Originally published June 2017

When I first heard about the Saints Row franchise, I saw it as a Grand Theft Auto (GTA) knockoff with some cruder humor and crappy marketing. The same was true about its sequel, especially the crap in the marketing since they really liked to showcase the opportunity you had to drive around the city in a septic truck spraying people with its contents. If you don't believe me, they still have some of the very on-the-nose marketing videos on Steam for Saints Row 2 that are clearly poking fun at GTA and touting the septic truck. The franchise did not make an immediately good impression on me. However, I decided to give it a shot once I heard the high praise sung about Saints Row: The Third. Once I did, I was hooked. I thought it was a revelatory difference in what I expected of the franchise. While the overall positive experience of Saints Row: The Third wasn't enough to make me want to go back to see the previous games, it still made me excited to see how the series might continue with the next sequel. In my usual fashion, I waited a while to pick up and play Saints Row IV, in the hopes that the complete package would be along the lines of what the developers originally intended for the title. If that is indeed the case, I'd say it's not as good as I had originally hoped.

Saints Row: The Third was so good that it managed to make it onto my list of games I'd be happy to have on a deserted island. It also managed to make me lose interest in the Grand Theft Auto franchise for deciding to stick to their serious stories instead of the bizarre, nonsensical directions they used to take. With that in mind, I was really curious how the developers at Volition were going to top themselves in Saints Row IV. There are ways in which they take the series further, with some significant and fundamental changes to the gameplay. However, the experience itself never reaches the same highs the previous game achieved.

The Short of It

How Much Did I Play?

• Steam's in-game time says 22 Hours

• All of the single-player campaign

• No multiplayer or co-op missions

Pros

• There are some great, well-written, funny moments

• The self-aware approach to the game set pieces is great

• Superhero mobility is pretty satisfying

• The favorite side-missions, like Fraud, are still there and just as fun

Cons

• Soundtrack is not as strong and has fewer radio stations

• Some side missions are tedious and unsatisfying

• Orb collecting to level up superpowers is lame (i.e. Crackdown)

• The premise behind the story isn't great

• Shooting isn't as good and most of the early-level guns lack punch

• There are a lot of details that seem like shortcuts were taken or some features actually worsened due to time constraints, such as the lack of new customization options for your character

• Buggy mess

The Rest of It

Story

Saints Row IV is an almost immediate continuation of Saints Row: The Third. The story picks up a few years after the events that took place in Steelport with the Saints on a secret assassination mission. It opens with a referential cinematic of a helicopter carrying the Saints to the tune of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally"—which is now becoming a bit of cliché with the frequency in which it is used in video games. While I love me a Predator reference, it lacked some of the goofy stupidity of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon's opening bit, which made similar use of that song. Regardless, the mission involves you hunting down the villain from the previous game and assassinating him. You manage to do so, but not before he launches a nuclear rocket at the US. Performing some physically impossible feats to the tune of a song that is a clear reference to the film, Armageddon—with a recognizable song that fits into a particular drinking game—your character manages to stop the rocket, survive the crash, and land directly in the White House. Saving America apparently gives you so much positive public opinion that you are immediately elected as President of the United States. This all happens upon completing the first mission.

It's all a bit sudden. Later in the game the actual process of campaigning to become president is mentioned, but you don't get to experience much in terms of the journey to becoming the commander-in-chief. It's just the first mission and then you're the president. I wouldn't bother getting comfortable with the title though. Within 5 minutes of playing the game as the president, aliens attack and manage to overtake the world. Despite a thorough resistance, the aliens place you and the rest of the important characters into a simulated digital environment. After a brief Leave it to Beaver bit that's pretty entertaining, you are suddenly transported to the same city from the last game.

However, this time it's just a digital version of Steelport. Here, you must harness the power of the digital world and take out the aliens from within their own simulation. Essentially, the plot of Saints Row IV is borrowing a lot of ideas from The Matrix, and it's certainly not afraid to show it. You and the rest of the crew are on the run on a spaceship, jumping into the Matrix and causing chaos in the hopes that doing so will allow you to free humanity from the alien threat.

