”Who is this for?”

That was the question running through my mind when the Saints Row Reboot (henceforth ‘SRR’) was unveiled. Ostensibly intended to be a ‘more grounded’ Saints Row game, it seemed unsure of whether it was meant to appeal to newer SR fans or the oldies who think everything after 3 (or 2) is abominable. Having been turned off early, I tuned SRR out of my brain and paid it no mind.

…Then I plugged my Xbox back in. Boredom has been overtaking me something fierce, seeing as we’re now in a relative dry period with regards to game releases and everything I care about is a few months out. To my surprise, the person I gameshare with had SRR in their library. Seeing as I’ve only played great games as of late, I figured I’d temper my palate with something irredeemably garbage. Something I can just laugh at and throw on the easy-joke pile with Endwalker, Daemon x Machina, Telltale Games, Arkham Origins and a bunch of other tripe.

I didn’t really get that. Instead I got a game that inadvertently made me reflect on my history with open world games, the open world genre as a whole, and what a ‘Saints Row Game’ even is.

If I had to give you a brief tl;dr so that you can stop the [wordcount] review early, I’d say… This game is the epitome of ‘one step forward, two steps back’. It’s locked in an endless game of twister where its only opponents are its hazy ambitions and the games that came before it. Remember, as of writing it’s currently the most recent big modern-ish open world game, newer than even Cyberpunk 2077. But ultimately its biggest flaw is that it just doesn’t know who it’s meant for.

It demonstrates this in the first five minutes. Immediately upon starting you’re given a vague prologue and then access to the character creator. The creator itself is pretty much fine, having a ton of returning and new options - like prosthetics, which were a welcome addition as someone who likes to play disabled characters when they can.
It’s great, varied, and… They didn’t bother adding colour channels for a lot of gear, so only one section can be recoloured. The game’s only button-up/waistcoat/tie combo only lets you dye the shirt, so it ends up not matching with more vividly coloured outfits. It’s… strange, and really jarring? SR3 and 4 were a downgrade from 2 on the customization front, whereas this is an odd sidestep.
They finally brought back upper body layering (so the player selects a shirt and jacket rather than just a Top Piece) but skipped out on colour channels, sleeve options and even the option to tuck your shirt in. Arguably, the half-measure makes it more frustrating than the straight downgrade of SR3 and 4.

Immediately after making your character, you’re thrown into a banal corridor shooter segment. It’s strange, but not in the ways you’re probably expecting. For starters, it’s one of the rare funny moments in this game, being a run-on bleak sequence of black comedy that wouldn’t be out of place in a GTA spinoff. It didn’t make me laugh, but it was amusing nonetheless.

Unfortunately it’s also a drag, where control is frequently wrestled out of your hands and the camera frequently pans away from the action to focus on something exploding.To say it sets the tone for the rest of the story’s gameplay is putting it lightly.
Rather curiously, though, it doesn’t set the tone for the actual story. Whereas the openings of SR2, 3 and 4 all told you what you were in for… SRR doesn’t. The most you get from the intro is ‘The Boss takes awful jobs to pay rent’, but even with that in mind nothing you actually do in the prologue even matters. The Nahualli befriends and backstabs you later yet your role in imprisoning him here doesn’t play into it. Gwen disappears from the plot after this mini-arc is over, and only appears in a side mission.

Immediately after, the player is introduced to the Boss’ best friends for life: Neenah, Eli and Kev. It’s instantly apparent after a few minutes with them that they’re amalgamations of previous characters (Shaundi, Pierce, Johnny Gat) but in a way that distinctly feels as though they were sanded down to be palatable to someone’s mother. These characters aren’t really what anyone would think of when asked to conjure up an image of ‘criminal’. They’re decent people - to an extent - and immediately they’re made likeable and human.

And… I think them being human actually makes them more unsettling than SR1-4’s wisecracking murderbots.

When Watch_Dogs 2 came out, a pretty common criticism was that the cast were likeable but Marcus seemed sociopathic if the player didn’t play non-lethally. Before that, GTAV received mild criticism for how strange the narrative feels if they choose to play Michael and Franklin as unrepentant murderers. Before that, people were pointing out how uncomfortable it is to have Nathan Drake and company be so happy and snarky after slaughtering enough people to fill out a cruise liner. The overarching theme being: “It’s unsettling to have characters just shrug off insane amounts of mass murder”.

I would use the term ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ here, but 1) it’s not appropriate, actually and 2) that term was spawned from someone misunderstanding Bioshock 1, it’d be unfortunately fitting to use it here. There is no dissonance because the gang’s penchant for murder, apathy towards collateral damage and willingness to do things like destroy the environment are part of the narrative. They’re chummy and friendly and likeable, sure! They also by and large view human life as a statistic and are purely emotion-driven.

