By tying humor and outrageous context to its moving parts, Saints Row The Third and Saints Row IV became viable systems in the modern open-world paradigm. Gat out of Hell (mostly) forgets all of this, sheds (mostly) all of its psychotic humor, and bolts on (mostly) dated mechanics. Its intended function may be a stop-gap between major iterations, but its execution feels like a failed audition against its recent past.
Gat out of Hell starts off innocently enough; the gang breaks out an Ouija board and accidentally conjures a portal to New Hades. This action magnificently abducts the series’ avatar/player-character, and Johnny Gat and Kinzie hop in after him. While there they’ll run into Saints Row 2’s Dane Vogel and a legion of historical assholes in the form of Vlad the Impaler, Blackbeard, and William Shakespeare. Their mission? Stop Satan from marrying his daughter off to the Saints’ fearless leader.
Again, Gat out of Hell really starts off well. After the last two games Saints Row needed to get away from Steelport, and the twisted new geometry and hellish architecture afforded by New Hades is an enticing lure. Along the same lines, dumping almost every established character in favor of a new cast of weirdoes is also a step in the right direction, as everyone was reemployed and recycled to infinity and beyond over the course of Saints Row IV.
A brand new suite of abilities, courtesy Lucifer’s lost halo, also appears to be on the table. Quickly, however, you’ll learn they’re all recycled, adjusted, or functionally irrelevant. Johnny sprouts a badass pair of angel wings and the ability to run incredibly fast – which is nearly identical to the collection of superhero mechanics injected into Saints Row IV. Tweaks are made here and there, with a few upgrades Johnny’s able to maintain flight a bit better than IV’s protagonist ever could, but it’s nearly identical to its predecessor. Even the upgrade path, offering endurance and quickness boosts, feels the same.
Johnny’s new offensive abilities don’t come off much better. Most of the familiar firearms return, doubly complimented with upgradeable customization options and all the cheap ammo you can carry. Returning superpowers include the giant stomp and fireball/blast ability, and they’re joined by summon (call on a demon pal to annoy/attack an aggressor) and aura (and area-of-effect attack tied to your person). Within these abilities are unlockable modifications that change their potential, like a stomp that creates a vacuum or an aura that causes all of those affected to drop what they’re doing bow like you’re a God.
Gat out of Hell’s player mechanics, even when they’re liberally borrowing from other games or recycled from the series’ past, aren’t the problem. It’s the levels and challenges designed to test them. There are a variety of weapons to collect and upgrade, but they don’t matter. You can boost the effectiveness and tweak the stats of your arcane abilities, but they don’t matter. The few missions that are tied to Gat out of Hell’s eclectic cast of characters all break down into brief instances of either murdering everyone in the room or clearing out enough enemies to properly engage a generic timer. Most all of this can be accomplished by upgrading the damage output of a single gun, putting a few points into the stomp ability, and laying waste to everything you see. This is both a waste of good mechanics and a crime against Saints Row’s typically insane context.
For example, a Dark Inciter demon generates a shield that must be removed before he’s able to be taken down. You can do this by emptying a clip of ammo into him, or you can use literally any of your four powers to accomplish the same task. Every power coalesces into the same function, rendering any unique ability irrelevant to their implied context. It’s great that they’re there – if nothing else they add some diversity to Saints Row’s tepid gunplay – but there’s nothing designed to explicitly test any one of them.
The batch of content intended to fuel Gat out of Hell’s progression fares a bit better. As you wreak havoc on New Hades, an all-encompassing meter starts to fill up. This is primarily accomplished through completing activities, and it’s these assignments that fuel most of Gat out of Hell’s content. Most are the same old missions with slightly different names (Torment Fraud is basically insurance fraud whereas Hellblazing is a flying version of checkpoint races). Of great interest are extraction facilities, which has the player running down a warehouse trying to own three control points, and Salvation, which has the player flying over a heavily populated area trying to save people before they either fall to the ground or get sucked up by heaven.
Gat out of Hell’s commitment to flight mechanics is kind of a double edged sword. On one hand, it’s nice to see challenges designed to take advantage of them. Salvation and Hellblazing are both great tests of player control, and the billion or so power-up orbs scattered throughout New Hades frequently make use of player-tested agility. On the other hand, Saints Row’s mushy combat and relatively arcane stabs at flight pale in comparison to recent offerings from games like Sunset Overdrive. Time has started to pass Saints Row by, as it’s clearly falling behind to more modern peers.
There was also a bit of stark disbelief at the relative lack of meaningful content inside Gat out of Hell. Objectively, it’s loaded with stuff to do. Tons of audiologs to collection, over a thousand Soul Clusters to obtain, and copious handfuls of optional activities. The problem is that that’s all there is, it’s a game without a main course but with a ton of side dishes. Character loyalty missions were nothing more than assigned collections of activities, and the precious handful of story missions boiled down to killing everyone in the room.
Gat out of Hell also exhibits a weird reluctance to engage its audience beyond a surface level idea. Audiologs suggest Vlad the Impaler was recruited to command Satan’s armies, and there’s this gothic influence in the architecture of his specific part of the map, but that’s it. Likewise, Shakespeare acting as practitioner of a nightclub named Tempest is exactly where his character starts and ends. Saints Row The Third allowed the player to parachute into a mobster party to the tune of Kanye West’s “Power,” and later recruit Burt Reynolds as a part of their gang. Saints Row IV hit the gas on almost everything its predecessor did, but also made time for smoking crack out of light bulbs, outrageous romance options, and Godzilla-like battles against giant energy drink cans. Gat out of Hell, by comparison, makes a joke, shrugs its shoulders, and lets you shoot some stuff.
Saints Row’s never had especially great characters, but they’ve also been inserted into interesting and provocative situations. Gat out of Hell manages a lovely musical number in the middle of its story, and nothing to speak of in the in-betweens. Jay Mohr, of all people, actually turns in a decent performance as an economically concerned but eternally distracted Dane Vogel, but it’s not enough to rescue the narrative. Speaking of which, by way of its plot, Saints Row’s unintentional commitment to player-authored diversity is left by the wayside. You actually have the ability to switch over and play as Kinzie (complete with her own dialogue responses), but gone is Saints Row’s trademark anything-goes avatar.
In the end, Gat out of Hell feels loaded with ineffective content. There’s a ton of options, but few reasons to engage many of them. I actually finished the game without knowing there were upgrades for the player-character, having made it through fine with only minimal upgrades to one gun and a few of my powers. Beyond that I stuck around to complete every activity and round up the collectables, but I was relatively unclear on the point of it all; it was completion for the sake of completion. It just feels like loosely strung together content without much consideration for how it all fit together – or why it was needed in the Saints Row universe.
