The Saint’s Row series continues its shark jumping escapades with this time taking fan favorites Gat and Kinzie to Hell in a new-ish adventure. But a change in locale isn’t enough to avoid just how bare bones this expansion is.
Flight Path to Hell:
The story is that during Kinzie’s birthday the leader of the Saints and president (the main character from previous games) gets kidnapped by the Devil to marry his daughter and both Gat and Kinzie travel to Hell to rescue him.
After an introduction and return of one of the villain’s from Saint’s Row 2, the pair is bestowed Lucifer’s former halo which gives them access to the super power antics from Saint’s Row 4. The basic gameplay remains unchanged as you’ll quickly acquire super jump and flight to render cars useless and over the course of the game you’ll get upgrades to transform you into a one man/woman killing machine.
The Hell theme comes in with new weapons based on the seven deadly sins and altering the flight mechanic as you now have wings. The trick to flight is that if you go too slow your wings will stall and you’ll fall while downward momentum increases your speed. You can flap your wings during flight for added speed and the flight mechanic was really well done when you add in finding souls which take the place of the orbs from the last game.
The revised flight mechanics and new city design are the highlights of this short trip.
Flying around the new city either looking for collectibles or activities was the best part of the game for me.
Unlike Saint’s Row 4, the city this time was not taken from a previous game and features a lot more vertical areas and places to fly between and more items to find.
Unfortunately it’s when you decide to go after the main mission that you’ll realize something is very wrong — there are no missions.
Heck House:
In Saint’s Row 4, part of the charm of the game was the various cut-scenes and sheer randomness of the mission structure but with Gat out of Hell there are no missions. The in game plot says that in order to rescue the president you need to get Satan’s attention. To do that, you have to keep doing activities to raise a meter which at certain thresholds will make the game harder and then unlock the final mission.
But the issue is that instead of having a story to go through, you’re just going to be doing side activities with no connection between them. New characters are introduced like Shakespeare and Vlad the Impaler but they literally don’t do anything to the plot other than one arena battle and unlock a power. You can’t summon homies this time around and the whole game has this sense that it was developed with a small budget. This also factors into the cut-scenes which the majority of them are still images and only one cut scene that fits into the Saint’s Row charm.
New Hell themed weapons and powers are nice but there are far less weapons this time around.
Even though Kinzie is playable, the game is written entirely for Gat with many times cut-scenes will mention him even though you are playing as her.
The entire game just coasts along until the final mission which is just another arena type battle before the ending scene.
For $20, there just isn’t enough content here to justify a purchase for everyone but the hardcore fans of the series. A recent snafu by GameStop priced it at $5 which I think is a much fairer price.
Sinning Saints:
Gat out of Hell seems more like a C attempt from Volition compared to their previous works which is a shame as the basic gameplay still works. The redesigned flight mode and city structure showcase just how good the designers are at open world design and movement and I would love for them to continue this type of design into a most likely being worked on Saint’s Row 5.
As long as you are fine with a quick trip to hell, this isn’t a bad game but it could have been so much more and up to the standards set by Volition.