The disconnect is strange, and I actually came away finding them more uncomfortable than the cast from the past games. It’s not helped by the gang being comparatively static, I guess? There’s no development here, individually or collectively. They end the way they started. Which is a little jarring, I will admit, because the game’s story proceeds as if they did have development, but we’ll talk about that when I get to the finale.

For now though… God, it’s a bad sign when even the cast are making me ask ‘Who is this for?’, isn’t it? They feel like a corporate idea of a ‘hip and trendy’ cast which, as we saw during the pre-release, turned off most older SR fans. Except… They are quantifiably the kind of sociopathic impulse-driven maniacs that would fit in with SR3, even if they are a little underbaked. I initially thought they wanted to have more GTA-esque characters, but the complete lack of interpersonal strife and even arguments torpedoes that.

Don’t get me wrong, part of me likes the new cast, but that’s moreso in spite of the writing than because of it. In particular, I really like Kevin for being a masculine himbo character whose bisexuality is only played for laughs in very benign, almost endearing ways…

Fuck. Alright. Okay.

Even if I cut this review short and end it early, I have to talk about the humour. More than the gameplay or the story or the mechanics or the cast, it’s the humour that confuses me.

This game really wants to be funny, and unlike the other SR games it has trouble nailing a particular style of comedy, because it goes for… All of them. Contemporary humor, political satire, lol-so-random funnies (shotgun chimp? seriously?), overly referential, punching down… This game tries to be funny in every single way imaginable and the end result is that it rarely is actually funny. Every now and then it just tells a straight joke and ends up being actually amusing - like getting fired as an ‘unlock’ - but then it pivots into a mean spirited jab at furries, or a boring and tired jab at bigots, or mocking activists, or mocking-

Hmm. Yeah. SRR mocks a lot of things. Like half the humour, regardless of flavour, is mockery. This game is overly referential and overly mean in ways that were gauche when Saints Row 4 came out a decade ago.
In a way, it feels like the only way in which SRR lives up to the shadow of GTAV it lives in, seeing as that game is also an irony-poisoned wasteland with mostly flat characters and a serious downgrade compared to the games it came after. Of particular note is the Dustmoot chain of missions, which seems to exist only to make hamfisted post-apocalyptic media shoutouts and spitefully poke fun at LARPers. It reads like the worst of Doug Walker’s Nostalgia Critic back catalogue.
Once again falling back to ‘who is this for?’, I also feel the need to point out that this game contains a number of jokes that boil down to ‘HAHA SOCIAL MEDIA IS STUPID ZOOMERS ARE STUPID’. It’s really crass and childish, like they’re aimed at an audience who never would’ve played SR to begin with.

I would be kinder to this if the entire game didn’t feel like it was afraid of saying anything or standing out. Its mockery doesn’t feel sincere or even meaningful, just a reflex reaction to something the writers don’t get.

And what better avenue to explore this game’s fear of standing out than the gameplay?

If you’ve played any open world game since 2008, you’ve probably played SRR. If you’ve played lots of them, you’ve definitely played SRR. The game borrows elements from pretty much every major open world title over the last few years. It has a wingsuit and roof riding like Just Cause, it has side swiping and vehicle combat like Mad Max, it has command abilities using a meter like Agents of Mayhem (or any anime fighter released in the last decade), cool glory kills like Yakuza or Doom and it has shooting.
It’s very transparently trying to appeal to as many open world fans at once, and as you might’ve predicted halfway through that paragraph, I don’t think it succeeds. Just to go down the list:

The wingsuit handles strangely and they haven’t bothered to give it the momentum control that other games with wingsuits needed, plus using it isn’t very intuitive given how clunky roof riding is and the general lack of spots to wingsuit from. This game’s map is very flat, after all.
Vehicle combat feels like an afterthought. The player’s vehicles do so much damage that everything else is tantamount to a metal egg waiting to get cracked. While car handling is much improved from its predecessors, the physics engine is a little overzealous and it’s prone to sending you careening into the sky (or worse, into water) when you meet a slight incline.
Skills are… Weak, they’re weak. The only good one is - tellingly - the very first one, which is a cheap command grab that does huge damage in an AoE, makes you invincible for the duration of the animation. The rest are superficial at best. Shooting your opponent in the face will do better damage.
The takedowns are just straight up bad. They’re a very obvious rip from DOOM 2016 (right down to giving you health and ammo on usage) but they go on far too long and on higher difficulties you don’t actually get enough back from doing them to justify sitting through an animation that can potentially go on for half a minute.
While the shooting is an upgrade from previous games, it’s actually marred by the enemies you fight. They oscillate between squishy and bullet spongy seemingly at random, and a lot of weapons don’t actually do enough damage to make fighting the spongier enemies less painful. You can upgrade them, but it does little to alleviate the issue. That the shooting itself is still a bit flaccid and unsatisfying doesn’t help.

