Saints Row review – the boss is on his way

Probably none of us have played the Saints Rown series as “our core game” but rather as “guilty fun” or as a filler between other, larger games. This is somewhat unfair, because in terms of gameplay, this series has managed to do a lot of interesting things in places, and there is something in its quirky humor too. Although fans of the series most often call it the peak of the second part, I personally like the third one more, in which, in addition to a very decent set, it managed to balance a reasonable form of realism with the purposeful exaggeration typical of the series.

Unfortunately, later parts degraded somewhat when they went to hell or fought aliens. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so, because with the last part of the series, the creators decided to bring it back to earth, up to the reboot of the entire series, including the new characters of your boss. and his gang of gangsters “Saints”. This time around, you’re building your criminal empire in the fictional Las Vegas-inspired city of Santo Ileso.

• Platform: PS4, PS5 (Review), PC, X1, XSX/S
• Publication date: 08/23/2022
• Producer: Freedom (USA)
• Genre: city ​​event
• Czech localization: subtitles
• Multiplayer: 2 players, cross-gen
• Data to download: 53 GB
• Game time: 40+ hours
• Price: 1480 CZK (epic)

Your boss, your gang, your city

While the game tells a fairly large and ambitious comedic story, full of cinematic and staged sequences, its biggest selling point against the competition is actually the freedom with which you can customize a lot of things – of course you can model and dress up your boss (or boss). ) and, accordingly, you can also customize your main car, but in addition, you can customize the appearance of your criminal gang members, the equipment of your base, and even place various criminal buildings and enterprises throughout the city (on a developer preview). planned free plots) according to your taste. As a result, with every hour of playing, you feel more and more at home in this city (and its environs), and even civilians on the streets react more and more to you, begin to recognize you and your gang. In short, the goal is to truly dominate the city.

The main story is a fairly traditional gang building cliché, from a humble beginning to a lavish end, including some betrayal along the way. However, everything is hilariously spiced up with constant reflections on the real world and its trends, whether it’s influencers, modern corporations, or even role-playing game players. The four main characters act like fresh out of high school looking for work – and the overall humor and dialogue is geared towards that. So if you’re in your twenties, most of these forks will probably be fine for you. The Czech translation, of course, also deserves praise for this, which, among other things, for example, is not afraid of even the most vulgar words and thus gives the game a completely authentic poignancy. Of course, it is not suitable for children.

With every hour you play, you feel more and more at home in this city.

In addition, Saints Row continues the trend of previous installments in the series, where it gradually improves the dramaturgy and splendor of individual missions so that you can enjoy really great action. Whether it’s a partially scripted car column chase that you gradually destroy and jump from one to another, like in Uncharted, or perhaps a mission in which you fly to bombard an enemy base with a military helicopter. So don’t be fooled by the seemingly realistic concept of this piece, because the action is going to be very big again. Of course, the choice of arsenal is mostly up to you. But, not wanting to sound like an old moralist, at times I was a little uneasy about how obvious your heroes are killing cops on a massive scale and still gloating about it. Not to mention the occasional collateral civilian casualties. At present, I would expect a slightly more sophisticated approach to these topics.

Unrivaled Experience

In terms of gameplay, there is no shortage of fun, and if you like teen humor, you might as well enjoy the game in terms of story. However, arguing about the mechanical aspects of gameplay, such as driving a vehicle or, above all, gunplay, is somewhat more complex. I have the strong impression that the authors did not even try to create a more accurate system – both shooting and driving are so simplified in terms of control and general behavior that it just had to be done intentionally. Thanks to this, you will be able to survive even in completely insane debris and shoot your way through almost everything. Unless you set the difficulty to the highest, but that just doesn’t make much sense to me in this game. However, the action in the game is fun, but more in a simple functional sense, like going to a fast food restaurant.

Estimating the expedition is somewhat more difficult. While for most of the game I was annoyed by the combination of post-production filters that do not properly use HDR (black is rarely black), nevertheless, while the game looks simply outrageous in places, at other times it manages to conjure unexpectedly impressive landscapes. As usual in open world games, this mostly depends on the time of day and lighting. On the PS5, you have the option of playing 4K with lousy smoothness, or 1440p with a fairly steady sixty frames. In terms of sound, I don’t really have much to complain about, I truly admire that you can choose from several different male and female voices for the main character (there is a lot of dubbing). Musically, I was very pleased with the Synthwave oriented radio station – driving around the city and its surroundings was a great pedaling experience accompanied by this music. As for general tuning, in addition to random glitches, unfortunately, I also encountered several bugs that forced me to reload the position – of course, it is possible that by the time the game is released, they will already be patched.

The action in the game is fun in a simple functional sense.

Likewise, the gaming experience is somewhat uneven overall, and it’s up to you to decide if you like it or not. For example, it can be easy to get frustrated with the repetitive activities for your side professions/missions, but they are rarely mandatory. It’s also very true that in the game you deal with more or less all situations in the same way: shooting larger or smaller groups of enemies. It’s such a dominant gameplay component that even the characters themselves make fun of it repeatedly:We can come up with some plan for an elaborate heist like in the movie… or break in and shoot everyone.“says one character to another to get an answer”Yes, a shot will do“. That’s actually the whole game: straightforward and transparent. If you have no problems with this, you can have a good time.