Image: Deep Silver
Saints Row's cartoonish fun is held back by a messy story and a multitude of technical woes.
After a seven-year absence, the Saints Row franchise is making its comeback with a shiny new reboot, aptly titled Saints Row. This time around, developer Volition is returning to its roots with a far more grounded story that involves a new Boss building the Saints from the ground up in an utterly chaotic crime-infested city called Santa Ileso.
Saints Row has always been a fun action-adventure franchise, churning out open-world riffs on the GTA formula that became considerably more unhinged with every sequel - we defeated Satan in the last one! Unfortunately, this reboot's attempt to win back old fans who might miss its over-the-top cartoonish action is mired by janky visuals, poor sound design and a half-baked plot. It’s still a fun enough romp, just so long as you don’t take it even a little bit seriously.
The Boss is back in town
In Saints Row, you play as the Boss: a young criminal who’s barely scraping by in Santa Ileso by splitting a rent check with three of your closest friends. After you get fired from the Marshall Defense Industries - a private military corporation that holds the city in a death grip - you decide to assemble the Saints, an all-new gang that plans to take over the criminal underworld of Santa Ileso. As you progress through the campaign and earn capital, you’ll be able to set up illegitimate businesses across the city. The more you have, the more money you make. The more money you make, the more resources you have to expand the Saints’ ranks.
Your rise to power isn't immediate, however. Your operation begins with the Boss’ three closest friends: a constantly-shirtless DJ named Kevin, a fiercely loyal mechanic named Neenah and a business-minded strategist named Eli. This group of characters has already proved divisive since the game's reveal, and I can see why. These aren’t your classic mobsters or desperate criminals, they’re quippy young adults scrapping for money and chucking out one-liners at every available opportunity. Their personalities come off abrasive at first, since you’re given very little reason to care about them until much later on. Their peppy, sarcastic personalities blend together like an unfocused collection of Gen Z stereotypes, but a few quests do end up fleshing them out as you progress through the campaign.
Still, there’s a tonal disconnect here that’s hard to ignore. At the start of the game, most of your friends are utterly devoted to separate competing gangs in the city that they consider family, but they have no issue abandoning every single one of them to save the Boss. We have to assume that they do this because they truly care about each other, but they don’t act that much closer than new roommates. All the emotional stakes of this story rely on you falling in love with this gang of walking cartoons, but the group dynamic they share feels inauthentic. I don’t buy them as friends. I barely buy them as people.
One thing I really loved here was the character creator. The Boss is entirely in your hands as far as their appearance and voice goes, with six different voices actors and hundreds of visual options to pick through. I spent more than an hour on the customisation screen alone, just marvelling at all the choices I had to make, from jaw width and lipstick colours, to tattoo shapes and nose height. These choices, including the ability to go topless, aren’t limited by gender - which is really nice. The game also has a ton of accessibility options to be more inclusive to players with visual, hearing and motor disabilities. This is slowly becoming the norm for games, so kudos to Volition for going the extra mile here. You love to see it.
The world of Santa Ileso and its population of dummies
Saints Row takes players to sunny Santa Ileso, a fictional city in the American Southwest whose Las Vegas influences are immediately obvious. During the day, it seems to be blazing hot wherever you go - from the casinos in El Dorado, to the houses in Monte Vista and the cacti-populated deserts surrounding rural Rancho Providencio. Open-world games don't always put a lot of thought into environmental design, but there’s so much to appreciate in the way Volition has fleshed out this city.
The city is split into nine different districts, which means that its missions have lots of visual variety to offer when you’re hopping from one location to the next. An enemy convoy chase in the desert feels like it belongs in a Mad Max movie, while a charity event heist in a swanky upper-class building wouldn’t look out of place in Uncharted. In the city streets, you’ll find monuments and points of interest that give Santa Ileso a sense of history and identity. A lot of open-world games do much less than this and get away with it, but Volition understood that players need to be attracted to this city and believe in its history, before wanting to take control of it.
