So... Saints Row...

Haters gonna hate

Final Destination is a movie franchise run under the premise that a destined death fortold by fate gets waylaid by those destined to die getting a premature vision of their demise through some unexplored phenomena. Try as they might to save themselves, and occasionally even avoid the headsman's axe, there's no escaping the fate laid out for them. I'd like to think of what became of the Saints Row Reboot as a 'Final Destination' moment; where so many of the world had that vision of exactly what this game was before it launched,  and try as they might to warn the rest of the world that couldn't quite make it out, their troubles were written in the unchanging stars. From the moment they revealed the bold new direction of Saints Row; it seem Volition were destined for destruction, although just how far the final product ended up going off the rails is a damn surprise, even to me.

Remember that this is a game that was delayed nearly half a year into 2022 in order to make sure that the thing ran right. Well it seems we might be having a bit of a Cyberpunk 2077 flashback here because despite all that extra development time we have a shockingly broken game being sold for full retail price in the current market of gaming. I thought there were basic standards that games had to meet in order to be listed on storefronts; but apparently not considering that the Epic Games version of the game launched with a bug where the Exe sometimes doesn't load the game and you need to brute force try the launch again and again until the game accidentally lets you through. All things considered, that's probably a pretty dire warning as to what you can expect from Saints Row as a whole. (Even the game itself is trying its best to ward you away; maybe we should have heeded it's advice.)

And the bugs don't end there. You have glitching out character models, weird camera lock bugs where sometimes vehicles jolt the camera in super zoom until you get out the car and get back in again, civilian AI seems to have two modes: routine and run away, the latter of which sometimes has them run directly into walls or into the thing they're supposed to be fleeing from, there's at least one captured example of a UI text box with placeholder text, some reports of UI disappearing altogether for periods of time, NPCs that disappear into thin air right in front of you, traffic that pops into existence right in front of you, and just about everything short of CTDs. That doesn't mean there aren't any Crash to Desktop issues; I've just not heard about any of them yet. All of this evidences a game that, rather obviously, was not ready to drop at prime time and to such a degree that there's no way the team were not aware of this when they put it up on storefronts for that laughable price-tag. And it all should have been frighteningly obvious to whatever board was certifying gold status for the game. Maybe Volition pulled the old "Whoops, we accidentally sent you a month's old build" to get around scrutiny. (Funny how often devs screw up build versions that you'd think would be clearly labelled. We need to set up some sort of industry standard for this stuff.)

But of course, those are just the barriers to getting into the content that Saints Row Rebooted has to offer; but what about if you're mister 'lucky' himself, the man-with-the-plan, what if you have a flawless play session? Well... then you get enjoy one of the most dated, lacklustre, empty, and cringe-inducing open world games on offer yet. You experience that game that Saints Row 4 was shaping up to be, before the decision was made to scrap the direction the franchiser was headed and just do nonsensical space/super hero crap instead. Only even then, at least the series would have some semblance of the Saints Row charm to fall back on, for those that still get a kick out of the same things that Saints Row writers do. (I realised they were a bit beyond my generation when 4 threw a cameo from Roddy Piper into the game and just expected me to know who that was.) The name game is, quite simply, just bland. But if you're into bland, and judging by the copium IVs that half of the Saints Row Reddit are on that is a common desire for gamers today, then Volition have that milquetoast, vanilla flavoured, store brand, open world- just waiting for your purchase. 

It's not just the fact that Saints Row has the ingenious idea of forcing it's side activity content into the main narrative progression so that you never have that 'go out and do your own thing' feeling you got back in Saints Row 2 where they told you to just go out and make some money and just left you to your own devices. Nor is it really the fact that even after all of these years the Volition team haven't had a single damn epiphany about a game-mode to add to the standard list. You've got 'Insurance Fraud', exactly as it's always been, bounties, bodyguard, chop shop (only with the whole car collection being a specific mission so that you don't have it be a metagame in usual play like GTA figured out is a more engaging way to do it since Vice City.) It's really the lack of even casual ways to interact with the world around you beside driving over dull and brain dead pedestrians. Why is this game even an open world? How can it justify that effort? It can't.

And beneath it all is this utterly bizarre sense that Saints Row is trying to 'clean up it's act' and become 'distance themselves from their problematic past'. What is meant by this is that the Volition developers made steps to try and erase the accusations of deeply offensive parts of Saints Rows past such as "homophobia, racism and sexual violence against women". And yes, you may have noticed how that list sounds like a questionable line-up of accusations if you've ever actually played those old games, and yes, I did steal that list off of 'DenOfGeek'. The truth is that Saints Row built itself off the ideals of irreverence in a very crude fashion telling jokes that appealed to shock factor above everything else, which made some of them more more flashy and prone to aging badly than more clever formed jokes might have. You can choose to try and twist this into some deeply offensive past to characterise a past of vicitmising that Saints Row had never been accused of in the moment, but that would be a little bad faith and an aggressive damnation of fans who charm in that silly 'chuck it all at the wall and see what sticks' approach.

The problem is that the Saints Row Reboot also falls for this bad faith assessment and aggressively tries to distance itself from the free-spirited, hope this shocking joke gets a laugh, past; whilst trying to slide itself into what feels like a watered down version of that exact same style of game making one wonder what the hell the team even wanted in the first place. For example, they've removed jokes like the car shop being called 'Rim Jobs', or the burger shop being called 'Freckle Bitches'. Two jokes that are literally only offensive to those who are sensitive to rude words, and Saints Row Reboot contains one mandatory section at the beginning where the player character swears for two minutes straight during a drive home. It's this tonal dissonance that alienates old fans and then fails to recapture them with a half hearted 'do-over' attempt that just feels pathetic and non-committal. Like slapping someone and telling them they're a vile scumbag because you two used to joke back in highschool, and then telling them half-forgotten badly told knock-off versions of those same old jokes desperately hoping they'll find them funny and be your friend again. That is the reason that even hardcore fans can't look past the bad writing or substandard gameplay like they used to. (Although to be fair, the fact that the gameplay literally hasn't changed since Saints Row 3 doesn't help their case much either.)

Dated, is the term throne around again and again but it's really just a part of a fascinatingly flawed whole. The game is broken and dated in a way that repels potential new fans, charmless and dismissive in a way that rejects old fans, and uninspired and bland in a way that utterly precludes all illusions of possible respect you might have for it. Some stragglers still definitely lift up their head and declare "I'm having fun with it" or, increadibly, "Don't knock it until you've played it!" To which I say, try playing literally any other game of it's genre or even previous games of the same series and you'll find your expectations of what a fun-time can be will be vastly expanded, and, the point of reviews is to be able to make informed decisions without wasting your money. No one should have to waste $60 to realise a game isn't worth that money. Plain and simply, Volition pooped the bed, and after a colossal screw up this bad, I can't possible imagine any publisher giving them the funding to attack this franchise again. So for the foreseeable future, Saints Row is dead. Killed in most pathetic and bland manner possible.