Review: Saints Row IV

Saints Row IV is a sandbox shooter for the Mac, PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. It was developed by Volition and published by Deep Silver, following their acquisition of the Saints Row franchise after Volition’s bankruptcy.

 

A normal story mission for Saints Row IV.

President of the United States and leader of the Third Street Saints “The Boss” is abducted by the alien Zinyak, leader of the Zin empire, and tossed into a virtual simulation of his/her old stomping grounds of Steelport. The Boss breaks out with help from    Kinzie, the brains of the Saints’ operation, and they escape from Zinyak’s mothership in a ship of their own. With Kinzie figuring out how the entire Zin’s computer operations work, the Boss goes back into the simulation to rescue the rest of the Saints who are trapped there, and figure out a way to get revenge on Zinyak.

In Saints Row IV, you are dumped into Steelport again, where you can do three things: the story missions, and side missions, which are red and blue. Red missions are mostly “go to this place and kill these people” and can only be done once. Blue missions are more creative diversions like “create this much damage with a tank in the time allotted” and “fling these things through hoops with your psychic powers” and can be done repeatedly. Completing a side missions makes a portion of the city yours, and more city you have the bigger your income is, and you use your income to upgrade the Boss’ weapons and the Boss him/herself. Story missions are about going into special simulations for the Saints, which are interesting because they are all unique, but are not challenging.

Most of your enemies are really easy to kill aliens.

The Boss can carry many weapons, from the simple pistol to a gun that sends people flying up into the air. The Boss also has superpowers, such as telekinesis and ice bombs. Everything can be upgraded, and if you regularly complete the side mission, it becomes pretty to become unstoppable.

What Saints Row IV does best is take advantage of the fact that the Boss is in a simulation to let you act as silly and destructive as possible. The side missions can get boring if you do them too often or when you try to get the gold medal, but overall they creative and exciting. There is no deep reason that they are fun, they just tap into that sort of basic joy that comes with blowing stuff up as much as possible, which the game does very well, like blowing up things in a tank, or a spaceship, or with a black hole gun.

You end up fighting some weird stuff because you are in a computer simulation.

Superpowers are enjoyable to mess around with too. Like the destruction side missions, there is no great reason for their entertainment value, it is just exhilarating to run through Steelport at super speed before jumping and gliding over the rest of the city. There is a reason vehicles are practically obsolete in this game. The side missions you use your superpowers in are not as fun as the blowing up stuff ones, but they are okay.

I also enjoy the level of customization. I wasted so much time coming up with new outfits for the Boss, and I like that there are several different version of each type of weapon, for example the three different kind of pistols, and the how the feel different, and that they have multiple skins, like turning SMGs into tommy guns.

While I do like all the new toys and activities IV gives you to play around with, I wish the core gameplay had been refined to distance itself from Saints Row the Third and just play better. The game feels so rushed, Steelport looks exactly the same except for random alien buildings, the Boss reuses a lot of old voice clips from the Third while running around, most of the clothing options are from Third (but the game still cannot get all of them in if there were some clothes you liked), the music selection is terrible, and a lot of the subtitles do not match what is being said. And it is so buggy, the game crashed on me several times, and I could not finish it because of an infinite loading screen until I read online making explosions glitched the game. There is no excuse for releasing a game than buggy.

Most of the story is about rescuing the Saints from their own virtual dungeons based on their deepest fears. This just serves as a way to revisit old characters and moments in the Saints Row series, which is great for nostalgic fans, but makes for a formulaic story that does not progress, since most of the Saints are useless. It cribs a lot from Mass Effect 2 as well, and not in a parody way. And it is never explained why the Boss’ personal virtual prison is connected to so many integral parts of Zinyak’s operation, or why he does not shut the prison down when the Boss starts messing up his stuff. As far as characters go, besides the Boss, Kinzie gets way more lines than everybody else, even though she is the second to last funny person in the crew.

Because that's who I want to spend most of my time with in a cast of characters that dates back to the first game and includes Keith David as Keith David: Miss Whiny No-Fun.

Saints Row IV has a lot of fun diversions, but that does not make up for its many basic flaws. I will admit I enjoyed the superpowers and the missions, they were very addictive, but selling a game this buggy and half done is a bit of a rip off.