? Embracer had expanded their media empire too fast and after they tried to make a deal with a Saudi Arabian wealth fund for several billion dollars to cover their losses, everything fell through, with a gaping hole in their wallets they put several companies on the chopping block and Volition was one of them.

Was it really their fault they got shuttered in the end? Not really, but the fact that Saints Row had performed so badly was surely the reason they were one of the first Embracer assets to be liquidated.

So why did I play it? Well, I had no intention of playing it, but a friend of mine who goes by Jenny_MCII swooped in. Jen has a habit of sending games to people as gifts on Steam, the twist being that those gifts are usually the shittiest games imaginable, so of course the day the game came out on Steam she immediately bought me the Platinum Edition of the game.

…I said no.

But then in March 2024 she bought me the game again and this time I said fuck it, why not.

Summary

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If you just want the short version of my impression of the game, here it is, basically all of my first impressions were right all at once:

• Compared to the old games the game is closest to Saints Row 3
• The city in the reboot is way better than SR3’s Steelport, with much more visual variety
• The mission design is poor, the writing is absolutely terrible
• The city is very empty

The only part that wasn’t the case was the bugs, when I played the game it was for the most part bug free, but that’s after a lot of rounds of patches so that isn’t a radical surprise.

As for the city being both better than Steelport and badly lacking, here’s how I reconcile those 2 points; The city is better, there’s a lot of variety in the building designs, the districts feel distinct from each other, there’s a lot of colour, it’s far better than Steelport’s concrete jungle of grey copypasted buildings.

But that’s just the visuals, mechanically there’s not a lot to spontaneously do in Santo Ileso, there are “discoveries” you can find across the map but they are very uneventful: Pickups like drug pallets, “Hidden Histories” panels, that kind of thing, all they boil down to is pressing the interact button and watching a number go up.

That was the short version, if that’s all you wanted feel free to piss off here.

Improvements list

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Now for the long version, since I’m going to go into the worst element of the game, the plot, at length I think I’ll start before that by frontloading this with some of the positives about the game that really stood out to me.

• Hands down, the game has the best character customisation in the series, given that it’s one of the very first elements the game presents you with that’s a strong plus.

The character creator is bursting with options, the character creation was always a strong suit of the series but this game takes it up to 11 with immense detail and a wide variety of options, you can have asymmetrical face customisation, you can add vitiligo blotches to your skin, you can customise how your nipples and genitals are censored (alongside the pixelation of the old games there are tons of decals to pick from), lots and lots more.

And that’s on top of everything that came with the previous games like the sliders for muscle and fat, age, every possible skin tone on the planet and several dozen impossible ones. I could go on, you really can make whoever the hell you want here.

_Before…

_{…and after!}

• Customisable difficulty.

As well as the preset difficulty options you can also opt for a custom challenge where you independently set your health, enemy health, vehicle health, frequency of stronger enemy types, wanted level difficulty, how much you get from ammo pickups and the timers on timed objectives, allowing for a lot of the gameplay to be tailored to your liking on the fly.

This means that balancing issues are basically non-existent, since you can tweak any element that could be problematic, some of the defaults are a bit off as I’ll get into later so this is a very useful feature.

• Mission specific kill lines.

Self explanatory, the generic dialogue lines for actions like killing also have specific variants related to the events of the mission or that act of the story, which makes them feel a little less artificial and repetitive.

Okay, that’s the compliments out of the way, let’s get to the bollocking.

Story

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As I wrote earlier, the basic concept of rebooting Saints Row and bringing in all new characters was something I was on board with, Saints Row 4 essentially drove the franchise off the deep end and I think trying to continue from it would’ve been a mess, a ground up origin story for the Saints was a golden opportunity.

But right from the get go when you start the game, you can see how they screwed it up, first off let’s compare the origin stories of the Saints in both games.

The original franchise starts in the city of Stilwater, which was plagued by 3 gangs: The Vice Kings, Westside Rollerz and Los Carnales, the Saints are formed as an “anti-gang”, people fed up with the tyranny of the other gangs banding together to root them out.

It works, the Saints purge the other factions and clean up Stilwater, but of course in the process they become just another gang, drug peddlers, murderers and all around tyrants, as the gang’s founder Julius Little later sums it up they became “Vice Kings that wore purple”.

