Review: Saints Row (Xbox One)

I don’t know how else to start this other than by saying that I’ve been a Saints Row fan since the second game. Saints Row 2, The Third and IV were some of my favorite games growing up. And while I’ll admit I never got around to playing the first one, the series as a whole holds a very special place in my gamer heart.

Why am I telling you this? Because what I’m about to say next is something I hoped to never have to say. The new reboot of Saints Row is, quite frankly, not very good.

Prior to giving the game a spin, I tried my utmost to refrain from going in with any bias. Yes, I saw the mediocre reviews, but reviewing is also my job, so I went in giddy to meet our new iterations of The Saints. However, coming out of the game, I feel mostly robbed.

That isn’t to say the game doesn’t have its strong points; it certainly does! Parts of the game definitely bring me back to my teenage days of causing needless carnage throughout the streets of Stilwater in SR2. However, for the most part, this game is a hollow corporate shell of Saints Row—ironic given the narrative’s frequent, uncharacteristically preachy, jabs at capitalism.

However, before I go too deep into rambling, I want to break down everything that makes up the criminal venture of Saints Row.

The citizens of Santo Ileso probably never heard of Isaac Newton

I know graphics aren’t everything, but there comes a certain level of expectation when you go into a big-budget AAA game in 2022. While I cannot speak on behalf of Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5 players, even a game on Xbox One has no excuse to look like it came off the 360.

To be fair, certain elements of the game do look pretty good. The main cast of characters, specifically, all feature great detailing to make them unique. On the other hand, NPCs look generally muddy and uninspired.

Visually, how good the game looks also tends to depend on lighting. Daylight scenarios look fine, and sunrise/sunset usually looks good. However, sometimes facing the sun overexposes everything to hideous results. Additionally, night-time in Saints Row also looks pretty ugly. You can have high brightness that cheapens the overall look, or you can have darkness that looks unnatural and flat-out ugly. Neither is very great.

However, the actual physics are probably the worst technical offender of them all. No vehicle in the game feels like it has any weight to it. You can just slam, all willy-nilly, into darn near anything without slowing down. It seems like Volition may have taken some questionable inspiration from Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

There were countless times I was playing where I slammed into other vehicles just to watch them go flying off into the air into a giant ball of explosion. In addition, you’ll have loads of dumb fun driving over fire hydrants, which launch you into the air, even if you’re behind the wheel of a semi-truck.

Okay, the physics are bad. But to be fair, Saints Row was never celebrated for its realism. After all, you played as the U.S. president, got superpowers and fought aliens in the fourth game. So, you can have fun exploiting the absurdly broken physics in the new game, even if it at times does pretend to be more grounded.

Taking things back to basics

To sum up my thoughts of the story, it works (mostly) for what it is. The plot follows four young roommates, struggling to financially survive in modern America. When we first meet our future criminal entrepreneurs, most of them already found work with other gangs.

We have Neenah, a skilled mechanic and driver for Los Panteros. Then, we have Kev, who serves the neon-clad anarchists The Idols. Finally, we have you (The Boss) who begins working for the para-military group Marshall. Oh yeah, there’s Eli, but he really isn’t part of anything illegal, at least at the start of the game.

Needless to say, having three roommates who are all members of three different enemy factions leads to trouble. That trouble takes hold after a three-way battle between all three gangs that leaves The Boss fired from their security position.

From there, Neenah and Kev both also abandoned their gangs, and along with you and Eli, take charge to form your own. As you and your rag-tag group of allies begin building a criminal empire, you’ll spend the rest of the game slowly chipping away and grinding to take control of Santo Ileso’s different territories to become an enteprise.

When your mom tells you that you have The Saints at home

Like I said, the overall story is nothing original, but it doesn’t really need to reinvent the wheel to be fun. It truly does try to be more in line with early Saints Row games before the series jumped the proverbial shark. However, while the plot generally works, the characters don’t.

I’m not going to be like other Saints Row fans. And you won’t see me simply complain that the likes of Johnny Gat, Pierce and Shaundi are gone. I love them too, but this is a reboot. It makes sense to treat players to a brand new cast of characters with a new origin story. Therefore, I went in excited to meet our new millennial gangsters.

