Unambitious to a fault, Saints Row doesn’t want to do anything but return to the era of 2010s Open World Games and seemingly set the stage for a brand new group of Saints.
And I’m on board.
Saints Row is a clunky, messily put together open world game with a compelling aesthetic, some interesting mission ideas and characters that are love them or hate them that was designed to fit in a void left in the release schedule by a lack of other open world crime games.
Saints Row (2022) is pretty much the same. And I don’t mean, designed to be the same idea in 2022. I mean it’s literally designed to evoke the feel of early 2010s Open World crime games.
No more Alien Invasions, Superpowers or Presidential decrees. And certainly less going to hell or multiplayer action. Saints Row in 2022 is back to basics for Volition in every way.
Basic mission design, Basic Combat mechanics, Basic open world design. Starting fresh with a new cast of Saints and a new setting.
Volition is under new management under Embracer group and the experiment of Agents of Mayhem firmly in the rearview mirror. Which means Saints Row (2022) is an exercise in setting a stable dependable foundation. A task it accomplishes by starting over. Going back to the open world game style that drew in an audience in the original.
An open world crime game in an American city with a set of opposing gangs to conquer, a stack of wacky crime themed side challenges to complete and a group of friends to help you set up the saints along the way.
It’s a blank slate to work from. And for me, I’m fond of what they’ve written on it. It holds to the one core thing that I adored about the original Saints Row games, that group of larger than life characters coming together.
You come in on a group of friends:
(Whofor Saints Row fans, broadly map to Shaundi, Johnny Gat and Pierce.)
- Kev – Shirtless DJ and Chef with a heart of gold and a talent for mayhem.
- Neenah – The Driver. Confident, unsuffering of fools and knows cars.
- Eli – Business Genius with an eye for numbers and one of my favourite storylines in the game as he introduces the boss to LARP.
I really like these characters. A bunch of kids, all lower level members in different gangs, just trying to make rent and live their best lives.
You know, by committing violent crimes when necessary.
The opening of the game is the Boss and their group of friends violently realising their life is being controlled by their gangs and their jobs. They want out, they want more. And they start building the Saints from there.
But what’s most important is that these people like each other and will put each other first.
Some of the best missions in the game are the ones where you start by hanging out with your friends, trying to do some random errand.
In fact, my one significant criticism of the narrative is that it frankly doesn’t have enough of that fun. These missions with them proceed in a snapshot basis, checking in every so often. Your reward as you do the hard work of establishing the criminal enterprises and building your hold over the city.
Obviously everything ends in murder because that’s the only real mechanic Saints Row can work with, but as it goes along you end up learning more about your crew and what motivates them and why.
It ties into a general issue with how the game delivers narrative, with the Saints Row staple of quick time events drastically underused.
There are multiple scenes that feel like they should have had quick time events in the scripted sections.
There are a few present, and they really are quite fun, but it really feels like more of them could have been added. It’s especially frustrating because there’s an early mission set in your apartment that uses these tools perfectly. The mechanical expression of the Boss’s depression and frustration ends up being hilarious as you try to button press your way through a miserable day.
Volition showed they knew exactly how to use these events and missions but just didn’t have enough of it. But when it’s there, it’s a delight. In Eli’s LARP based storyline in particular, I was Fully ready for yet another LARP storyline to be kind of tedious and more than a little judgy.
Then they hand you a nerf gun, tell you to shoot a bystander and you watch as the custom “death” animation plays.
And a custom takedown animation plays out Complete with called attacks like gut punch, throat rip and arrow to the face.
And then Eli tells you the whole city is in on it, so go wild.
It’s so much effort for such a simple joke that I can’t help but love it.
And it all comes back to the earnestness of your Boss.
Your boss doesn’t fully understand why their friends do what they do. Often they’re a couple of steps out of the loop, only catching up halfway through the mission.
But what ends up being consistently endearing is how little that matters. They’re your friends, and you want want they want.
Even if they are as Psychopathic as any version of the Boss in a Saints Row game before.
