Saints Row's Biggest Failure Is How It Misunderstands Today's Youth
Saints Row isn’t very good. I always had my hesitations with the reboot, unsure about its new approach to story and characters and a reliance on gameplay systems that already felt outdated ten years ago. Volition was clearly harkening back to a different era, placing all its bets on a nostalgia goldmine that it needed existing fans to latch onto. We tried to, and I don’t think the studio ever once undersold or misrepresented the game it was making, but goodness me the result is so mediocre it stings. On almost every account, it’s a big ol’ miss.
Volition seeks to recapture the playful magic of past entries, but doesn’t seem to possess a single cohesive direction. It wants to lean into the wackiness and irreverent humour of Saints Row The Third, while also drawing from the more serious gang warfare of 1 & 2, yet it also hopes to establish its own identity as a millennial success story of young people rising up from the corrupt structures of an establishment and make their own mark on the world. This is a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be, and thus it ends up feeling meaningless.
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The reboot opens with a whimper. A sedated dance party at The Saints HQ immediately flashes back to several months in the past, with our new vision of The Boss working for a private military company intent on murdering rival gangs. It is framed as a tiresome grind as our protagonist is thrown to the wolves on her first day with no training to speak of. Much like the real world, millennials must fend for themselves and will seldom receive assistance from older generations hoping to maintain their position atop the food chain. On the surface this could have been the
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