Saints Row IV is insane. It’s crazy in a manner afforded exclusively to videogames, meaning that its scenarios not only indulges in gags and references but also the player’s ability to directly interact inside of its jokes. Volition, perhaps more so than any other development studio, knows Saints Row IV’s intended demographic and laser focused their game on it. The prospective player understands that Saints Row has become a psychotic foil to modern day Grant Theft Auto, probably plays and has played a lot of other videogames, and recognizes Keith David’s magnificent contribution to the world of acting. Or, in other words, Volition hopes you liked the direction Saints Row The Third was going, because they bricked the gas pedal, lit the car on fire, and ignored the brakes. It’s a wild ride, but sometimes they get into a bit of trouble when the car stars to drive itself.
Saints Row IV’s premise births a world where anything is possible. Technically, as anyone who played through Saints Row The Third knows, anything was already possible, but throwing a narrative qualifier in makes it no worse for wear. You – the player of a billion different body types/colors, either (both?) genders, and of seven different voice actors – are now President of the United States of America. Your old Saints crew is your cabinet and Keith David, played by Keith David, is your Vice President. Without much warning, aliens lead by Zinyak attack and enslave most of humanity under the Zin Empire and institute human battery farms like in The Matrix. Breaking free from the Zin’s ship prison, it’s up to you, the former POTUS, to salvage what’s left of humanity by disrupting the programming of the simulated Steelport. Again, is almost exactly like The Matrix.
Volition isn’t shy about referencing practically everything. Hell, I’m pretty sure the opening scene went from Robocop to Terminator with plenty in between in less than thirty seconds. Saints Row IV employs other’s ideas for its own benefit, though typically in a manner that openly mocks the source material. Your space ship, for example, slowly fills up with rescued Saints not unlike outfitting The Normandy with squad members in each Mass Effect game. Starting a romantic relationship with a crew member and growing it over the course of the narrative was one of Mass Effect’s more alluring objectives. In Saints Row IV everyone – Keith David, a spherical robot named CID, what or whoever – has an immediately available, zero-to-sixty romance option and you’re free to engage it almost any time. It’s a tiny goof, but it exposes Saints Row IV’s dedication to lifting an idea, making it a joke, and creating something all its own.
Like its predecessor, Saints Row IV also has a special relationship between level design and soundtrack. In Saints Row The Third, Kanye West’s, “Power” and Bonnie Tyler’s, “I Need a Hero” transformed otherwise ordinary actions into electrifying sequences of emotion fueled objective. Saints Row IV doubles down on this idea, and of course I’m not going to spoil which pop classic is supporting whatever action, but it’s definitely there and maybe even better than before. In fact, the whole soundtrack feels curated specifically to support the insanity of simulated Steelport’s big stupid world. Tracks from The Mix 107.77 and Mad Decent 106.9, and K12 97.6, especially, seem to support what Saints Row IV is all about.
Virtual Steelport is subject to a lot of weird shit – so weird that in the opening hours I was wondering whether or not my game was bugged. Saints Row IV is about disrupting the system, and the more I messed with it, i.e. completed side missions, the crazier it seemed to get. Have you ever seen the glitch where a character’s limb gets pinned to a fixed point and it stretches and contorts polygons like some sort of nightmare fuel horror show? The citizens of fake Steelport do that intentionally. Giant eyeballs, people driving cars upside down from on top of the car, and weird stretched limbs are, quite hilariously, the norm . I’m pretty sure Saints Row IV was also subject to a handful of real glitches (whenever I boot my game it plays the last audio log I collected, some assassination targets got stuck inside buildings, etc) – but in a weird way they’re part of the fiction. I’ve never passed a glitch off as an emergent experience, but Saints Row IV certainly makes the best of it.
Being a virtual world, simulated Steelport isn’t subject to the same rules and regulations required by reality. Saints Row IV ties almost every one of its objectives to its fiction, but none more so than its new and endearing hook; Saints Row IV is a super hero game. Like Crackdown. Like Prototype. Strangely – better than Crackdown and better than Prototype. About an hour into the game you’re shown how easy and cool it is to customize any vehicle in the game. Shortly thereafter you’re given the ability to jump really high and run extremely fast – and you’ll probably never use a car again. I don’t know how Volition nailed the fidelity of control so well on their first time out, but in Saint’s Row IV’s running fast, leaping into the air, and gliding down and through the city feels perfect.
And then there are those upgrades. Positioned throughout fake Steelport are glowing blue collectables called Data Clusters – 1255 of them to be exact. Clusters are everywhere and for the first few hours of Saints Row IV I was terminally consumed with collecting as many as I could find. Not unlike Crackdown’s agility orbs, Clusters are easy to get with a moderate amount of effort and, as the game unfolds, filter into must-have upgrades to your suite of super powers. Four hours into Saints Row IV I was running up skyscraper walls and gliding at will around Steelport. Ten hours in I was running much faster than my initial super run, so fast in fact that I created a vortex of chaos that consumed everything around me. Fifteen hours in and I was a veritable flying freight train of carnage and destruction. The super power upgrade path, most of it gated by completing challenges or reaching a certain character level, is spaced out neatly over the course of Saints Row IV’s narrative.
Running and jumping occupy your primary means of movement but your super powers also extend to combat. The Blast power initially shoots ice to freeze enemies in place, but can be upgraded to set enemies on fire or mind control them over to your side. Likewise, the telekinesis power can be modified to shoot lightning or steal life. With a giant area-of-effect stomp move and neat buff that adds elemental effects to your firearms, Saints Row IV has an effective collection of super powers. Each one is also open to rampant upgrades via Cluster collection. Your telekinesis throw distance, for example, can be increased or the recharge on your Blast can be shortened. Almost every super power has some sort of option or modifier ready to consume any Clusters you may have collected.
The rest of your offensive options remain mostly intact from Saints Row The Third. The usual selection of handguns, SMG’s, shotguns, and assault rifles return. New to the fold are alien versions of those guns which differ in appearance and sound but, more importantly, trade traditional ammo for a cool down cycle. Each class of weapon uses in game currency, cache (cash, get it?), earned throughout the game to upgrade stats like ammo capacity and damage received. Actually, almost every facet of Saints Row The Third’s character upgrade path seems transferred directly over to Saints Row IV.
Of course, there is also a healthy of supply of wacky weapons. Most prominent and useful among them is Dubstep Gun. It’s a gun that shoots dubstep, literally. It charges for a bit and then right as the beat drops it fires dubstep waves and everyone dances until they explode. It’s hilarious to watch and, as a weapon, tremendously effective in crowds. In addition to that a black hole gun, there is another gun that inflates its victims until they explode, one that disintegrates enemies and deletes them from the system, and a couple other crazy weapons to join your crowded weapon wheel.
If the last two paragraphs sounds more matter-of-fact than enthusiastic, it’s because there’s not much to get excited about in regard to Saints Row IV’s combat. When the game opened with a traditional third-person shooter mission, I thought it was a clever criticism on modern games. Firing a gun felt rudimentary, enemy AI did little other than a dodge to the side, and enemies were basically bullet sponges. Basic gun combat felt soft and ineffective, and I thought Saints Row IV was being that way on purpose because it was being supported by ridiculous context. It was supposed to be ineffective and impotent because everything around me was wacky and stupid. Imagine the horror when it turned out that wasn’t a one-off instance; that kind of third person shooter encounter repeats throughout the course of Saints Row IV.
For a game that spends its opening hours introducing super powers and seems happy to let the player fool around with them, there are an awful lot of missions that restrict their usage. I lost count of the times that, for one reason or another, my character wasn’t allowed access to her super powers. I understand that game design is difficult and sometimes it’s necessary to put a few restrictions in place in favor or a properly designed level, but every time Saints Row IV took my toys away I felt like it was pulling back on a promise. It’s fun to stomp hoards of aliens, or throw pedestrians at T-800’s Murder Bots, or fire off flaming bullets at the back of Wardens. By comparison, it’s boring to run behind cover and get headshots, destroy endless generators, or defend a fellow Saint while he or she is unlocking a door. Saints Row IV was supposed to be about breaking doors down, not walking through them in an orderly fashion.
While Saints Row IV’s frequent basic combat is mechanically boring, I will concede that it’s usually contextually satisfying. Firing a gun at trucks trying to run you over is kind of a drag to play, but when examined in the proper context – the trucks are blasting conforming music and you’re trying to cause disruption by firing your Dubstep Gun at it – then it suddenly becomes engaging. Likewise, going after Zinyak because he insulted Biz Markie’s “Just a Girl” is a much more satisfying call to arms than a simple, “fight enemy.” Firing a rocket launcher at a Godzilla-sized can of Saints Flow is easy and mechanically simple, but, sweet christ, you’re shooting rockets at a giant anthropomorphic energy drink. Saints Row IV is a master of ridiculous context, and it’s penchant for the absurd, in most cases, numbed the pain of its neutered or plodding combat sequences.
Oddly, it’s the side missions that make the most of your super powers. Blazin paths checkpoints through Steelport and challenges the player to run through them as efficiently as possible. Fight Club plops you in an arena and forces the player to combat foes exclusively with super powers. Professor Genki’s latest show, Mind Over Mutant, is probably the most satisfying and creative. It places rings over a small area in Steelport and tasks the player with TK’ing a car, person, or Genki head through them. Various mayhem missions focus on destruction and insurance fraud returns (albeit aided through your super powers) from previous games, but on the whole even the side missions don’t do much to test out more than one super power. Virus Injection (wave based combat), Flashpoints (killing a handful of enemies at a base) and Security Deletion (assassination) are more open to creative interpretation despite technically amounting to little other than “kill all these guys.”
Saints Row IV is jam packed with content – when I finished the story, every side mission, and finished off every collectable I was at twenty three hours and 91% completion – but it’s hard to shake the feeling that its original focus was the canceled expansion for Saints Row The Third. Around every one of Saints Row IV’s corners you can see it making the most of its technical assets. Jokes established in previous games were reused albeit with their own clever spin. While there are a few one-off environments, Steelport itself is reproduced from Saints Row The Third with a few art filters and alien architecture thrown on top. In fact, most of the loyalty missions on Saints Row IV thrive on recycling plots, characters, and assets from previous games. Even when Saints Row IV is trying to be cool by bringing back a one-off instance of the Genki Bowl it’s, well, it feels like I already got enough of that in the previous game. None of this is necessarily a complaint, but at times Saints Row IV feels more like an extension of Saints Row The Third than a brand new game.
But then there’s that ridiculous context, and how hard Saints Row IV pushes to make a joke at every instance. Keith David turns in a hilarious and confident performance that perfectly captures his cocksure persona. His voice is aided by his on screen presence which is quick have him looking at porn mags while discussing the technical term for power armor one minute and then calmly resisting your sexual advances the next. Actually, all of Saints Row IV is gifted with great exchanges between characters. There’s a ton of incidental dialogue included for instances when two or more Saints are summoned as homies to help you out in the simulation. There’s so much content in the form of banter that players may never hear, and Volition’s willingness to crank it all out anyway speaks volumes to their commitment to the crazy.
It becomes a question of what you value in your gaming experience. Can you enjoy a game if it declines to seize its potential but makes you laugh anyway? Will you be able to reconcile not having the best of both worlds? Saints Row IV reminds me of that classic stereotype of the super smart kid in high school who abandoned his gifts in favor of light recreational drug use. Sure, climbing satan’s ladder was probably fun but it prevented him from doing something truly special with his gifts. Likewise, Saints Row IV’s veritable drugs are fun, but, given the apparent strengths of its super powers, it feels like like it didn’t reach its potential. How good is the world’s most impressive super hero if he or she is never thoroughly tested?