Now as is tradition, a significant amount of how much you’ll like the boss comes down to the voice you’ll pick as part of the customisation process. If you like the line delivery, half the battle is won.
Fortunately, as part of an evolution of Saints Row’s best in industry customisation, you can change everything about yourself, including the voice, at any time just by going to your phone/menu at any time outside a mission.
And while there’s a touch of friction in the decision to move everything into types that are then modified by the player, a dedicated user can create some truly weird and wonderful characters.And then share them online, or swap between them at any point in your session.
It’s a feature that in particular would be very handy to have in the game’s co-op mode, theming your bosses as you mess around in the playground of Santo Ileso.
Saints Row (2022) is set in the South Western USA,in Santo Ileso.
This decision to move from an East Coast US City to a South West US City doesn’t quite shake up the formulaic American city in structure. You’ve still got skyscrapers, industrial areas and endless blocks of small scale stores.
But Santo Ileso is not Stilwater, and it’s not Steelport.
There’s a sense of presence in Santo Ileso that I just didn’t find in Steelport, and was only hinted at in Stilwater.
Santo Ileso is your city. Your friends are integrated into the workings of it, they know the traditions and the best locations.
And beyond that, the city feels like it’s got a history beyond just being your playground.
Every district has some historical area to wander round and listen to a number of surprisingly weird historical tour logs which flesh the world out, and cover the unique warped background for this region.
And that distinction also appears in the visual setting which means mesas, mesoamerican design influences and splashes of colour in paint among the browns of the landscape.
The setting also means duststorms and a never-ending low level particle effect that makes the environment feel close and fractious.
This is shown off in in pretty much every night mission, where the lighting engine for the game results in everything having a hazy diffused neon framing.
It also results in absolutely stunning raycast sunsets and sunrises.
Everything in the game feels informed by these visual decisions. The south west setting means latin music, country stations and a lot of off road vehicles. Santo Ileso itself has an old mission in one part of the city, a thinly veiled Las Vegas casino district and a delightful shift in colour in the CBD as the closer you get to the people with money, the more greenery appears in this desert city.
It’s a city that’s fun to navigate and wander around, as traffic accidents are generated ahead of you and world events like bank robberies give you opportunities as you go between missions.
Which is important, as you’ll be spending a lot of time doing so. Main missions are working through the plot lines of your friends, which helpfully mesh with the major threats in the game.
You’re a psychopath, which is fortunately what everyone needs to solve their problems.
The rest of the game are the collectibles and the side missions in the Criminal Enterprises dotted throughout the city’s regions..
The collectibles are an incredibly good version of that gameplay feature. You have a list of collectible decoration for your base you can find. Each is given a brief description of their location, and then you have to use that to find them on the map and get a picture. There’s no hand holding, but it’s not a complete snipe hunt, so it ends up being a fun open world puzzle.
Simple and player driven, you can choose to engage as much as you want.
What’s much less like that are the Criminal Enterprises.
You pay cash to set up a criminal enterprise of some sort. (Insurance Fraud, stealing specific cars using tow cables, etc)
That Criminal Enterprise generates passive income every hour (real time), unlocks specific missions across the map and also five mini encounters in the region of the enterprise.
For every mini encounter you take out, you get better rewards from the enterprise. So it makes sense that you do the mini encounters first, right? Because the boost is both passive and active. So every criminal enterprise becomes a checklist:
Buy the building, complete the five mini challenges (which will normally be three fights, one destruction of a police van and maybe one wave defence mission) and then you can play the proper missions.
Which there can be around a dozen of.
Now in theory, this is fine. Each of the Enterprises are fun in their own way, nice little breaks from the open world. Spreading these out over a 40-60 hour playtime would mean that you could break them up, avoid them becoming stale. Especially with some of the enterprises having more events available than required for collection.
Except, some story missions about the growth of the Saints require you to have completed Criminal Enterprises.
Which means you’ll be spending a lot of the game playing the same type of mission over and over in order to progress.