You’re a random bystander that ends up joining the Saints after stumbling into a shootout where Julius saves your life, you join up and meet the gang’s lieutenants Johnny Gat, Dex and Troy, working with them to root out the rival gangs.

After you lead the Saints to victory you get blown up and end up in a coma, fast forward to Saints Row 2 you get rescued by an admirer, Carlos, and you rescue Gat, he directs you towards Pierce and Shaundi, people he met in prison, these 4 become your lieutenants and the Saints are back together with new gangs to take down, the rest is history.

In the reboot, you’re an ex college student saddled with debt from student loans, you’re part of a Private Military Company, Marshall Defence Industries and you have 3 roommates: Neenah - A member of the Los Panteros gang, Kev - A member of the Idols gang, and Eli - He’s not a member of anything, he just spends his time listening to motivational tapes.

_{Maybe Embracer Group should take the advice from that objective…}

After only 3 jobs you get fired by Marshall, you end up in conflict with the Panteros after you and the gang decide to rob a payday loans store to pay the rent and the Panteros steal your getaway car, then the Idols come after the business of a mechanic friend you make at Marshall, the Panteros attack an Idols party Kev and Eli are at and you end up fighting both gangs to rescue them, leading you to go it alone and form the Saints.

You then recruit members by appearing on a livestreamed illegal combat ring called Boot Hill, and then the gang is together.

Immediately there are several problems, the original game’s idea of having you experience the violence of the other gangs first hand and then get rescued by the Saints gives you a sensible reason to join them and shows you the motives for why the Saints were formed, the reboot has you throw yourself into all this because of… Student loans and rent, because you know, murderous criminals are well known for paying their dues.

Then, the dynamic of the roommates all being in different gangs is thrown away almost immediately, Neenah and Kev have seemingly no problem quitting their gangs and going to war with them right after.

And on top of that, Eli has basically no connection to any of this, he’s just kind of there.

Because you start the game already being roommates and best friends with the trio, you also don’t get any real introduction to their characters, you’re just expected to roll with it and like them.

The original Saints Row didn’t have to show the formation of the Saints, they already existed by the time you entered the plot and you hear about why, but when the Reboot shows it shows some parts poorly and doesn’t even bother with others.

The reason for you and the lieutenants forming the Saints makes barely any sense, and you don’t even see the footsoldiers join up, all that happens is you play the Boot Hill mission and then the first time you see them in the gang they’re already working and paying you your cut, the bit where those first recruits become initiated happens off screen.

The crap origin story already puts the narrative on a bad footing, but it gets worse with the fact that the characters are just generally unlikeable and have no substance.

The story just seems to assume that because they’re presented as loyal to each other and liking each other, that’s enough to do the trick, even though you don’t get any introduction to how these friendships were formed, so the relationships don’t mean anything.

From there the characters have no development at all and stay the same throughout the plot, there are no plot arcs, you all start and finish at the same point personality wise.

Now that’s not to say the original games were perfect, definitely not, your character in the first game only even gets 3 lines of dialogue, but you do rise up from a nobody to a boss and by Saints Row 2 the boss is obsessively hungry for power; As for the other major characters Julius gets disillusioned and quits the gang, Dex betrays the gang and joins a corporation, Ultor, then Troy is revealed to be an undercover cop and becomes the Chief of Police.

Shaundi goes from a hesitant member of the Saints’ crusade into a well connected intel gatherer, Gat has a revenge arc after one of the rival gangs kills his girlfriend, Pierce doesn’t have much of an evolution but at least has a dynamic, struggling with Shaundi for recognition and a place as an advisor.

The reboot has none of this, the game does have some suggestions of what your friends/lieutenants are supposed to do, Neenah is an art history buff and a car fan, Eli is a wannabe businessman, Kev… Well apparently he’s a DJ on his days off, that’s all the background he gets, and none of this is utilised at all.

A far better writer than me, the video essayist Tehsnakerer, made a very lengthy video on Saints Row dissecting the game’s problems, primarily the story, and he summed up this wastefulness like this, pointing out there could have been so many uses for these character traits but they went nowhere:

The irony is this setup was a perfect opportunity, the lieutenants being in different gangs could’ve been a great introduction to the factions and their motives, there could have been some drama where they struggle between their loyalties to you as a friend vs the gangs they consider family, when they turn on their former gangs they could bring some defecting members with them as the first members of the Saints, instead it all goes unused.