More than anything, though, the game just feels dated in both gameplay and humor. My main thought while playing it was ‘Huh, this feels like it’s stuck in GTAV’s shadow’. Which would’ve been fine ten years ago when GTAV was current, but 2013 was a long time ago. If it’d come out back then I could’ve easily declared ‘Oh yeah, this is clearly trying to be more GTAV’, but now I’m not so sure. It feels trapped, both by GTAV and its identity crisis.

Before talking about the story from a narrative point of view, I need to say a few things on the gameplay front.

Back in the 2010s, singleplayer gaming ran into a pretty major problem: Setpiece addiction. Unwilling to let any mission be forgettable, every mission devolved into a handholding setpiece that was often scored with licensed music or some other ‘hype song’. It was cute the first few times, but by 2012 it’d become exhausting. The setpieces often took priority over anything else - including character writing - and by the time they grew out of fashion, everyone was tired of them. Too much of a good thing, and all.

SRR feels like going back in time on that front. Way back, to the days where every game wanted to be Uncharted. Pretty much every mission goes off the rails at some point, dragging you into a boring murderfest or giving you a front row seat to a corridor setpiece that would’ve been considered dated in 2012. This is something the other games in the series - and of course, GTA - managed to avoid, often devoting smaller missions to character building. Sure they were ‘filler’, but the game benefited from them.

Here? It’s all action all the time, and by the endgame I was debating turning down the difficulty just so I could get it over with. I said there were a lot of setpieces, yeah, but they’re hardly good ones. They boil down to ‘kill a lot of guys while licensed music plays’. It’s very Marvel in all the worst ways, and at times it feels as though they’re trying too hard to aspire to the glory days of SR3. As if they have no greater goal than to make people feel the same emotions that they did when Power played… In 2011.

I’ve mentioned SR3 a lot, because this game does read like an attempt to recapture those glory days. Would you believe me if I told you that, by all accounts, the devs were seeking to return to the days of SR2? Speaking to Eurogamer, one of the developers said:

“[Saints Row 4 is] so far beyond the realms of reality. Where do you possibly go from there? So you've got to go back to your roots. The only place to go when you've gone that far is to pull it back in.”

Other interviews make a point to reference Volition’s desire to return to the ‘mix of drama and comedy’ that was present in SR2. All throughout the pre-release, this is their guiding star: “We’re going back.”

And they sure did. I just don’t know what they went back to.

The story, perhaps more than anything, is very emblematic of this uncertainty. Very immediately, it falls into the SR3 format: Get missions by phone, here are 3 very big bad factions to be afraid of, here’s a 4th wildcard for near the end. It’s very painfully derivative, to the point where it recycles a lot of plot points from SR3 - including one of the main threats getting unceremoniously offed in the middle of the game!

Unlike 3, though, the opening has a markedly different tone. Rather than a group of sociopathic murderers who ‘sold out’ and got betrayed, the nu-Saints are college graduates willing to do whacky things to pay off their exorbitant student loan and make rent. It’s a very grounded beginning that ultimately just makes it more disappointing when the story falls back on ludicrous action setpieces and more murder.

Yet… I don’t know, there are moments when it feels as though SRR crosses into a reality where it was more like SR2. Early in the game, you disrupt a convoy formed by Los Panteros and piss off their leader, causing a rising series of escalations that culminate in the leader destroying Neenah’s beloved car and triggering a rampage of revenge.
If you’ve played SR2, you might be getting deja vu. If you haven’t: The Boss in SR2 pisses off Maero of the Brotherhood and it triggers a string of brutal escalations that culminate in cruel executions and all out warfare.
The mini-arc with the Panteros is very clearly trying to allude to this. The gang even share a ton of visual similarities with the Brotherhood, have the same palette, drive the same vehicles and their leader is even a Big Dude who isn’t keen on reason. It wants to be the new Brotherhood arc, and it simply isn’t. There’s no meat to any of the escalations, and the plot being a straight line means that the Panteros are an afterthought. They’re even dispatched abruptly during an otherwise unrelated mission by a character who has no stake in the conflict. That the Boss lampshades this does not make it less confounding.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Even before that, during the intro missions, an allusion is made to conflict between the gang stemming from their initial allegiances to the main three factions but it amounts to nothing. It’s there to make a joke about the ‘roommate code’, and then the Saints are formed about a mission or two later.

Even worse, the ending seems to have been written with this hypothetical alternative story in mind. Later on in the story, the Boss recruits the Nahualli (every single slightly concerning Dangerous Hispanic trope in one) despite the apprehension of their friends. Even though they attempt to befriend him, the Nahualli betrays them and stabs them in the gut. What follows is a hallucination sequence where the Boss alludes to having ‘lost something along the way’, and they’re then condemned by hallucinations of their allies for going too far in the morality swimming pool, being told that the Nahualli stabbing them is a comeuppance for their actions. In the final confrontation, the Nahualli is brought down by the power of friendship, with the Boss declaring “They don’t need me, I need them”.