Which is a problem when many of these missions revolve around some form of murder spree at a set location. Especially when the main reward is getting to play missions in specific locations where you murder lots of people.
Because the core missions are very basic in that sense.
Checkpoints veer between fair and infuriating depending on the mission and there really are minimal mechanics outside of the baseline.
While you will get meaningful skills and abilities throughout the game through level progression, this isn’t reflected in your opponents.
I upgraded all my weapons as part of the store options, but really it just helped chew through enemies faster.
Which is good because the complexity of the game on the base difficulty comes down to throwing more of the three types of enemies at you. Normal Member, Armoured Normal Member or Gang Specialist. Who will increase in numbers throughout the game.
Though it’s worth noting that there is a very granular challenge modifier set of tools for players to engage with.
Pairing that with a health system that rewards close up takedowns with replenished health and you end up in frenetic, chaotic firefights. They never necessarily feel unfair, but equally, they never necessarily feel overly challenging.
Again, unambitious! It provides a perfectly reasonable experience that sets a bar of engagement and never tries to jump over it.
As part of the back to basics focus though, one element that’s seen an actual overhaul is traversal.
Fast travel requires you to visit one of surprisingly few locations, then take a picture to unlock the travel option.
It’s an odd decision, but ends up reinforcing the importance of traversal elsewhere in Santo Ileso.
Easy access to Skyscraper rooftops or slingshots give ample opportunity to make use of the new wingsuit mechanics. Though outside of this, they’re really only focussed on in a few set missions. Which unfortunately means your engagement with them is limited to how much you want to travel to those skyscrapers/launch points. Flying is cool. Walking to a building to fly is less so.
As such, you’ll spend a lot of time driving around. Which is fortunate, because a significant amount of work has gone into this driving model.
Vehicular combat is a big deal in Saints Row. Shooting is still important, and you’ll be able to fire from your window from the off. But if you’re playing a mission, or have a co op partner/AI friend drive, you’ll be able to climb up on the roof and use even bigger guns.
You probably won’t need to though because Saints Row wants you to trade paint. Gone are the very twitchy ragdoll physics which would see you fly through your windshield after a crash.
Now sideswiping and ramming are so important that you’ve got set buttons that allow you to swing your cars nose into anyone chasing to cause a fiery crash.
Chases end up escalating wildly as you ram pursuing cars off the road or into traffic.
It becomes a maelstrom of angry civilians running lights and cops or rival gangs bashing off each other in a very limited space.
In spite of this though, it rarely feels frustrating to be caught up in. Thanks to some well defined drifting mechanics especially, there’s very little chaos in your inputs. Only in the results.
It’s a level of control that’s replicated in the car customisation too. There’s the usual suite of colour options, lighting and mods obviously. But in line with the combat changes above, the biggest updates are the equipment and signature abilities.
The former includes the likes of Nitro, Off Road kits and a towing cable for causing mayhem. The latter is based around accomplishing some minor challenge for each type of car. So sideswipe five cars for example in a hatchback. That then unlocks that type of vehicle’s signature ability. These range from ejector seats to chariot style wheel spikes to a giant cartoon ball and chain.
It ends up being a way of genuinely distinguishing between “your” car and one you can steal off the street. That’s important in a game where it is often faster to just steal a car than wait for yours to be delivered after being destroyed.
Overall though the entire mechanical implentation of vehicles will be very familiar to you.
It’s less a new idea and more a collation of old ones.
Which sums up Saints Row (2022) pretty perfectly. It’s by no means bad. But while I do love the old Saints Row games, this new setting and new cast work for me. I care about their journey to being the new Saints, and the way they get on with each other. I’m hoping that the next game gets to expand. But that it keeps the vibes and art direction that’s made this one so enjoyable.
Because that’s what Saints Row did best of all. It set the standard and built a base to jump from. I just genuinely hope that Volition is able to take the best parts of this game and soar with them.
Saints Row is out now on Xbox Series X/S, Playstation and PC via the Epic Games Store.
(Some Images Courtesy Deep Silver)