Saints Row review – rebooting the poor man’s GTA

metro.co.uk:

The already controversial reboot of Saints Row tries to take on GTA at its own game, but it has more in common with Goat Simulator…

There are many words that come to mind when playing the new Saints Row: shallow, unsophisticated, old-fashioned, low-tech, clumsy, charmless… The reboot was decried by ‘fans’ as soon as it was announced, for a variety of vaguely expressed complaints centring on its diverse new cast of characters and complaints that the game had drifted too far from the relatively serious gangster simulator that Saints Row 2 is perceived to be.

The new characters are unappealing, but that’s for the simple reason that they’re so blandly written and so pathetically desperate to appear cool and trendy. And while viewing Saints Row 2 as anything but a low rent Grand Theft Auto clone requires some very thick rose-tinted glasses it is odd that this reboot drops the few elements that did make it stand out, in terms of running a criminal empire.

It is easy to understand why developer Volition would want to reboot Saints Row, as the last game, which featured a full musical number set in Hell, had long since given up on any sense of realism. This reboot dials things back down to somewhere between Saints Row 2 and 3 on the absurd-o-scale, which, like most compromises, is unlikely to please anyone – a phrase that happens to describe the new Saints Row in general.

There are many strange design decisions in Saints Row but one of the oddest is that it doesn’t really have a story. You and your three roommates start off as low-level gang members, before deciding to start their own gang. After they do that that though there’s no real plot, just a series of missions that involve you taking down each of your rivals. There’s no