I liked The Matrix when it first came out, but that fact did not help me get invested in the story of Saints Row IV. Aside from a few returning characters, most of them are not nearly as interesting or memorable as the last time around. Something about almost everything taking place in the digital world also completely removed my commitment to the events that transpired. Yet, like The Matrix, I didn't want to spend much time in the real world and preferred to be where the primary action was with all the superpowers and ridiculous content. All things considered, the main plot points of the story didn't go in very interesting directions. I honestly don't remember much that captured my attention, which is a huge contrast to the last game.

Saints Row: The Third was an orchestrated and polished train of thought that was crafted, developed, and paced exceptionally well. The introduction of new mechanics came at a speed that rarely felt rushed or slow. The big story missions were spectacles with exciting set-pieces and a great use of music. They even had decisions in the game that were legitimately difficult simply because of how great or funny the perks were. Somehow, Saints Row IV managed to lose a lot of the finesse in its storytelling that shined in the last game. It retreads some great moments from the last game in ways that just felt cheap and ditched some of the intriguing story-based choices that had significant impacts on the gameplay. Aside from the They Live reference with a special cameo performance late in the game, I can't say there are many moments that significantly improved my experience or made my jaw drop. Unfortunately, even this funny moment was ruined by some performance issues, which we'll get to later.

Still, I don't want to just speak badly of Saints Row IV. The focus they added to the certain returning characters (mainly Kinzie) makes for at least some entertaining interactions. A few new characters are added to the Saints, as well as some who were in the earlier games but I didn't know because they were absent in The Third. Since I haven't played the first two Saints Row games, I likely missed plenty of jokes and references, but it wasn't much of a big deal in terms of the stories they were telling. For the most part, the character side stories and interactions work. They just end up falling flat in certain ways or just feel a little pointless. The new characters don't add as much personality or drama as you might want and the returning characters are sometimes saddled with recycled jokes, which are far less funny the second or third time around. Ultimately, Saints Row IV's story has its funny and epic moments, but it ends up being somewhat forgettable and only serves as a backdrop to upping the crazy on your abilities in the gameplay.

Gameplay

Saints Row: The Third was the last open-world, sandbox game I played that I really enjoyed. The developers took some risks with their design and made some really smart choices that gave the game a ton of fun, raucous insanity that built to a boiling point by the end. The progression of weapons, perks, and upgrades for your character was designed around making you an unstoppable lord of your own mafia with superhuman resilience to damage. Saints Row IV replicates the superhuman part and cranks up the potential, without making significant improvements to the overall combat. In fact, some of the choices they made to the gameplay contradict some core features of the game.

It doesn't take long for you to end up in the simulated city of Steelport. About as quickly as you arrive in the Matrix, you lose the point of ever needing a car again. I think the total time I spent in a vehicle by the time I was done playing was less than 30 minutes. Considering how Saints Row used to be a clone of the Grand Theft Auto series (it's in the name), it seems a little ironic you are immediately given superpowers that render cars completely pointless. You don't even need them for the music anymore, because you can just turn on the radio from your weapon menu and listen to the station of your choice. Unfortunately for me, I didn't like my choices of music as much, as the variety significantly dropped in this installment. But we get a whole station for Rasta music, so yippee... I guess.

Even though they break the core mechanics of the Saints Row games, the superpowers can be fun, when they feel effective. The mobility powers, such as running, jumping, and flying through the city are satisfying. However, the process of upgrading these powers among others involves collecting power orbs. I don't like half-assed collectibles in games, especially when there are thousands to find. Some games make collecting objects meaningful, or at least the number of objects is reduced to a more tolerable total. Doom is littered with secrets and collectibles, but the total in Doom is significantly less than in Saints Row IV. I was immediately dismayed to find that Saints Row IV was mimicking Crackdown in how it forced players to go on an extensive Easter egg hunt to improve their character's superpowers.

While I may have just praised the superpowers for being fun, there was still plenty left to be desired. They give you a variety of offensive abilities to use, such as telekinesis and energy blasts of different element types. However, those abilities were typically just an assist to your primary combat methods. Even fully upgraded, the fireballs I threw weren't very effective. It made more sense to just focus on using the guns (the core mechanic of the game) than to even bother throwing a fireball at an enemy, simply because of how flaccid the superpower felt. To make an X-Men analogy, I wanted to be Dark Phoenix, but I felt like Jean Grey. There were powers I had that put me above my enemies, but I still felt a bit limited in a game series that was known for getting ridiculous in its power-trip experiences.