None of this has any relevance to what comes before. It is grotesquely out of place with the rest of the game.

No lip service is paid to the Boss’ allegedly decaying morality. In fact, they arguably become a better person after founding the Saints given that they make it a point to give their gang members salaries and pension plans. All of their victims are people who unambiguously deserve it and routinely incite their ire. The Saints themselves don’t even truly escalate the way they did in prior games - especially 2, which the developers purport to be inspired by. The character arcs in this game are a straight horizontal line.
Most importantly, the sudden ‘power of friendship’ reference truly comes out of nowhere and is demonstrably false. Besides the Boss, the Saints are frequently damsel’d and require the Boss to bail them out. Their suggestions that aren’t ‘kill things’ often fall on deaf ears and the Boss ignoring them is vindicated by their wanton murder being the correct choice in almost literally every situation bar one - a situation which is not resolved by a member of the Saints, by the way.

It is a strange, flat and headscratching story. Not difficult to understand textually, but utterly bewildering in a meta context. It is at once SR2, SR3, and GTAV in the same game. Even as I type this, 3.3k words into a review, I don’t have a clue as to what the actual point is.

An answer can perhaps be found in the real world.

SRR often has the Saints declare that they’re ‘here to stay’ and that they’re not a fad or a ‘flash in the pan. Outside of the game, it was clear from the onset that Volition saw this as their big comeback. Their parent company gave them as much money, time and space as they wanted and the game was allegedly cooking for quite some time. Pre-release, numerous people involved were publicly confident that this would be it, that Saints Row would be BACK. One of the last things IdolNinja ever publicly said before his death was:

”Our new Saints Row game is absolutely going to blow the roof off. I am beyond proud to have been a part of bringing it to life.”

Morale was high. These people were clearly confident that Saints Row would be a household name again. And yet, the parent company all but said that SRR was never going to give them a good return on investment. It failed to meet expectations and it only took a few months before Embracer Group pulled them away from Deep Silver and threw them at Gearbox. To this day, they’re still too ashamed to post sales figures.

I don’t think I’m wrong in saying that SRR was meant to be the resurgence of the entire franchise. In retrospect, it touches on a lot of the same beats that SR1 did and it’s more digestible if viewed as the start of a new series rather than a standalone reboot. It wasn’t just going to be ‘a new Saints Row’, it was going to start a new Saints Row.

And it failed.

While writing this, I flicked through my library and came face to face with Crash Bandicoot 4. A game that ignored everything after 3 and explicitly aimed to design itself as “a sequel to Crash 3” rather than just a Crash game. In many ways, I feel this sort of explains why SRR is the way it is. They evidently wanted to make the reboot a spiritual sequel to SR2 but failed to realise that 2008 was 14 years prior to SRR’s release and the game itself came out a decade after SR’s peak in popularity.
If this game came out in 2008, it’d probably be viewed more positively, but it’s 2023. Just Cause, Mad Max, another GTA, Cyberpunk 2077, Crackdown, Prototype, Ghost Recon Wildlands… There have been so many better and more engaging open world games in the intervening decade that SRR was never going to be exceptional even if it did manage to be a perfect recreation of SR2.

Sometimes I feel like being kinder to the game. The deck was stacked against it and the SR fanbase is so polarized as it is that it was never gonna unify them. There simply isn’t a world in which this game succeeded without being a radically different one.

But…

In 2007 I got my first Xbox 360, and with it a handful of games. Among them was a little game called Saints Row 1. It was a bit of a janky mess, lacking direction beyond “be a GTA clone” and having an oddly paced story with a weird betrayal ending. Despite this, I liked it and could forgive it. It didn’t feel bad to shoot things up and I liked the characters in spite of everything, plus very rarely it was genuinely funny. I could even forgive the bugs, the pacing and shallow gameplay.

However, it had this minigame called Insurance Fraud where the player had to rack up points by hurling themselves in front of cars. On paper it was fine but it was subject to numerous issues: The traffic controller sometimes failed to spawn appropriate amounts of vehicles. The physics were prone to bugging out and failing to launch you. Collision on ragdolls was wonky and oftentimes getting hit at 60mph lead to no points. Ultimately the entire mode was decided by RNG.

It’s 2023 now. SRR has come out and been out for nearly a year now.

It’s a janky mess, lacking direction, and it has an oddly paced story with a weird betrayal ending.

Now? I don’t know if I can give it a pass despite the endearing characters, the rare moments where shooting is fun, and the odd moment of genuine humor. I don’t know if I can forgive the bugs, the shallow gameplay or the pacing.

It’s been 17 years and Insurance Fraud still has the exact same issues.

Says everything, don’t it?