The superpowers have been scrapped and the sex toys have been safely stowed back in the sock drawer – the new Saints Row has shed its shark-jumping silliness and smutty tendencies in favour of a return to its open-world gangland roots. However, this back-to-basics approach has borne out a fairly primitive kind of crime spree, and stripping the series of its more outlandish elements has laid this reboot’s design and technical inadequacies bare – with no pixelated modesty censor big enough to hide its junk. While there’s a decent amount of fun to be had chasing collectibles and causing chaos, outdated mechanics and repetitive mission design meant that by the end of my time with the new Saints Row I was desperate for something that could genuinely surprise me like a slap to the face from a 40-inch dildo.
That’s not to say I wasn’t entertained for significant stretches at a time, and while the rags-to-riches story of the new Saints gang in the sandswept city of Santo Ileso is anything but original it at least facilitates a handful of B-grade action scenes that do an admirable impersonation of Uncharted, with a car-hopping convoy chase and an explosive train robbery among the more dazzling high points along the way to the campaign’s somewhat underwhelming end. But in between these peaks is a relentless rinse-and-repeat cycle of wave-based shootouts against a handful of rival gangs that are uniformly bullet spongy and largely indistinguishable from one another. The only ones that really stand out are the garish, neon-soaked Idols who appear to have grown restless waiting for Ubisoft to announce a new Watch Dogs.
The combat itself is snappy and serviceable, and in the absence of a proper cover system is heavy on circle-strafing and pulling off occasional execution moves in order to replenish your health mid-fight. It doesn’t exactly create a propulsive ballet of ballistics to rival Doom Eternal, but it’s a neatly streamlined setup that allows you to recover from damage without having to scramble for dropped medkits or fumble with a consumables menu. In addition, there’s a recharging skills system that allows you to bind special abilities to four hotkeys. By the time I had fully leveled up my character I had access to everything from flaming punches to the ability to shoot through walls, but rarely did I feel the need to use them in favour of the more traditional skills like throwing grenades and activating temporary armour which made for a mostly conventional brand of firefights.
It’s also fairly conventional in its approach to driving. Though there are a handful of aircraft and boats to discover, most of my time in Santo Ileso was spent behind the wheel of a healthy fleet of land vehicles, from motorbikes to monster trucks and everything in between. The floaty and largely homogenized handling meant that I never really grew to favour any one vehicle over the other (aside from the glorious hoverbike unlocked late in the story), but the ability to drift and sideswipe other cars at the tap of a button does give chase sequences a welcome burst of Burnout-style gratification. The fact that you can scramble onto the roof at speed and launch into a wingsuit glide (a move straight out of Just Cause) also makes for some spectacular getaways, although it seems like an oversight that you can’t do the same thing from a motorbike’s saddle.
Purple Reign
Joining your created boss character, who is a self-described “walking murder party”, are three other foundational members of the new Saints who accompany you as AI partners on certain missions and provide some consistently cringe-inducing banter in the cutscenes in between. They can also be summoned via your phone’s contacts to fight alongside you in the streets, which comes in handy later on when you’re trying to clear out rival gangs from your turf and you want to get the repetitive fights over with in a slightly speedier fashion.
None of these partners in crime have particularly interesting personalities, but the one I warmed to the most by far was the brainy pacifist, Eli, mainly because his side story missions involved donning some cardboard armour and swapping my assault rifle for a Nerf gun in a series of live-action role-playing battles. The actual combat experience in these sections remained fundamentally the same as every other shooting gallery sequence, but it was funny to hear the characters make the gunshot sounds with their mouths and perform pretend executions, or to come upon enemies who would stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that you shot them instead of lying down and playing dead. It reminded me of the sticks-and-stones-style warfare of South Park: The Stick of Truth, and provided an enjoyable shift in tone from the more murderous mayhem found elsewhere.
I’d have preferred to have Eli with me on more missions, but you can’t change who you’re stuck with. However, you can certainly change yourself, and Saints Row’s impressive character customisation tool can be accessed at any time via the in-game phone, allowing you to completely alter your appearance either by crafting it yourself or importing one of the growing number of community creations. I’m a fairly simple man with simple tastes, and so I basically bought the mariachi outfit, equipped the Three Amigos pelvic thrust salute emote, and kept them for the 30 hours I spent playing. But you really can let your imagination run wild if you want to get creative, especially in tandem with the numerous clothing options to unlock, whether you want high-end fashion or perhaps merely a taco hat and tissue boxes on your feet.
This robust cosmetic customisation extends to your weapons arsenal and garage, and even the Saints’ HQ, which is an abandoned church that evolves and expands over course of the journey and can be augmented with dozens of decorations found hidden across Santo Ileso, from abstract art to hulking pieces of Americana like giant football helmets and cowboy boots. It’s a nice way to organically display Saints Row’s collectibles, and finally answers the question of what would Animal Crossing be like if its residents were 100 percent more homicidal?
Repeat Business
As you progress through Saints Row’s story and strengthen your gang's stranglehold on the streets of Santo Ileso, an increasing number of criminal ventures become available to purchase. Buying one of these businesses and completing its associated set of missions boosts the Saints’ hourly revenue, giving you access to a slowly swelling pool of cash to spend on more weapons and clothing. You don’t need to acquire all of the dozen ventures in order to complete Saints Row’s campaign, but buying up roughly half of them is mandatory in order to unlock its final story missions. Which is a shame, because precious few of them are actually any good.
Admittedly, it will always be goofy good fun to bounce your hapless anti-hero hundreds of feet in the air off a series of exploding cars in the returning Insurance Fraud challenges that come parceled with the Shady Oaks Medical Center. I also found that tracking down and photographing specific materials throughout the map for the Cutting Edge Fashion Designer was a fairly novel way of unlocking new customisation options for your clothing.
However, the majority of ventures are forgettable and unevenly weighted, with the lower-quality tasks seemingly higher in quantity. The Eurekabator, a start-up incubator for gadgets that allows you test hoverboards and rocket-propelled sticky bombs that latch onto enemies and send them spiraling through the sky like ruptured gas tanks, is a disappointingly short-lived blast since it’s limited to just three missions. And then you compare those to the Bright Future venture, which forces you to haul the same sluggish truck full of toxic waste barrels across the city a grueling total of 13 trips before the venture is completed, the latter feels like a genuinely toxic waste of time.