The synthesis of music and action at my friend Chris’ wedding was unparalleled. As he took the floor to perform the garter-belt toss, Stan Bush’s legendary Transformers: The Move theme, “The Touch” began and blasted through the entire room. After removing the belt, he held it above his head in that iconic pose when Hot Rod Rodimus Prime finally unlocked the Matrix of Leadership. It was awesome. “The Touch,” defined two memorable scenes in Transformers: The Movie, and from the opening lyrics all the way to the guitar-whaling close are enough to send chills down the spine of any Regan-era youth.
Like I said, it was unparalleled, because Saints Row IV destroyed that moment by pure happenstance. I was low on health, surrounded by aliens with energy weapons, and down to my last few shotgun rounds. Suddenly, the radio – you can play the in-game radio anytime – started blaring, “The Touch” and I lost my damn mind. After all is said and done, you’ve never walked, you’ve never run, you’re a winnnnnnaaahhh. The ridiculous lyrics and iconic 80’s cheese guitar was now backing my narrative and I had to oblige every command. I ran away at 100mph (because you can run faster than cars in Saints Row IV), flew back to the battlefield (because you can fly in Saints Row IV), threw an ice grenade at a cluster of aliens (because you have super powers in Saints Row IV), and shotgun exploded them to oblivion. When all hell was breaking loose I was riding the eye of the storm. I had the touch, and I had the power. Yeah.
That wasn’t the only time something like that happened. The curated radio tracks backing “The Mix107.77” felt like they were designed to bring the best and brightest out of the player at any given moment. I’m not going to spoil any more other than to say I had some unique form of appreciation that station’s entire playlist; all of it was authentic or ironic super hero music. This should be no surprise to anyone who played Saints Row The Third, but while that game used Kanye West’s, “Power” and Bonnie Tyler’s, “I Need a Hero,” to punctuate designed sequences, Saints Row IV allows its music absolute freedom to narrate the player at any time. Yes, in the preview build there were still a few of those designed instances, but in my five hours of time with Saints Row IV the random outweighed the intended. It was the best of both worlds.
The premise of Saints Row IV is, well, it’s in line with the raw insanity established by Saints Row The Third. Your character is now president of the United States, and after an opening mission that gushed film and videogame references every other second, it’s back to normal Presidential life. Walking down the hall to a press conference, you meet with your Vice President, exchange a few barbs with a congressman, and discuss weekend plans with a member of your cabinet. Because this is Saints Row, the Vice President is Keith David, you have the option to punch the congressman in the face or dick, and your cabinet member is Night Blayde. Then aliens invade during the press conference and your character wakes up in a Matrix-like simulation. Because this is Saints Row.
Dropping your character in some sort of virtual simulation allows Saints Row IV to layer a bunch of new ideas on top of its existing architecture. I don’t necessarily think the series’ continuity required any additional level of abstraction, but it’s no worse for wear in execution. Bizarro Steelport brings back familiar features from Saints Row The Third; it’s still packed with clothing shops, plastic surgery offices, and fully populated with virtual citizens and vehicles. In the preview build I had access to the usual assortment of firearms at the gun shop, but also had the option to pick laser weapons off downed alien corpses. In the first twenty or thirty minutes, Saints Row IV was shaping up to go down the same gameplay path as its predecessor.
And then I got super powers. I don’t necessarily remember the context, or consider it important really, Kinzie hacked the simulation and granted my character the ability to jump extremely high and run faster than cars. Better yet, fake Steelport was then populated with a seemingly endless amount of neon blue clusters – and collecting them provided fuel for unlocking new abilities for my super powers. Oh, sure, there was still the traditional experience system in place – as in Saints Row The Third completing missions and earning XP is your currency for upgrading your character’s perks and stats – but these clusters catered exclusively to fueling my new powers, and that’s where my time with Saints Row IV went off the rails.
