Saints Row review | PS5

---

Since the original Saints Row came out back in 2006, it’s no surprise expectations have changed, but can this now teenaged franchise call us back to the streets with a fresh paint job?

by James Michael Parry

---

​@james_parry

---

Developer: Deep Silver Volition
Publisher: Deep Silver
Platforms: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Players: 1-2

---

We came in with little knowledge of the original franchise, having played the demo for the fourth game and often heard “yeah, the first two games were good, but it all got a bit silly and over-the-top after that”.

It came as a surprise then, to find our introduction to the world of The Saints, the titular gang you go on to create through the course of the game, being not really over-the-topp at all, but a more standard (if explosive) third-person shooter experience, as your main character works as a gun for hire for the Marshall private security company.

After some cinematic scenes, featuring outlandish stunts that Tom Cruise would be jealous of, as you initially make a name for yourself, things quickly go sideways and you end up unemployed, pondering your next move. It’s only here that the game really gets going.

Before all that though, you’re asked to create your boss. The character creation lets you pick a “personality” from a selection of voices, but sadly all the characters seem to be the same, namely an arrogant, abrasive and constantly sarcastic individual with an extreme indifference to killing large numbers of people.

The game aims to humanise your character by proxy, having your three companions be judgemental of your offhand comments, as they tell us more about them in a couple of side missions each, but they still don't come across as obnoxious as the protagonist – including one of them who's a DJ…and refuses to wear a shirt…​

Once The Saints find their HQ, and pick their name, the map really fills out to almost overwhelming levels. Beforehand, there's already a few activities scattered about the map like dumpster diving, photographing signs and, inexplicably, being a "wingsuit saboteur". Yes, you can wingsuit about the city.

After that, you can start to build business ventures, beginning at the frankly bafflingly cheap price of $30,000, which then generates income constantly, though in small amounts at first. Each venture adds its own activity, like collecting trucks full of toxic waste barrels or making food deliveries.

Fortunately, there’s a handy “GPS to next venture objective” option, which is a godsend for actually being able to find these across the vast map’s nine districts.​

Your enemies in the game are either one of the rival gangs, The Idols and Los Panteros, the aforementioned Marshall or the cops.

The police are the most overzealous, which is not a new experience to anyone who’s spent time playing Grand Theft Auto V, but here the ease at which you can set them off seems borderline unfair.

At one point, to complete a venture mission, I had to steal a particular type of car and take it to a garage. After fending off the cops, who seemed to instantly spawn all around you, I got back in the car to finish delivery and…the process started all over again.​

if you aren’t put off by the character’s brash attitude and enjoy messing around in a sprawling city then there’s definitely something here you’ll enjoy...

In fact it makes the experience feel rigid, with the game telling you to be chaotic and then warning you not to leave an area or you’ll immediately fail. Plus, there seems to be no way to self-right a car that’s flipped over, so if you have a bad crash – you’ve had it.

All this leads to a contradiction in tone, where you take on large groups of colourful enemies, but leaves you with relatively limited weapons and abilities to take them on. Your skills, unlocked by completing challenges, seem unreliable, causing you to occasionally jump or roll around instead of using them in combat.

For a time, we found ourselves with only a machine gun in our inventory, as the few other weapons we’d unlocked remained stashed in a gun case at HQ, forgotten. You can also collect, customise and upgrade vehicles, but you’ll need to fetch them from a specific garage rather than just getting it brought to you.​

The soundtrack is strangely sparse, far from the high bar set by older GTAs for licensed music, with arguably no well-known tracks and relatively few overall. Though you can make a mix and match personal playlist from all stations through the app on your phone.

Phone apps let you tap into all aspects of the criminal underworld, except certain things you need to go back to HQ for. One particularly nice detail is the ability to adjust your style and even your character’s appearance on-the-fly, without paying an arbitrary in-game fee.

Game performance is worth mentioning, with generally just a bit more pop-in than we’d like, but there were a few times where we got stuck not being able to press a button. There was even one horrible moment when we were in combat and could suddenly only melee, as all other offensive controls just stopped working. There was also one hard crash, but that’s not unheard of ahead of the day one patch.

So it’s a really mixed bag for Saints Row. The bottom line is that if you aren’t put off by the character’s brash attitude and enjoy messing around in a sprawling city then there’s definitely something here you’ll enjoy, but as soon as you dig deeper there’s not a huge amount of substance, especially by comparison.​

The driving is actually pretty good, but nowhere close to Forza Horizon 5, which the setting in particular invites comparison to. The variety of the missions isn’t as wide as GTAV, an almost 10-year-old game, and arguably it doesn’t look as good either. There is coop but it’s limited to two players.

Finally, in terms of gunplay, you might think of third-person action like The Division 2 or the similarly chaotic Sunset Overdrive, but the action is just not as tight. Weapons feel too light and bullet spread is high, you never have enough ammo and it takes a long time to get access to more weapons, and when you do, they are such wacky armaments as…an RPG.

It’s frustrating, because we went into this wanting to hear this story we’d heard of, but never got into, and, unfortunately, the game doesn’t do itself justice in terms of telling it.

If you only played the first couple of hours you might not even get to the point where you start building an empire, and given people’s limited attention spans, that could be a serious problem.

Pros

• Freedom to take over the city as you choose
• Lots and lots to explore and get your teeth into
• Glimmers of fun and excitement the series is known for in the LARPing missions

Cons

• Hard to avoid comparisons to other games that do it better
• You never feel like a boss in combat
• Missions are mostly fetch quests or shootouts

6/10