I had a great time playing Saints Row the 3rd, so when the next entry got it's turn to play, it was without hesitation I loaded it up and started playing. It did not disappoint, and in fact I think I liked it even more... but I would have to agree that it was also a less balanced experience then the previous. Step inside.
Story: Saints Row 4 started it's life, not as a sequel, but as a DLC expansion for Saints Row the 3rd, and as such the plotline is actually very tightly tied to it. It's been a few months since the end of that game, and the Saints have decided that they really liked this hero business. While not about to stop being full of chaos and destruction in the process, it was good to use that energy to give back. So when a few months later MI6 asked for their help, they did not hesitate, especially when the man they had to stop was Cyrus, the very guy who tried to run them into the ground in Steel Port so recently in that previous game. Now he was threatening Washington DC with a nuclear missile, and it was up to our boys in purple to stop him, and man were they up for it!
And so their reputation blasted ever higher into the stratosphere, and even to the highest seat in the land. Five years later, "The Boss" was the president of the United States of America. Sadly it was not meant to last since his acceptance speech was cut short by an alien invasion quickly taking over Earth. Despite his best efforts, the boss is captured. His obstinate attempt at resistance, however, has drawn the personal attention of the alien overlord, Emperor Zynyak. Amused, he decided to let the man live, but live in a virtual world of his design built to break the will and mind: a person hell of ones and zeroes.
If that sounded off the wall, you are not alone to think so. Hell even as I wrote it I felt like a young child telling an "and then... and then... and then" story, but that's just how insane the setup for this game is, and how much has to be covered before the game can even really begin. But at that point, your mission is clear: escape the simulation and teach Emperor Zynyak he fucked with the wrong planet.
Much like the previous game, you really can not expect a lot of major twists and turns from this point on, choosing instead to move the story forward basically by lining you up to find the and rescue the other Saints in your efforts and ultimately staging your big resistance/offensive on the alien emperor. But that does not mean serious shit does not happen on the way. In fact there is a major event about half-way which will add fuel to their inspirations to see Zynyak get his. But it's not going to do anything that will effect the game itself, as is the case with most of the story. Effectively you can call it window-dressing, and not very intricate at that. But it is enough to give you a reason to be there and compelling enough to fill that roll.
6/10
Graphics: Again like previous game, this is not a new game and does show it's age. However the environment lets it get away with this a lot more due to where you are playing. This being inside a simulation, the graphics will glitch out with the bitmaps that make up city walls scrolling and skipping out. Other characters and even vehicles will lose resolution becoming a mess of pixels before restoring right in front of your eyes. You will see monstrosities of dis-proportions walking around like nothing was going on, and it all fits because you are no longer in the real world.
Not that these effects cover for anything that looks bad. In fact despite it's age, the game looks great with these distortions just adding flavor to this virtual world. It simply looks great.
And it should! As noted in the story section of this review, Saints Row IV started it's life as DLC for game 3. As such, the base building blocks for how the game looks come from it's predecessor directly. True the detail wastouched up and the world has been enhanced over the development of this update but the same core is there, including the level of customizability. I went over this in the previous review, but in short, this game offers a lot of it. Between your design, outfits, personality and vehicles, you can modify just about everything you will use in this title.... as well as things you likely won't but we will get back to that when we talk about the gameplay.
8/10
Sound: And also much like the previous game you will be getting a lot more for your ears then anything your eyes will get. And while the sound effects are solid, they are not the reason for this. The guns sound about right and you will not be disappointed, but that is something I can say about most games these days.
Voice work, on the other hand, is once again absolutely on point... well the main cast, anyway. I can not be so kind to the NPCs that populate the city as they really can sound dumb from time to time. But the main cast, especially as your character is fully voiced by multiple actors (and actresses) depending on how you build them, were one hell of a feat to make fit perfectly to the world... and perfectly fit they do! Although I think this time the star of the show is our alien overlord Zynyac. He's just such a pompus self-assured asshole and so full of character that even when he's not on screen, hearing him is a treat, be it taunting the Saints when they try to get cute with some custom scenario in the simulation to even deciding to join in with them when they sing with the radio. He's the perfect balance of love and hate for a villain.
Still, this once again takes a back seat to the absolute masterful use of soundtrack this game (and the rest of the franchise). Once again, this game has it's fair share of moments encapsulated by the perfect choice song, like "Miss a Thing" by Arrow Smith as you climb and disable the launching nuke in the introduction, or perhaps the best intro to the final boss I have ever seen just due to a perfect use of "The Touch" by Stan Bush outside the movie it was brought to the world for. They even use part of the confrontatio from the most famous standoff and showdown this song has ever accompanied to just hammer it all home (if you were there, you know).
But the problem here is that while the soundtrack is beyond respectable, it feels like little more then a weak reflection of what the previous game pulled off. It's still really good and compared to most games it stands out as a shining achievement. But compared to the game's own franchise, not so much.