I was terminally consumed with the idea of grabbing every cluster in sight. Better yet, clusters seemed to be everywhere I went. For a solid hour I couldn’t do anything else because it was impossible to deny cluster collection. Soon I was able to run twice as fast, later I was able to transition my super jump into a glide, and shortly thereafter I was running, rather than jumping, up walls. Essentially, I was running and flying all around the city in order to better run and fly all around the city. It’s impossible not to mention Crackdown and its agility-orb addiction syndrome; Saints Row IV presents a near perfect replica and made me feel like a god amongst aliens. I don’t know if Volition necessarily intends the super hero angle to last the duration of Saints Row IV, but I was enamored with it right up until the preview concluded.
Of course, there’s plenty else to do besides act crazy and collection clusters. While the preview build only contained a few story-advancing missions, I appeared to have free reign over the side missions. Old favorites like Insurance Fraud, where you bounce your flailing body around traffic in order to rack up cash, and your standard Destroy-Everything-With-This-Tank returned. Other traditional side missions were contextually modified to fit Saints Row IV’s new premise. Vehicle collection, for example, designated a specific car as virus-infected and tasked me with retrieving it. Likewise, Virus Injection was a brief wave-based survival game while Kinzie remotely uploaded a virus. Security Deletion tasked me with hunting down and eliminating a specific pedestrian target. Security Deletion in particular was pretty crazy, because at one point I was hunting down a walking question mark with a gun that shot death rays. In a world already filled with men in bunny suits and other ridiculous crap it’s hard to imagine what else Volition has cooked up for your assignments.
Super powers were also incorporated into a few new side missions. Blazin tasks the player with running through a series of checkpoints under a certain time limit. Collecting green spheres along the way sped the player up, though I suspect the running and/or jumping super powers needed to be upgraded sufficiently before I had any shot of getting gold times (I had no trouble nailing down silver across the board). There are also Towers – a vertical platform of daunting height reaching into the sky. The goal is to get to the top through a combination of precise super jumps, but there were plenty of checkpoints if something went catastrophically wrong along the way. Flashpoints, while not specifically requiring super powers, were Saints Row IV’s version of territory control. They’re positioned all over the map and populated with a hoard of aliens, and eliminating all of them grants the player control of that area (to what extent remained a mystery).
A welcomed degree of customization also returns to Saints Row IV. A myriad of options for body type, gender, and facial adjustments join the options afforded by shopping at fake Steelport’s variety of clothing stores. Three different male and three different familiar voice options return, plus a surprise seventh option which had me cackling like an idiot in front of my computer. Volition clearly knows their audience, and it’s instances like that where they demonstrate it. Any car in the game can also be customized, though I stopped using cars entirely after the first hour.
The preview build kept most of the narrative progression under wraps. I was granted an additional super power, the ability to shoot ice and freeze enemies, after taking down a rather large alien, and with five blank slots of additional powers more will surely be on the way. It’s not clear if the entire game will take place in fake Steelport, or how the rest of the Saints’ crew will work their way in there. Still, the super powers, audio-logs about Keith David’s rise to power, a staggering amount of side missions, and a technically flawless (it maintained 60 frames-per-second on my PC) certainly leave the meat of the game primed to take advantage of the player’s expectations.
Criticism can be applied by stating Saints Row IV is doing little other than borrowing ideas and mechanics established by either its predecessor or other games. That being said, it all felt tightly controlled and competently constructed. It didn’t seem to matter what was being borrowed because all of it had been thoroughly washed under a different context. When delivering speeches it’s often thought that what you actually say doesn’t matter as much as the manner in which it’s spoken. Technically Saints Row IV might be enabling a collection of ideas that have been tried before, but when you’re doing them under the guise of a super hero shooting laser weapons at aliens while flying around to, “The Touch,” who’s going to argue with that? In what world is that not immensely satisfying?
Saints Row IV releases in a painfully long month and a half on August 20th, check back with us then for a full review.