The only character that does have an arc is the Nahualli, a ruthless mercenary, you arrest him while working for Marshall at the very beginning of the game and then break him out later once the Saints have been formed so he can help you with a heist.

He goes from hating the player to working with the Saints but not understanding their focus on friendship over just killing, to trying to integrate himself and be a good friend, then at the very end when all the gangs are beaten he decides he likes your friends so much he wants them for himself, so he stabs you and leaves you for dead, you spend the last few missions hunting him down and rescuing them.

This betrayal makes absolutely no sense, since he has no reason to kill you to integrate himself, you as the boss already welcomed him with open arms and were the first person to actually introduce him and search for him, and him loving your friends so much that he’s going to stab you for it is clownish when they have no substance as characters.

The other villains are also wasted, the Idols gang doesn’t even have a boss, Sergio the boss of Los Panteros appears for 2 missions in the early game and is then forgotten about until the late game where he gets killed off in a cutscene, the boss of Marshall, Atticus, also similarly vanishes early in the plot and doesn’t come back until it’s time for him to be finished off.

The last key villain, Police Chief Michaels, somehow manages to top even this level of underuse, she appears in a radio broadcast announcing that a “Special Task Force” has been created to deal with the Saints mid way through the story, what this amounts to is a single mission where you destroy evidence while fighting off some SWAT and regular Police Officers, and then another where you pick up the Chief’s car while she’s in it with a helicopter magnet, toss her around for a bit and then she gives up and disbands the Force.

Keep in mind that Saints Row 3 did this exact story beat, the Saints causing so much trouble that a crackdown takes place, already. In that game the “Task Force” was “STAG” - The “Special Tactical Anti-Gang” unit, they’re introduced with a similar broadcast announcing a crackdown on gangs, but rather than being a tossed away gimmick they keep striking out at the Saints, announcing an “urban war on terror” with a speech about a civilian you got killed in the previous game, and when you hit out at them by blowing up their aircraft carrier, expecting them to be finished off, they instead declare martial law, roll the tanks out onto the city streets and raise the bridges connecting the city together:

Their patrols are then a constant on the city streets and they become a major faction appearing throughout the game’s missions until the very end of the game.

So not only does this have a serious story impact, but a gameplay one as well, the Saints Row reboot never has the spine to do anything like this, its story is a graveyard of wasted ideas.

It’s actually incredibly bizarre how much potential the story had and how much it was wasted, every idea goes absolutely nowhere.

There have been a few explanations as to how this happened since the game died, some apparent ex-Volition devs have spoken out about what the development was like to various social media personalities, one example from an video I watched by a YouTuber called ShortFatOtaku claimed that the story was mainly written by an uncredited contractor who had worked on SR2 and 3, who Volition’s own writing staff weren’t allowed to criticise, and that the team was split between those who wanted something grittier and those who wanted something lighter, with Volition’s management trying to “half ass” a compromise and micromanage solutions that opted for the safest option in the disputes between the team.

This would explain why the game’s elements are so disjointed and why it has little resemblance to the promises of being “grounded” and closer to SR2 that appeared in some of the marketing, keep in mind though that the apparent insider interviewed for this was anonymous and also made a dubious claim that XP and cash rewards for killing cops or civilians was removed by a “inclusivity” group that didn’t want to “upset BLM” or encourage the killing of innocents, which isn’t true, although only the gangs and Marshall drop cash now you can get various XP bonuses from killing cops, and some missions and ventures force you to kill them, so take this with a grain of salt.

Another video with a similar theme and another anonymous source by YouTuber Matt McMuscles painted a similar picture, with the source claiming that the game had been restarted because of rewrites 3 or 4 times and that the intro mission setpiece had been scrapped and reworked just as many times, they even went as far as claiming that the original pitch for the game wasn’t a reboot at all, but a sequel to Saints Row 4 with the same characters themed around once again rebuilding the Saints in some kind of “weird dimension” or past timeline created after the ending of SR4, again these are anonymous sources we’re talking about so I would take it with a grain of salt, but these claims of intense division and revision surrounding the game’s premise would explain a lot of the final result.

This tonal confusion combined with several other problems: Crunch, COVID, resignations to create an overworked, overburdened and understaffed studio trying to pull off a massive new AAA game was a recipe for disaster.

But I do have to say, for all the game’s faults it is Saints Row, it’s a bad version of Saints Row but it is Saints Row, if anything this game is more like Saints Row than Saints Row 4, the Saints Row reboot has you tied up in gang warfare just like the first 3 games while SR4 had you fighting an alien empire in space, this isn’t the most out of left field the series has gone.

