Saints Row review: An excellent reboot fueled by Gen Z rage

Saints Row is a series predicated on one existential question: What if you just didn’t give a fuck anymore?

Are you miserable at work? You’re a criminal lord and you can fire an RPG in your office. Jerkwad ex won’t leave your friend alone? He will not be left alone if you wingsuit on his patio. You can jump from a nearby building and tackle him 60ft up. Snob of the suburban new-riche uses a valuable piece modern art as a drying rack. Drive home on rush hour in an lava-colored golf cart.

These problems can be solved by human beings, but Saints Row’s reboot is about getting reasonable people to do it for themselves. The Boss of the newly formed Saints solves every problem that comes their way in a straight-line fashion: There’s you, there’s the goal, and in most cases, all that’s left of anything in between those two points is a trail of smoking, bleeding, or radioactively green glowing debris.

In terms of scale, this new incarnation of the series isn’t Very as bonkers as its immediate predecessors — after all, in the first couple hours of Saints Row 4.They The Earth can be blown up. It exists somewhere in the middle of the straighter, more elegant versions. Saints Row 2.The left-field turn of slapstick Saints Row 3. Thus, while there’s nothing as wild as a gun that fires weaponized dubstep, you can still skin your grenade launcher so that it fires beer cans instead (and that’s one of the tamer options).

Image: Volition/Deep Silver

It would be fair, at the core to refer to the new Saints Row an evolution more than a reboot; the setting and characters are new, but the core gameplay elements haven’t changed. Slowly, you take control of the city by killing many people and performing various actions. JackassYou can also sabotage episodes. Have you ever written a Yelp review that was so negative, anarchist hipsters ran out to get shotguns and retaliate? The factions even feel vaguely similar; anarchist hipsters the Idols said that echo Saints Row 3’s emo hacker Deckers, for example, but updated for 2022.

This is not a problem. All the classic trappings from the series needed an update over the past nine years. Saints Row 4. happened (we don’t talk about You can get out of hellIn this house The world has evolved since that time. While the old and new Bosses have some core things in common — casual disregard for the lives of strangers, inhuman toughness, being super good at murder — their contexts are very different.

The Boss of SR3 And 4 A crime boss, who rose from humble beginnings in his first job. Saints Row. In this version, the Boss (a frustrated Millennial/Gen Z mix) lives with three roommates in a tiny apartment. They lose their jobs at Marshall Defense Industries, a cartoonishly evil company, in the opening hours. You are in debt, and it is keeping you under its control. You feel like you are wasting your talents digging dirt for somebody with half your abilities but 4x your income. Fuck ’em.

The resulting entrepreneurial bent (“Be your own boss” is the game’s slightly meta motto) flavors the core gameplay. Once the Saints begin in earnest, you take over the city by building “criminal ventures” at various vacant lots across Santo Ileso. The law-breaking money machines come with several activities which help grow the company; each of the activities helps Saints to take control of the locality where they are located.

Image: Volition/Deep Silver

Some are common. Saints RowFare: You can make money at the Shady Oaks insurance front by walking in traffic and running over cars. Building an arms smuggling emporium opens up the classic “Mayhem” activity where you demonstrate the merchandise by spectacularly blowing shit up. Some are more recent, such as a toxic waste dump, where you must carefully drive trucks filled with radioactive goo around the city. Or a vaporwave haute couture workshop, where the designer will give you her dream notebook and ask you to take photos of things that reflect what she sees. There are also “side hustles,” which can net you extra money to reinvest into your criminal empire, but don’t necessarily contribute to overall progress.

Your empire will grow, and the main story follows the Saints through increasingly bizarre set-pieces that allow you to murder anyone who crosses your path. It’s the ContextThere are many different types of murders. Sometimes it’s expected action movie situations (a train robbery, rescuing a kidnapped friend) and sometimes it’s absolutely not. Some of these are hilariously bizarre in the most amusing way. One of them involves a local gang power stealing popular children’s meal toys from local fast-food restaurants and then you running around trying to find them. Another is a city-wide post-apocalyptic LARP where your weapons are replaced with foam guns and your takedown becomes a pantomime of ripping someone’s heart out.