In terms of game design and adjusting a game's mechanics, I can understand the reason why there would be some reluctance to jack up your powers to god-like levels. Saints Row was originally built around the core tenets of a GTA game. The developers could only go so far with it and the limitations of their game's design, especially in the time frame they had to complete Saints Row IV. What is a Saints Row game if you aren't still shooting guns to accomplish your goals, after all?

Despite the fun one might have in using the superpowers, they are nonetheless impotent and you have to rely on your guns to resolve your confrontations. The shooting in Saints Row: The Third was a great experience, but, somehow, it doesn't feel as good here. I'm not sure what happened, but not many guns have much oomph to them; I had to upgrade them multiple times to make my character much of a threat. It wasn't until I had maxed out the upgrades on three of the gun types that I started to really have fun with the shooting. The combat felt like a chore through most of the game until I got the singularity gun with infinite ammo. Even with all my complaints, shooting black holes in the middle of the street that sucked up everything in sight was pretty damn fun.

Presentation

The somewhat recycled and unpolished nature of the storytelling leads me to believe that Saints Row IV was rushed. The gameplay contradictions and uninspired inadequacies of the superpowers led me to believe the game was rushed. However, nothing more clearly illustrates that a game was rushed by having a high bug count, and Saints Row IV is a buggy mess. QA is often late in a game's development cycle, and if there isn't enough time before the promised release date, bugs aren't fixed. Bugs will happen in any game, especially an open-world sandbox game, and it's not like I can't still enjoy a game with its fair share of bugs. Saints Row: The Third had its share of glitches. Saints Row IV gets away with some of its glitches because it's got its own intentional bug gimmicks going on, sometimes making me wonder if the bugs I was seeing were intentional.

Nonetheless, plenty of bugs I saw were irrefutable:

• Characters were half-way through the floor in the "real world."

• Controls would suddenly lock for no apparent reason.

• Sound effects and character speech were constantly falling behind the action or even cut off by what was happening.

One of the funnier moments of the game was ruined when the sound dialogue of the characters had fallen behind by a few seconds. After the final boss battle took place, I ended up with a piece of the antagonist stuck to my character's arm for the remainder of the game, so any cutscenes that took place looked more ridiculous and stupid than they ever intended. In the developer's defense, this game was in development during the tumultuous period in which its publisher, THQ, was imploding. So, that likely played a factor in forcing them to push the game out the door before THQ lost the rights and the revenue.

Even if you ignore the buggy nature of the game, however, the presentation still isn't great. I don't care much for the filters they applied to the digital city. It just looks drab and dull all the time. The animations of characters also look weird, as though Saints Row IV fell out of a PS2 into some shinier graphics. Not to mention, there's not a whole lot that is new to the look of the game. Character customization is largely the same as last time. The new vehicles they've added are all cut from the same cloth, not that you'd use them anyway.

There are only a few things about the presentation that stand out in a positive way: Some of the new weapons and melee animations are cool, and the soundtrack is still used in some funny, clever ways.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

The biggest problem Saints Row IV suffers from is the same thing that most sequels to great movies and great games suffer from: a predecessor that was too good. I know my review was pretty harsh and I pointed out a lot of flaws, but I still enjoyed my time with Saints Row IV. It's a fun game. Using the superpowers to fly around the city is a blast, and there is still some quality writing to the humor and story. However, there are a lot of cracks on the surface and beneath it that hinder the overall experience. Some poor design choices, whether they were the result of time constraints or just misguided judgment, prevent Saints Row IV from achieving the heights of the last game. If you are curious about how the story of the Third Street Saints goes, it's still worth your time, just temper your expectations a little bit.

Do you agree or disagree? Tell me what you think in the comments!

Fan of death metal? Check out my band on Bandcamp and Soundcloud. If you like what you hear and want to hear more, head to HoundsofInnsmouth.com for more info!