Yet, as much as I wanted to like our new characters, they just felt… off. Let’s just say, I can’t take someone seriously as a criminal if they’re more worried about carbon emissions than not getting caught after robbing a business. Throughout the whole game, none of the main characters seemed like a real gangster. The closest I came to anyone seeming believable in their roles is The Boss, as I customized him to look as close to Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules from Pulp Fiction as I could.

The point remains, however, that the characters’ nonchalant mentality towards murder felt entirely out of place with their otherwise sensitive personalities. Take Kev, for instance. On one hand, he’ll go out guns blazing with the rest of The Saints. On the other hand, his favorite hobbies include cooking gourmet meals and being a DJ for raves.

In addition, the humor and charm that made Saints Row, Saints Row is gone as well. Lame jokes like, “Dinner and a show,” replace the dark satire that marked the original games. Put it like this, Saints Row can feel like a Saints Row game, only if you put it on mute and skip the cutscenes.

Boom shaka-laka!

Okay, I ragged on the game enough. I want to talk about some of the good elements of Saints Row. Most notably, I had a blast with the combat. Overall, I think the new game’s combat mechanics are most reminiscent of Saints Row: The Third, which definitely is not a bad thing. Gunplay is repetitive, yet I still find it mindlessly fun to mow through waves of enemies during missions.

One new feature in this iteration, however, is the takedown mechanic. As you blast through enemies in the game’s many, many combat encounters, a special meter fills up. When it displays the Saints logo, you can perform a special takedown. There are a few variations that each have some cool looking animations. It’s all the over-the-top b-movie action you can hope for in a Saints game.

That isn’t to say combat doesn’t have its problems. Enemies with double-health bars can get annoying pretty quick, for instance. You cannot perform a takedown maneuver on them until you deplete the first health bar, and they can become annoying bullet sponges pretty fast. Another annoying enemy type is the Idol with the spinning fan-boomerang thing. While that thing’s spinning, good luck. You can’t hit them until they finally decide to throw it, so be patient and make sure to dodge.

Enemy AI can also be pretty dumb in Saints Row. The amount of enemies that just charge right into gunfire while carrying a melee weapon is absurd. And when they’re of the strong variety, they will just eat bullets as they make their way toward you.

Additionally, some enemies will just pause fighting out of nowhere to take selfies. Why? I’ll be in the middle of a gunfight, and an Idol will just whip out their phone and pose for a picture as I blast multiple rounds into their cranium. Also, during takedowns, enemies will just stand around and watch, patiently waiting their turn during the animation instead of jumping in to attack. Isn’t that just polite of them?

Driving me crazy!

Saints Row games never really had the smoothest driving mechanics, but as products of their time, I hold them to a different standard. On the other hand, this year’s reboot should have seen improvements. After all, the last game in the franchise came out nine years ago. With that large of a gap in between entries, you would think Volition could modernize the driving.

Earlier, I already mentioned the ridiculous crash physics you’ll experience while in a car, so I’ll move on from that. However, one of the main reasons you’ll experience such frequent explosions and collisions with other vehicles is because of the stiff steering. Essentially, the only way to really make turns at all is to utilize the drift mechanic, which can also get extremely janky and send your vehicle smashing into walls.

There’s also another driving mechanic you can have fun struggling to make use of in high-speed chases: the side-swipe. When you execute it right, you’ll witness the satisfying bliss of watching a pursuing car launch 50 feet into the air in an insane explosion. However, more often, you’ll just set yourself up to go way off course and crash into things.

Prepare for non-stop action!

Do you love blowing things up while riding on the roof of a car? Good, then you’ll love the main missions in Saints Row! Throughout the game, there are some notable story missions that stand out, such as one where you drive a tank across a train. Another standout mission happens fairly early on in the campaign when you get to drive a bulldozer through a construction site to get access to the church that becomes Saints HQ.

