Saints Row V

So, what was enough to drag me back to the murky world of foolish ramblings? Why, the rebooted Saints Row franchise of course!

I’ll start by saying: I’m a massive fan of the Saints Row franchise, from about 3 onwards (2 was fine, I never played 1). It’s GTA on acid and I love the sheer stupidity of it, the ridiculousness of the characters and, of course, the innumerable dildos. It is the best way to waste hours.

The basic premise is that you and three friends start your own outlaw gang (The Saints), and you’ve got to expand by seizing power from other criminal organisations in the city of Santo Ileso. You control ‘The Boss’, who can look pretty much any way you want thanks to the pretty impressive customisation options.

It’s not exactly the most inspiring plot, but hey, we don’t play Saints Row for the storylines.

Unfortunately, for some reason the developers have decided to take Saints Row back to its roots – specifically the more ‘realistic’ feel of 2, and away from the mad horniness of 3 and 4. This means it feels like a poor man’s GTA (or, as my husband said, ‘the Wish version’), with less likeable characters, far less interesting storylines and clunkier controls.

Your three other friends are pretty two dimensional – occasionally you get a glimmer of backstory or character arc but it’s incredibly fleeting. Neena is a member of rival gang Los Panteros and while her story starts out promising, it crashes and burns harder than her car.

Kevin is a member of other rival gang The Idols (why are all these rivals living together?) and is painted with a very broad bisexual brush, but not given much else to work with. Eli is probably the best character solely down to his LARPing missions, which are a lot of fun and the best missions in the entire place.

The only other character of note is The Nahualli – a super-criminal that you team up with on some missions. Aside from that, pretty much everyone else is interchangeable, so much so that I can’t actually recall any of their names.

So what’s actually wrong with it?

There’s nothing really bad about the reboot, it’s just… meh. We waited nearly 10 years for this and it feels more like an RPG from the early 2000s.

A few things off the top of my head:

• There’s tons of pointless things to collect: drug pallets, car parts, dumpster diving, etc. At least in Assassin’s Creed you had to chase the bloody feathers under the pretence of working for the collectible. Saints Row literally highlights it on the map, no effort involved.
• Hidden histories. There are 16 of these, each as pointless as the one before. You have to find 5 information boards in each location and read them to hear about the history of Santo Ileso. Why? Who knows.
• Combat isn’t fun. Have I mentioned that Saints Row is meant to be fun? The only way to regain health is to execute people, meaning every fight is the same.
• The mini map, weapons wheels and menus are unintuitive and in some cases downright useless.
• The church is infuriating. A winding labyrinth of dark rooms that lures you in with promises of customisation.
• The photos. So many photos of things.

And that’s what it comes down to: everything is the same. You go somewhere, do a task that undoubtedly involves you shooting people, and thaaaat’s…. pretty much it. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few glimmers of hope, especially when you begin to buy enterprises across the city. Good old insurance fraud is still present, so you can ragdoll your way across a highway and earn lots of money, and Eurekabator! has a couple of fun side missions where you test out experimental weaponry.

But the criminal enterprises suffer from the same thing as the rest of the game – repetitiveness. You have to deliver 13 toxic trucks across the city for one of them. Nothing exciting happens, you just have to go steady enough to not ‘activate’ the barrels. Long gone are the days of driving a tiger around the city and getting attacked if the drive is too dull or too bumpy.

Like I say, there are a couple of missions that are definitely fun, and some of the cut scene dialogue will make you chuckle, but there’s none of the insanity or vibrancy that I’ve come to associate with Saints Row. There were so many times where I found myself loading up the game, flicking through the available missions, and just turning it off in favour of something else.

In conclusion, stick with the earlier versions and GTA V rather than picking this one up.

Saints Row 4

When we heard that there would be a Saints Row 4, we had some wild ideas about how it could possibly outdo the previous game, and I eagerly purchased it for the boyfriend’s birthday. Around three months later I’ve finally finished it, and at times it was a struggle to pick up the remote.

The beautiful thing about Saint Row III was that it was ridiculous, loud, sexy, immoral and funny. Nothing was sacred, the only things that mattered were how big the guns were and how much damage you could cause. Saints Row IV, for me, had none of the refined beauty of 3, the cleverness was gone – maybe because they had to outdo themselves, be more extreme.

The main problem, and it’s one that a few games suffer from, is that it was originally intended as DLC but then changed into a standalone game. This means that the general mechanics are very similar – the same characters, the same city, the same ideas behind the plot. You begin as President of the USA, with the rest of the Saints holding various positions of power, when suddenly an alien called Zimyak invades Earth and beams everyone up into his ship. He then creates a simulation of Earth where everyone is trapped, you wake up in a 1950s America wearing tweed and proceed to freak out, then break out of your prison. You have to release the rest of your crew, end the simulation and try to save Earth.

As you go through the simulation you begin to unlock superpowers such as super sprint and super jump and so on. They sound quite cool, right? They are for about a minute, and then they just take out all of the fun of getting round Steelport – you don’t need to drive or fly, or run down the street butt naked. And I think that’s my problem with this sequel, it’s just not that much fun compared to the previous game.

But this extends to the activities that are spotted around the city, and even to the melee moves that you can do. In 3, they were funny. In 4, they are so ridiculously overpowered that they become effective but really boring to execute. The same goes for all the other powers that you can obtain – fun for a bit, but you are in general so overpowered that there’s no challenge, the only times I died was because I was doing something really stupid like shooting black holes at my own feet. Yes, there is a gun that shoots black holes.

Something as fun as fighting waves of police in 3 becomes merely an annoyance in 4 because you can obliterate a street full of people in one move. The thing I missed the most was the driving – Saints Row has one of the best driving mechanisms I’ve come across, and yet you barely need to use it. I did anyway, but aspects like customizing a car and superpowering it are ignored. In 3 you could spend an hour driving round the city, streaking, taunting people etc and it wouldn’t get boring – in 4 you either do quests or do nothing. Even the collectibles become a right pain in the arse – there are over 1200 ‘clusters’ in the simulation that you can find, do you have any idea how frustrating it is when you only have one left to find?

It’s nice that they haven’t downplayed the sexiness of it all – if you’re a bit of a prude then you should really avoid the game, there are a lot of very small clothes and ridiculously proportioned bodies. You can also romance every single member of your party with varying results, because clearly Volition (the creators) don’t give a crap whether you’re straight, gay, black, white, alien or robot. And that’s the way it should be.

Once the plot gets going and you unlock more superpowers the game gets a lot better and more fun, and I’m interested to see where Saints Row 5 will take us. All in all? It’s pretty fun, and now that it’s only about a tenner in Game it’s worth picking up a copy, but I wouldn’t bother trying to max everything out and getting all of the achievements – just do a quick play through of the main story and then move on to something else. Though do have a play with the Dubstep gun, it’s fun and obliterates pretty much every enemy.

It’s a shame really, considering how long I spent playing 3 – my game time on 4 is only around 23 hours (which sounds a lot but, when compared to my playing time on 3 of 35 hours, actually isn’t). Also, I heard a lot of outrage and controversy over an alleged alien probing scene which was removed in Australia, but it was nowhere to be seen in our game – has it been taken out of all copies of 4? I am disappointed.

On a side note, Borderlands 1.5: The Presequel arrived on Sat and it’s looking pretty good so far. You can even play as Claptrap, if you really really want to.