Combat

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So that’s the worst part of the game out the way, I felt I had to dedicate a lot of words to it since it’s the main thing that sets the game apart from others in the series, but since that’s over with we can look at the main component of the gameplay, the shooting.

The game’s combat loop is heavily rooted in the combat from Saints Row 3, fairly standard third person shooting with regenerating health and a large selection of weapon slots, but it does add some notable changes of its own.

• Skills and flow. The reboot introduces skills, there are quite a few of these ranging from tossing grenades to a flaming punch to the “quantum aperture” - a special field that lets you shoot through walls or enemy blocking moves, to perform a skill you have to use up flow, a resource which is earned by doing damage and killing enemies.

• Executions. While regenerating health does still exist in the game, the main way to recover health now is through executions, special takedown moves, after carrying out an execution there’s a timer you have to wait for before you can perform it again, but killing enemies speeds up the timer.

• Enemy health. Enemies tend to be more bullet spongy than in previous games, because of that their health bars are shown when targeting them. There are also “tough” variants of enemies that have a second health bar, coloured yellow instead of the usual red, until that bar is depleted you can’t perform an execution on them.

The skills are basically a simple improvement to the gameplay, it adds extra abilities, while I only really used the grenade toss and the aperture and didn’t bother with the others, the mechanics don’t take away from anything.

I’ve heard it argued that the execution mechanic is just a crappy knockoff of the glory kills from DOOM Eternal and don’t fit as well in this game and that’s true, it’s awkward watching your character pause to carry out this execution animation while all the other enemies stand around and watch, but I think it’s better than regenerating health where you take a break by running away and awkwardly hiding behind a wall, this system at least keeps you in combat.

And as for the enemy health, the sponginess of the enemies is something I can see being annoying, but this is something you can change thanks to the custom difficulty, I expected that I was going to have to change it but personally it didn’t end up bothering me, so I kept the difficulty at the stock level.

At first I wasn’t that into the combat, partly because it’s just not as interesting in the early game and partly because I was biased against the game from the get go, but as I unlocked the skills and upgrades to the flow metre, bought and upgraded all of the weapons, and got to mowing down enemies at some point I had to admit I was enjoying myself.

The combination of the regular shooting, the executions and using the skills was enough to keep me engaged for the game’s lengthy runtime and I didn’t find myself getting tired of it.

So is it an improvement over previous games? Not necessarily, it’s more of a sidegrade, the enemies are stronger and that also means there’s generally less of them, and it tosses in more miniboss type enemies with the “tough” enemies, the previous SR games were faster paced with quicker kills and either didn’t use minibosses or had them in much lesser supply, I’d wager that if I went back to play SR2 and 3 again I would probably prefer them, but that doesn’t mean the reboot’s formula doesn’t work.

Missions

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And since that was a positive it’s time to go back to negatives, something that absolutely doesn’t work is the mission design of this game, the missions are of course immediately hampered by the crappy plot and they often have the same lack of imagination as it too, it’s mostly A to B driving and shooting galleries, there are far fewer setpieces or just generally interesting concepts going on, there are some missions that really had interesting gimmicks in the previous games like Saints Row 3 having you sneak into STAG HQ by going to the plastic surgery shops used for character editing to make yourself look like the group’s commander, Cyrus Temple, or Saints Row 2 having you rush to rescue your Saints under siege while stoned out of your mind, in the reboot these are fewer and further between.

There was one mission that really did stand out and show Volition still had good mission design in them for the reboot, a bank heist where you do some social stealth using a hologram to make yourself look like a celebrity, rob his bank fighting your way through Marshall PMC and then end with a helicopter chase where you catch your escaping Saints friends with a magnet and airlift them to safety, but guess what? That was part of a DLC!

That’s not to say the older games did everything right either, 3 really pissed me off by the fact that it forced you to play its side activities like Guardian Angel and the Professor Genki Arena as main missions with thinly veiled plot excuses, especially on a second go around, but despite the fact that it did have many many shooting galleries and vehicle jobs it did put more effort into tossing things into the setup in a way that the reboot doesn’t.