However, most of the missions are your standard shoot the enemies, drive away, and shoot the pursuing enemies from the car roof. While this can be repetitive and forgettable, I think the mindless nature of combat makes it fun enough to kill time in short spurts. Really, the gameplay here doesn’t break any new ground, but for a third-person shooter, there are a lot worse you can choose from.

A criminal grind

Whenever you aren’t shooting up Santo Ileso’s other gangs and causing massive explosions in the story missions, you’ll spend a lot of time pursuing criminal ventures. The new Saints Row is packed full of side content, so you’ll definitely have plenty to do.

Early on, you are introduced to side hustles. These are various missions you can take on in the city’s different districts. In total, there are five types of side hustles, with each having multiple instances.

One of the side hustles, @TCHA, sees you going to a shop or restaurant to leave a bad review. This leads into you taking on a rival gang that shows up in retaliation. Other side hustles involve transporting vehicles and items via a helicopter, driving someone to a drop off while avoiding obstacles like police, and jumping from building to building via wingsuit to destroy satellites. In addition, if you want more car-riding action, you can play the Riding Shotgun missions.

Apart from the side hustles, you’ll also unlock other criminal adventures once you establish base at the church. Using a map, you can purchase different properties, which will allow you to complete more missions to build your empire. Some are obviously better than others. For instance, launching yourself from car-to-car and ragdolling around in Insurance Fraud is plenty more amusing than the tedious Toxic Waste missions.

However, one problem with the criminal ventures is that they can often feel extremely chore-like and tedious. Grinding to make enough cash to purchase the startup is a grind in itself. But some of the hustles, like the aforementioned waste disposal, which sees you driving around waste barrels in hopes of not going to slow or crashing, are very grindy.

Glitches galore

Would you believe me if I told you that this massive AAA open-world game was released as an unpolished mess of bugs? Who am I kidding? That’s pretty much all games at this point. Don’t worry, there will always be post-launch updates to fix that.

Well, either way, let’s talk about some of the glitches I encountered on my playthrough. Starting things off, we have the buggy AI and bizarre animations. As I talked about earlier, both enemy and friendly AI are extremely dumb. In large groups of people fighting, you’ll notice a lot of “mashing” together, as opposed to polished animations. Other times, you’ll see enemies just kind of standing there, twitching as if they’re stuck and are about to phase out of the game.

Unfortunately, the issue of phasing out of the game is common. I encountered numerous instances of NPCs clipping out of the world. At one point, the woman giving me the first @TCHA mission just disappeared into thin air immediately following the cutscene.

The worst offenders for bugs, however, are the instances where the entire game crashes. This happened to me twice during my playthrough, most frustratingly during a heated firefight in an early story mission.

Although, the second time my game crashed is by far the more bizarre instance. At one point, I simply stepped out of my car to find myself falling through the ground and clipping out of the entire game world. Seriously, did anyone beta test this?

Concluding thoughts

Overall, to say I’m disappointed in Saints Row would be an understatement. From the cringe-inducing dialogue that makes it hard to take the Saints seriously as a criminal enterprise to the unpolished mechanics and glitch-ridden gameplay, the whole game feels like what would happen if you ordered Saints Row on Wish. As a longtime Saints fan, I really wanted to like this game, but it ultimately just doesn’t deliver.

It isn’t all bad. I do think the character creation tools are some of the best in franchise history. There is a lot of depth in constructing your character and tweaking all of their physical attributes.

And I also think the combat, while pretty cut-and-paste from previous games, is still fun. I think the amount of enemies (even without posing much of a challenge) makes for some fun, mindless gunplay. Additionally, I like the animations you get while performing takedowns, even if they sometimes bug out. However, it’s these things that make it still somewhat feel like you’re playing a Saints Row game. And for that, I can forgive its unpolish.

However, it lacks the personality and charm established from the series. That’s okay to an extent. It’s a reboot, and everything is starting fresh. However, of all the new directions they could have chose, they went in a route that makes the game lose all sense of identity in the process. I truly hope Deep Silver and Volition can make improvements if we ever get another Saints Row game in the future.

Saints Row is available now for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC via The Epic Games Store.