Much like Stilwater, Steelport and Steelport before, Santo Ileso, itself is a unique character. Where the previous games’ settings had an upper-Midwest, Rust Belt aesthetic to them, Santo Ileso is a fusion of media portrayals of the U.S. Southwest. Going solely by places I’ve been to, it’s a sort of melange of San Antonio, rural Arizona, Reno, and even a bit of Southern California, depending on the neighborhood. The city’s east side is working class industrial crowned by a gentrified arts district, while the west side is a corporate high-rise midtown that slowly transitions into a strip of casinos and red light district-y shops. The city itself is surrounded in extensive scrubland, which is unlike previous Saints Row games. There are abandoned mining towns, roadside attractions (Santo Ileso can be found on Route 66), and rocky cliff sides.

Image: Volition/Deep Silver via Polygon

As much as I like Santo Ileso, which has all the quirks and details that really define the best cities found in games like Saints Row or Grand Theft Auto, I feel very aware that I am a white person from the northeast who’s never lived farther south than southern Ohio. Santo Ileso was marketed as an especially southwestern U.S. town because of many things. Please send me — including two Spanish-language radio stations, complete with Spanish readings of the intermittent in-game news broadcasts — may read very different to natives of the region, and I’ll be looking for the reads of others once the game is out. Saints Row — especially Saints Row 3 — has a messy history with race because of its invoking of fictionalized visions of (note skeptical quotation marks) “gang culture.” I think Volition is aware of this, and steadily working to improve it, but the new SR doesn’t always hit the mark; Los Panteros as a machismo-driven gang of brutes led by a vindictive misogynist feels KindaIt is bad for race politics, particularly since Idols rival gang is mainly rich white raver children from the nice area of town.

While I largely enjoyed my time in Santo Ileso, the game definitely has its frustrations — Many of which are holdovers from earlier entries. Many, many activities involve vehicles, especially with “get X to Y across the city without it blowing up” objectives, but the default difficulty can make said vehicles feel a little too fragile. Similarly, many combat-oriented activities are a “horde mode” situation, but the Boss feels a little too fragile for how many baseball bat-wielding weirdos are out there trying to fuck you over. The result was often a series of try-again-from-checkpoint deaths that got on my nerves pretty fast.

On the flip side, however, Volition now presents a strong set of difficulty options; the selectable difficulties aren’t concrete categories but are instead presets with different sliders at a specific number. You’re free to tweak those sliders yourself and change individual bits of the experience to suit your tastes. I found the situations I just described to be less annoying when I turned down the “Vehicle Combat” slider a bit, for example, giving friendly vehicles more base durability.

Image: Volition/Deep Silver via Polygon

The “Should you buy this game?” part of this review is easy: If you enjoyed previous Saints Row games, you will probably like this one, and if you’ve never played one, this is a decent onboarding point. You were once a big fan of Saints Row 2.However, I found the latter entries to the series to be somewhat lacking. TooIf you are a maniac, it is time to give in and accept the challenge. Saints RowIt’s worth a chance. It’s still got that comedic series edge, but it doesn’t break the knob off.

It’s worth noting, however, that even though the game sometimes frustrated me, and the core gameplay loop wasn’t especially new or innovative, Saints Row is the first game I’ve reviewed in years where I finished it, wrote the review, then went back in and started playing just for myself. There were so many incidental things that made me laugh or smile that I didn’t get to expound on here; the NPC I overheard shouting “SPEAK! TO! A! REPRESENTATIVE!” doppler back at me as I drove past, or the mariachi street band that — while I was watching them play — stopped mid-song, threw down their guitars in disgust, and literally walked off. There are many screenshots in my folder that I can’t wait to share with you when the embargo ends. They have both amazing customization options as well as some very snappy dialogue. Just keeping finding fun things to laugh at or share with friends was what I did. When it comes to endorsements for a game, I don’t think you can find a better one than that.

Saints Row August 23rd will see the game released for Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Deep Silver gave a pre-release code to the game for PC. Vox Media also has affiliate relationships. Although these partnerships do not impact editorial content, Vox Media could earn commissions for products bought via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.