Our new Saints Row

 A game about Student Loan- playing the people's tune.

So the Saints Row games have certainly entered a very weird space in the most recent entries, and now even more so for this remake, reboot, thing we have ahead of us. Whilst most remakes are a celebratory time where fans are reminded and drawn to the classic games of yesteryear that they love and yearn for, Saints Row's newest game has sort of placed itself in an adversarial position to those originals games and now it sort of feels a bit odd getting excited using those old games in preparation for this new one. Of course that doesn't go to fully describe the player/game split that has ruptured in the time following the reveal of this remake, but I think it's a touch on why people are finding it so hard to get aboard that ever elusive hype train. What are we even waiting for?  A game that wants to distance itself from everything this series popularised, or which wants reframe all of it under a totally different approach? I genuinely don't know what we should be expecting, and that's more than a little because of heavily mixed messaging and utterly questionable team comments, and thus though I want to be excited for a new Saints Row that isn't going to be continuing the cursed Saints Row 4 plotline, I literally cannot track the path to that excitement. (But I'm still trying)

During the Game Awards we got ourselves a much more sensible gameplay presentation of what this game will look like, which was so much more welcome than that abominable cinematic from the first reveal and it builds upon those snippets of game that we saw during the interview sections of marketing. Is it going to magically bring things back to the gritty street gang aesthetic from Saints Row 1? No- but personally I don't particularly care about that because I think that Saints Row 1 was a mediocre GTA clone and Saints Row 2 was a perfected version of that formula, but that still wouldn't fly in today's world. We've just moved on so much in design meta, in fact I feel like we're reaching a point in the gaming industry where people are growing sick and tired with half assed open world games in general. A lot of Saints Row games probably clock into the quality scale at just above 'half assed', but that doesn't make them any less of the problem with these incessant and ill thought-out genre games.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm looking for this Saints Row remake to actually take a big step in revolutionising itself from it's predecessors, and that means more than just forsaking those previous game's tone in favour of whatever the hell this new game is trying to be. (Funny? Is that what it is? Saints Row has always been super hit or miss in that regard) Key areas of improvement are all easy to label, but unfortunately are the hardest parts of the game to get right. The game world has been terrible ever since we lost Stillwater, base your world on a real city to capture some of that heart and intent to the overall city design, which was totally absent in Steelport. The gameplay has always been floaty, which for a series as action heavy as Saints Row feels like a nigh on crime. And there could be some effort put into exploration beyond late game icon chasing. (Don't be Ubisoft, guys.) Everything else Saints Row does great, we'll just have to see if they've managed to pick up any of that previous slack sufficiently.

The gameplay trailer from the Awards show certainly did have a pizazz to it that I was looking for, but evidently it still hasn't resolved my nagging concerns seeing as how I'm still voicing them. Santo Illeso is very pretty looking in my opinion, although I have noticed that there so far hasn't been a single piece of footage where we see action taking place in a predominately metropolitan part of the city. The desert red-rock aesthetic appears to be everywhere and it takes away from the overpowering and typically domineering atmosphere of a real-life city. What they've captured, oddly, is the aura of a town, basked by the world around it, instead of a city jutting up in stubborn defiance of nature. It's not a look I hate, but it's already making every scene feel samey, and if I can't get out of one environment I've grown bored of in order to spend some time in another: how long will it be before this entire gameworld starts to feel stale?

Gameinformer were kind enough to post some actual mission gameplay for the Saints Row Remake/ Reboot/ Sequel as well, so we can get a sense of what the game is like when the entire screen isn't nauseously throbbing to the beat of an ill-advised backing track. (Yeah I think trailer aesthetic people need to seriously be told to stop more often.) Right away from watching the footage I can tell that something in the gameplay has changed from how Saints Row has played in the past, and it's a change that I'm liking the look of. Driving is the easiest to judge without getting my hands on the thing, and it looks more satisfying and robust to the point where, unless I'm very much mistaken, it could be that resistance and weight will actually exist in this universe! (Starkly different from earlier games.) Of course this clearly isn't exactly Forza level car physics and cars are still bouncy enough for this to remain a shameless action game (actually, I worry that the cars are perhaps a shade too bouncy) but basic foundations look solid for game that at least drives better. 

Gunplay is another area of noticeable improvement, although that's going to be much more a case of "I can tell how good it is until I play it", but I say that I notice some definite improvement with the utmost shock because I was near certain that Volition would leave this part of the game high and dry. Gunplay looks fine right now, with a sort of snap over-the-shoulder perspective introduced in order to fit a slightly more in your face and grounded moveset. Enemies have health bars now, but they don't appear to be garishly large and feels more like a visualisation of enemies about as tough as they were in previous entries. (Which raises the question of why one even needs health bars at all, but I'm guessing the armoured enemies from the Ultor/STAG stand-in faction are going to justify that with robot mecs or something else similarly contrived) The player moves with an agile spped to them and though there doesn't appear to be an inbuilt cover system to the game or any of the other typical trappings of your best third person shooters, I could still imagine a world wherein a big fire fight might actually be a solid and enjoyable experience and not a bullet hell groan fest like in the past. There's even a very rudimentary fist fighting mechanic in the game that I imagine will be misbegotten and a waste of development time as well as a lighting system which is a tad too aggressive for indoor locations, as evidenced in the way that it makes the inside nigh-on blinding. (I wasn't expecting RDR2 level systems in play here, I can deal with some jank.)

With everything that the game has shown itself to be in the marketing material, I'm becoming fairly set on my assessment that the Saints Row Remake is glowing up as a solid b-tier game; and that's totally fine. I feel that somewhere along the way Saints Row of the past got a little too into itself and tried to use pure spectacle to suck all the air out of room from other big names games, (that and tons of shock factor, of course) and thus the games started to come across a little tryhard some of the time. (Not as tryhard as Sunset Overdrive, but you can see in Saints Row sapling that would grow up to become Sunset) So far this iteration seems comfortable in it's skin and what it wants to do, and what it wants is to be a game that'll be fun to kill some time and screw about in. Is it going to revolutionise the industry or reignite the golden age of Saints? Probably not, but as long as it does what it needs to do right, then it doesn't need to blow us away with any of that other stuff.

Although on a personal level all of this does reignite this nagging question of 'do we need this game to exist?' I mean honestly, why does this remake need to even be launched, what are Volition going to say with this game that hasn't been said with past entries? I ask because to be honest, I think I'd rather something with a bit more legs to spread out and be new got worked on. I don't know, I just don't feel a special spark off this game, and certainly can't justify this being the sort of title I'll mark on the calendar and rub my hands waiting for. It just sort of feels like Watch_Dogs without the hacking, but then Saints Row does always seem to have this charm which has filled up that hollow space in past games before, so maybe that intangible and elusive boon will flare up to win this title some points once again. Or this will come out as the incredibly average middle of the road game it seems destined to be. Welcome back to the Row, I guess.