That being said, Santa Ileso still falls short of immersing players in its world, largely due to its complete lack of life and poor AI. I found myself driving through the city streets way too many times without a single NPC popping up at the side of the street, likely because the game hadn’t loaded them in yet. The empty buildings and storefronts would give off entire blocks the eerie impression of a ghost town even in the heart of the city when I was driving around, but when I got out of a car and walked on foot, people would magically appear to go about their routines. Even then, they behave like robots - spouting one-liners like, “Cryptocurrency isn’t gambling, it’s an investment!” to absolutely no one in particular, or just stand frozen in place like they’d forgotten their lines.
AI is just awful across the board here. NPCs will actually dive in front of your car instead of away from it as you drive past, and barely anyone defends themselves if you steal a car or decide to commit a casual homicide in broad daylight. Enemies are no better - they’ll occasionally duck to avoid your bullets if they’re feeling up to it, but most of them simply stand around and eat headshots like they’re Nerf bullets. Sometimes they’ll duck for cover, and other times they’ll run out at you and pause so you have just enough time to shoot them down. If you have a ranged weapon, they’ll still come at you wielding bats - because why not? That makes total sense to me. Honestly, you’re doing Santa Ileso a favour by taking it over - it’s under terrible management as it is.
It’s bug city over here
Now we get into the stuff that really bothered me in Saints Row. I booted this game up with managed expectations - not expecting the very best in open-world storytelling, just a fun time blowing stuff up. I can forgive the half-baked, messy story campaign because even at its very worst, it delivers all the stylised chaos it’s aiming for. Even with the bar set this low however, the game disappoints with wonky driving physics, awful sound design and bugs aplenty.
Saints Row has the worst sound design I have seen in an open-world game in a very long time. Across the board, from music and dialogue to sound effects, you’ll find huge inconsistencies between what you’re watching on screen and what you’re hearing. Saints Row’s story missions are often big, bombastic setpieces that have you hanging off aircrafts, crashing into trucks and blowing up buildings - but the impact of these sequences completely falls flat with the game’s flat and muddy sound effects. You’ll see an aircraft careening through the sky as the Boss dangles off it, hitting cliffsides and spiralling downwards but what you’ll hear is distant metallic screeching and noticeably missing audio that should accompany the crashes, the gunfire and the failing machinery.
This poor audio work extends to the gunplay, which never feels quite as satisfying or impactful as I’d like, and story cutscenes that feel confusingly devoid of life when they’re not plagued by lip sync issues. Even while driving, I’d notice the car radio volume going up and down seemingly at random. Saints Row has never been a visual showcase either, but the world of Santa Ileso looks so much better during the night. That’s not just because its Las Vegas inspirations come through in colourful neon signs and bustling nightlife, but because daytime is plagued by weird lighting issues that constantly shroud characters in darkness even if they’re standing out in the open sun. I tinkered with my brightness issues non-stop while playing, and could never get the game to look right during the day.
Performance-wise, the game ran fairly well on the PlayStation 5 besides some pop-in - I didn’t see noticeable frame drops while playing at the 60fps setting, and there are some much welcome higher-res settings as well. What really got me were the bugs. These range from small annoyances like visual options (such as subtitle opacity) resetting themselves every time you boot the game up, to more gamebreaking issues that halt story progression. One mission involved the Saints fighting off a group of police, only the police decided to spawn outside of mission bounds where I couldn’t fight them, blocking me from completing the mission even after restarting from a previous checkpoint.
Verdict
Wait for a sale on this one. Saints Row has a lot to keep me from calling it a thoroughly bad game: the world of Santa Ileso has a lot to offer in terms of exploration, and building up a criminal empire from scratch, even in the shallow way this game goes about it, is satisfying enough to keep me coming back for more. I genuinely wanted to see the Saints rule over this city, and the game knows how to cultivate that power fantasy. That, and the endless customisation options - from the Boss themselves, to your vehicles and weapons - will keep you busy for a long time.
That being said, the game suffers from a vast array of technical issues and braindead enemy AI that severely impact its fun factor. The story campaign is a messy thing that plods along at a dull pace, reliant on you grinding out unfun sidequests and activities in the open-world to open up more of the Saints’ criminal ventures and progress. The Boss and their friends will get on your nerves at first, and even after plenty of quests flesh out their backstories, only end up being somewhat tolerable. Saints Row fails to bring the few good ideas it has together cohesively, and I can only recommend it to anyone who wants more GTA-style action in a lesser game.
Saints Row is now available on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC.