Review: Saints Row is a painfully generic open-world malaise
Our overwhelming takeaway after finishing Saints Row was how badly the open-world genre needs Grand Theft Auto VI. How the genre is so past the point of relevance that it needs the flag bearer for the open-world action game to once again provide the roadmap forward.
Because between Saint’s Row’s lifeless city, terrible shooting, lacklustre characters and high frequency of bugs, this really does feel like the endpoint for this style of open-world action.
The premise of this reboot is that you’re tasked with building the Saints from the ground up in the city of Santo Ileso. A Las Vegas-ish open world that fails to capture the liveliness due to a population density that will make you wonder if the game is set after the end of the world.
Johnny Gat, Shaundi and Kinzie are gone, replaced with Kev, Eli and Neenah. Despite some rough dialogue in the early missions, they aren’t overly offensive. The story is extremely bland, with every twist and turn visible from the international space station. But in a rare positive note, the missions themselves are generally tasking you with doing something a bit different each time, although most of that involves shooting, which brings up to our next point.
The shooting in Saints Row is dreadful. No matter what combination of sliders we tried, we couldn’t aim in a way that felt satisfactory, and it just drains every combat-focussed mission of fun. There is a good variety of weapons, and you can even adjust the gameplay in-menu to make enemies take fewer bullets to kill, or increase the frequency of tough baddies, but when the shooting is this bad, it’s little consolation.
There’s a flow system in which players fill a meter which will allow them to do certain special moves, like throwing a grenade
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