The reboot’s missions weren’t broken (mostly), they weren’t unfairly balanced (mostly), and they didn’t make me want to bash my head into a brick wall (mostly), they were passable, but that’s not a high grade for a Saints Row game, this is a series with far more potential than that, I wish I had more to write about this element of the game but the missions genuinely are just that forgettable that only 3 weeks after finishing it this is all I’ve got, 50 hours of my life went into this thing and that’s 50 hours that probably would’ve been spent better without it.

Bugs

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As for the technical side of things, there were a few problems but not enough to be that eyebrow raising, definitely not enough to make me as mad as some of the reviewers and commentators who found themselves playing the game on launch day.

The bugs mostly came down to missions being busted. The very first mission after the introduction broke after I outran a trigger for a police chase to start, causing the mission scripting to break, but it fixed after I reloaded a checkpoint.

Another instance was a venture job series called Chalupacabra, where you have to steal food trucks and deliver them to a location while enemies try to ram you off the road in their cars, the enemies in this mission were insanely aggressive and spawned way too frequently, leaving you no breaks in combat at all, for 3 of these I survived with very little health left and for the 4th I actually had to turn down the vehicle difficulty to make it possible to me to finish.

The last jarring instance of this was another venture job, KAKTS Radio, which requires you get high wanted levels with the different gangs to catch them out, the problem with this is that the gang pursuits even at the highest wanted level are pathetic, they can end up losing track of you even if you stay in the same spot the whole time and the gangsters have a low spawn rate, so I had to slowly take out the enemies while leaving enough of them so that the gang still knew where I was. Apparently this was because Volition had turned down the aggressiveness of the wanted levels in a patch, not taking into account this activity, oops.

The ventures aren’t part of the main missions but they’re required to progress through the game, these issues were annoying but very far from the worst I’ve experienced and none were game breaking, so it seems Volition mostly did a good job with the patches before they croaked, but obviously it wasn’t enough to give the game a Cyberpunk 2077 or No Man’s Sky style recovery.

Conclusion

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So, final thoughts about this game? Well, it’s obviously very flawed, the narrative design is an absolute dumpster fire, Santo Ileso is an improvement on Steelport but is badly underutilised, a lot of the missions are dull.

But, and it’s a big but, I did have lots of genuine fun with this game, the improvements I rattled off at the start are nothing to shrug off, I enjoyed the combat and the technical problems were mostly cleaned up since launch, it’s very far from the worst games I’ve played like Hunt Down The Freeman or The Slaughtering Grounds.

I honestly don’t see Saints Row as the black sheep of the series like most seem to, I think that accolade belongs to Saints Row 4, all the other games centre around the urban gang warfare theme that has been a constant thread since the original game, 4 tosses that out in favour of a crappy parody of the Matrix, the Reboot had the courtesy to make a new city that was actually visually interesting, 4 copypasted the already poor quality Steelport, made some tweaks and called it a day.

So I really don’t think Volition deserved to die over this game, I think they deserved another chance to get back on the saddle and finally get Saints Row right for the first time since 2011 (or 2009 if you want to be harsher), this reboot took a few steps forward and a few back, with some more rejigging it certainly could have been a base for a future title that would genuinely reignite the franchise.

But instead the series and its developers became a victim of corporate incompetence and overconsolidation, I really doubt that it will get another chance now that its creator is dead, but you never know, maybe Embracer will get their minions to drag out the Saints Row franchise again to try and make some money back off of the name, but for that we can only wait and see.

So that’s Saints Row, the end of a franchise not with a bang but with a whimper, Volition has obviously paid dearly for getting tangled up in the corporate conglomerate crapshoot, I can only hope that its former staff end up landing on their feet, some of them have already formed a new studio working on development assistance for other AAA projects so maybe things are on the up there.

As for Saints Row, there are many wishes I would have for that series, a PC port for the original game, the completion of the long teased Saints Row 2 patch, a new game that really would bring the franchise back to its roots and give it new life, the vaporisation of Saints Row 4, Gat out of Hell and that cursed looking Saints Row 3 “Remaster” from memory, Men in Black style…

But maybe it’s time to let the Saints take their place in the afterlife, hang up those purple jackets, tanks and attack helicopters and look for more new IPs in the open world genre, this series is no doubt long past its heyday but it will surely still be fondly remembered by many for years to come.

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Changelog

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Edit 1 - 13/04/2024 - Quotes are now split instead of in one text block, removed Saints Row announcement embed and turned it into a hyperlink since age restriction means the video can’t be played on the website