8/10
Gameplay: If you have played Saints Row the 3rd for yourself, you already have a good idea of just what's in store for you when you click to start the game. You will take your gangster and run around Steel Port city's virtual counterpart in a 3rd person perspective, raising mayhem as you complete missions to move the game along. This time, however, you are not trying to take over the city, though. It is a simulation and to conquer it is not going to jack shit about the situation. Rather, if you want to win and save the human race from being stuck in these situations, you have to break it.
How do you do that? Well there are several things you will do. First and most important will be the primary missions.to break through to sims other Saints (and allies) are currently stuck in to help them break free, ultimately leading to a team effort for the final confrontation. These missions are generally unique and highlight just what makes this franchise fun even as they are the main drive to complete the story.
These missions will do more then that, however, as you will find yourself gaining super-powers while in the simulation by absorbing code fragments from some of the more powerful enemies you face off with... and this is where the game gets divisive to the audience. The reason becomes obvious fairly early on as the first powers you get are a super jump and super sprint, two powers that will quickly become the key way you make your way around the city instead of driving around like you would in the previous games. In fact it won't take you long to upgrade that dash by getting infinite stamina and rendering the use cars at all completely unnecessary. If you find yourself wanting to play a more classic open world game, you will probably find this annoying, but personally I found it a pleasant detail. After all, you cant turn far tighter then any car and the fact that while running you can knock cars clean off the road was quite fun (albeit juvenile) to do on a whim while dashing to the next mission I wanted to take on.
Still, this is going to be a point of contention due to the way the game was designed since once again, the game's origin as DLC that grew too large and became it's own game rears it's head here. The superpowers you will game throughout the game are fun and easy to use, especially as you buy upgrades for them, but in the process, you also make them more and more your main weapons, removing the need to just about all your equipment, at least while in your simulation which will sour some.
But this power does come with a cost you will have to earn in game, and this will come in two forms. Your powers themselves will be improved by spending data clusters, a unique currency strewn about the map. These things are everywhere, so you should never have to worry about hoarding these: most likely you will find more then enough with little effort.
No the real effort will perhaps come from the currency for literally everything else, your "cache" (get it?... yeah I know, they should probably have gelt pretty bad about that one). This cache is gained by doing just about everything in small doses and used to buy anything else. Succeeding in an activity on the map or a mission (side or main) will offer you much larger amounts, as well as earn you bigger chunks of cache in a timed meter to spend as you play. This is all pretty standard for the franchise, but the big change here is that you can not buy any of the property in the simulation. Rather, you take them over by an additional new activity: hacking them. This in essence is a puzzle minigame which, once completed will earn you more cache and grant you a small discount if you purchase the services of said store, so... basically exactly what you got for buying the places last time.
This is also not the only new activity, this game offers. You still have classics like mayhem with various weapons and vehicles or accident fraud (although his is both far more broken and more fun thanks to super jumping), but now you also have races where you run on food through obstacle courses, locations you have to clear with shields to disable before you can shut them down, or eve the ominous alien towers you can take over once you scale to the top. Simply put the activities on the map itself have improved heavily this time around, and yet this is also where the game starts to lose some ground for me.
You see, in addition to the activities and main missions, each character you rescue (or are rescued by) will offer you a handful of side missions. And while one or two will be unique story pieces where you will bond with them and grant them a super-power mode as well, the others are not really side-missions, but just a list of activities on the map you will need to complete to get the reward at the end.. and if you already did that activity it's already checked off for you. For the most part, if you do all these side missions, you will finish all the activities on the map at the end because the devs didn't bother filling these in with anything special (unlike the last game).
Still this is a fairly minor complaint when considering the game as a whole since, as I noted, these activities have improved immensely in this iteration. I just kinda wish they either went that extra mile to have these side missions actually be side missions or just skip them entirely rather then make the game look lazy with this double-dip and admit the game itself is a bit more linear and streamlined then the last one.
Still what's here, when you get down to playing it, is really good and very well balanced. If you can overlook the new overriding the need of the old, you will have a great time with this.
8/10
Bugs: I can't say I found a single issue running this one. And outside of the limited frame-rate in cutscenes, it ran absolutely perfectly! (For reasons I do not understand, much like the previous entry cutscenes are capped to 30 FPS even though they are in-engine.)
Score: Due to how much this title relies on the previous one, it makes comparison in the end inevitable. On the one hand the game refines the activities of the world around you, making the actual open-world side of things that much more fun. But on the other, the side missions have been replaced rather lazily by assigning you to take on these same missions.. enough so that if you do them all you will basically do everything in the map. Just about every car from the previous game is here, but you won't need to use them long after you start getting super powers. On the same note while the gunplay is good and offers a variety of choices and customization, you will find yourself pretty much relying on only one or two in the off chance your powers are charging or in a simulation where you don't have them for a few minutes. In short I think overall it's an improved game from the previous one, but it's stutteringly so... every 2 steps forwards comes with 1 back. I cant help but think this was great, but could have been even better if just given a little more refinement.
8/10
System Requirements:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600/AMD Athlon II x3
- 4 GB RAM
- Radeon HD 5800/Nvidia Geforce GTX 260
- 10 GB hard drive space
- Windows Vista
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
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