Do you remember Saints Row? That’s right, a series of dildos. Well not yet. This soft reboot finally removes the garish, dated vulgarity of the original games, but retains the fun and absurdity.
His saints are a fickle young man with a caffeine addiction and student loan debt. They’re a mixed family of cowardly stereotyped 20-somethings, but they’re smart and charming enough to get you involved in their quest for self-sufficiency. There’s some amazing dialogue that sounds almost desperate in its attempts to please the Gen Z crowd, but I’m much happier making jokes about armchair activism than blatant misogyny.
And there is a rather interesting story that unfolds in the midst of all this chaos. Your character and his housemates are fed up with their low-paying, dead-end jobs and want to survive on their own, using their individual talents to build a strong team. It turns out that a group of part-time thieves are building a criminal empire, but even so, there’s a clear anti-authority bias here that’s easy to take into account.
This change of tone mainly serves to make Saints Row’s iconic brand of satirical, action-packed nonsense more palatable, and once you try it for the first time, you won’t be able to resist coming back for more.
It all starts with the creator of the character. He can customize almost every facet of his Saint, from the obvious things like his hair and body proportions, to how his veins bulge and the size of his areolas. Skin tone options cover an iridescent range, you can give them lizard eyes, and there’s a “glow” slider if you want your character to look like they survived a head-on collision with a KY Jelly tanker. .
It’s stupid and brilliant, but it only works because the gameplay and the world are just as ridiculous. Among the various adventures you can experience in Santo Illeso are a Mad Max-inspired LARP throughout the city and a tech startup where you can test Wallhack devices and attach thrusters to unsuspecting mercenaries before defeating them and watching them fly into low orbit. Insurance fraud is back, forcing you to crash into traffic as often and as brutally as possible.
Unfortunately, these highlights are combined with some really tedious side quests. There are a series of junk removal missions where you carefully deliver flying barrel trucks all over the map, which is a bit stressful the first time but incredibly boring the next 12 times.
The combat and driving mechanics that make up the bulk of the game have been honed over a long hiatus since Saints Row 4. The piercing sound, tons of recoil, and some nice smooth gore all combine to make consecutive hits feel good, but that’s adding melee. unlockable finishers and abilities that tie the fight together. While foot combat in previous Saints Row games was commonplace, the reboot is incredibly fast. You can come out of hiding, fire a few shots at a nearby thug, then do a nimble melee finishing move before dashing to the next bad guy and using an ability like Pineapple Express, which lets you throw a live grenade at an enemy and then throw them at your colleagues.
The driving is also much more orderly than in previous Saints games. Every vehicle is different and the handbrake twist is so powerful that you can skid almost any car. Slow, heavy vehicles still move fast enough to be fun to use, while a new side-swipe mechanic makes pursuers incredibly easy to take down – just wait for them to get close, press the swipe button sideways and watch with glee as they wander. off, sometimes exploding in a fireball of death.
Unfortunately, improvements to the game are often overshadowed by questionable physics and some critical AI bugs. You can really feel the weight of the truck when you turn it around a tight corner, but a small bump in the ground is enough to jump into the air and roll like a microcar. Similarly, when multiple enemies freeze in the middle of a fight, unable to move or even fire their weapons, it’s a surefire way to knock yourself out of the game, especially when it happens during a decisive boss fight.
It’s a similar story when you look at the updated images. Animations are natural and there are great lighting enhancements that really pop after dark, but character models and textures lack detail – the Saints cat is so tough and plastic that it wouldn’t look out of place in a game LEGO.
Santo Illeso itself seems a bit more elaborate than Steelport, with easter eggs and comic stories dotting its plazas and alleyways. It’s still pretty shallow compared to other open world games – the only buildings you can enter are clothing and gun shops, and you shouldn’t expect to be spotted in random encounters – but it’s bright, varied and always fun to drive. Whether you’re speeding on a hoverboard or parking on a rooftop looking for missing drugs.
It’s a shame that much of the main story takes you to the same area over and over again, because there’s a lot of Santo Illesos that you’ll only pass through on your way to other destinations. The convergence of Las Vegas and Reno to the north is one of the coolest regions on the map, but the story will only take you there a few times. By the time you roll up the credits, you’ll know the area around Saints HQ like the back of your hand, but the rest of the map feels like a forgettable blur of repetitive side quests.
In a world of unsolicited remasters and remakes, this new Saints Row does a great and much-needed job of wiping the series off the board. There’s a dearth of unapologetically fun AAA titles, and if that’s what you’re looking for, this reboot certainly fills that role, despite its shortcomings.
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Sometimes repetitive, sometimes dazzling, and sometimes just plain broken, Saints Row 2022 is far from perfect, but that doesn’t stop it from being a chaotic good time.
Source : PC Gamesn
