One of the craziest AAA series in recent memory would have to be the Saint’s Row franchise. Starting at competing directly with GTA to going completely off the deep end, the series has morphed into one of the most off the wall games out there.
After unleashing the crazy in Saint’s Row: The Third, you would think that the developers wouldn’t have anywhere else to go. Instead, Saint’s Row 4 is one of the craziest games yet and surprisingly a great sandbox game.
Cutting Out The Sand:
Originally starting as an expansion to the third game, Saint’s Row 4 follows the street gang turned pop culture stars: The 3rd Street Saints leading a terrorist operation to save the world. After a few QTEs and a heroic act, the leader of the Saints (AKA the player) becomes popular enough to become president of the United States.
But it doesn’t stop there, following the US under Saint’s rule; an alien empire invades kidnapping humanity along with the Saints and puts them in a virtual simulation. Leaving you to reunite everyone along with vice president Keith David (playing himself) to mount a resistance to save the Earth. No really, everything I just typed is in Saint’s Row 4 and that’s not even including the fact that you get superpowers in this one.
Saint’s Row 4 biggest change to the design outside of the superpowers (which we’ll talk about next) is how much of the busy work of an open world game has been cut out. As before, you can use your phone interface to call people for backup, upgrade your character and start missions. The act of taking over property is back again and all money or cache as it’s called can be earned by simply pressing the command on your interface.
The superpowers which were hinted at in Saint’s Row the Third are in full force and make Saint’s Row 4 feel more like a sequel to Crackdown. You’ll quickly unlock super speed and super jumping, making vehicles obsolete within minutes. Data clusters are hidden all throughout the world and are used to enhance your super powers.
It’s finally happened: A dedicated Nolan North voice option.
Weapons can be customized and upgraded and you can use cache to unlock character upgrades. Just like in the previous game, it’s not a matter of if you’ll become a total bad-ass but when.
What may surprise you the most about the game is that for all the insanity, it features one of the better stories in an open world game. The freedom to effectively do whatever they wanted, gave the designers a wide berth for the missions. The developers both mock and revel in the traditional tropes of AAA design.
QTEs, morality choices that don’t mean anything, being able to have a romance with any character at any time (except for Keith David,) fourth wall breaking and a lot more. With all the callbacks to previous games in the series and returning characters, Saint’s Row 4 feels like a series finale last hurrah. The designers did their best to make the characters a little deeper and it helps give the game a bit of heart.
But despite all the freedom, Saint’s Row 4 still runs into the same problem that I had with the previous one.
All Dressed Up and No Where to Go:
Saint’s Row 4 is a loud, insane experience, but despite everything going on in the game, it still is shallow. As with the previous game there isn’t any growth of the mechanics or challenge for the player to become invested in. Instead it’s all about just raising the player’s power curve to insane proportions and telling them to go nuts.
However there really isn’t anything for the player to go crazy on. Most enemies will fall fast to your upgraded weapons and powers with only a few having powers of their own. All the side activities are basic and because most of the upgrades are just tied to leveling, data clusters and cache, means that you don’t get that sense that what you’re doing is directly making you better.
The addition of super powers was great, but it made the city even more sterile now that you can just glide around everywhere.
If you look at a game like Batman: Arkham City, all the events have some degree of challenge to them and helped engage the player with the world.
Speaking of the world, despite dealing with aliens and running around in a copy of the Matrix, the world was very plain.
Modeled after the city from the previous game, it doesn’t have any identity to it and you’ll spend most of your time super gliding around. While there are some new vertical sections, they are few in far between. Collectibles are still scattered around but without any real challenge to collect them, such as in Batman or Crackdown.
After finishing the main story, I didn’t feel the desire to go back through and attempt to go for 100% like I did in Arkham City. I also did not play the DLC packs and cannot comment on them.
Saint’s Row 4 felt like the culmination of the insanity that has taken over the Saint’s Row franchise and felt like it was a sandbox game built for your id. But despite the simplistic nature of the game, there were a lot of smart concepts in the forms of the powers and removing a lot of the tedium that the genre is known for.
At this point I’m not really interested in seeing a Saint’s Row 5, but I would love for Volition to make a superhero themed open world game and let us really go nuts.
