Developer Volition
Publisher Deep Silver
Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Release Out now
The Saints' boss sighs deeply, as her plans for a team-bonding day are spoiled yet again by a rival gang. "How many motherfuckers do we have to kill to have a goddamn day off?" she growls. Our thoughts precisely. The shootout that follows is, like almost every other encounter in Volition's misguided reboot, aggressively protracted: one more bout of effortful but numbingly repetitive carnage involving waves of moronic but frustratingly hardy enemies. This one is complicated slightly in this instance by your AI teammates' unfortunate habit of walking into explosions, but at least when one perishes we're not forced to sit through the introductory preamble we usually get when restarting a mission. Nor, on this occasion, have our skill shortcuts inexplicably disappeared, though our ability to fast-travel appears to have been disabled. We've grown accustomed to that during missions as well as the map screen being out of commission - but not outside of them.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/2246545655.jpg]
Welcome, then, to Santo Ileso, a fictional city in the American Southwest, and an urban sandbox that would prefer you to forget that the past ten years ever happened. To a point, you can understand Volition opting for the throwback approach - Saints Row had escalated to such preposterous extremes that the only realistic option it had was to return to first principles. On paper, the idea of a more grounded type of rags-to-riches crime story makes sense. But the result feels deeply compromised, falling awkwardly between the Saints Row of old and the series it became. It seems unsure of how weird and outlandish it should get; consequently, it settles on an approach that feels like it's holding back yet whose sillier elements fatally undermine the storytelling.
That story opens with a choppy, awkward mix of action and cinematics that immediately bodes ill for the rest of the game: your self-created player-character begins their first shift at PMC Marshall Industries, which involves capturing a dangerous criminal, in typically chaotic fashion. After being admonished by superior Gwen - who has clearly subsumed her status as a personality trait - for showing initiative rather than following orders, she launches a volley of invective on the drive home that feels so self-consciously edgy it's almost enough to have us swearing off profanity entirely.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/7766922675.jpg]
Saints Row's one big idea doesn't arrive until a little way in, when your housemates and friends (hot-tempered right-hand woman Neenah, persistently shirtless DJ Kevin, and business-minded nerd Eli) have agreed it's time to seek alternative means to pay the rent. By then, they've used their prior connections to the city's three main factions to give your new startup a leg up, but it's not long until you've made enough noise and cash that they're all after you. Time, then, for a bit of aggressive expansion: inside a rundown church, you set up base, and gather around your 'criminal empire table' to spend your ill-gotten gains on various business ventures, establishing legitimate fronts for nefarious activities on empty lots dotted about Santo Ileso.
Each generates a set of side missions, and some of these are reasonably entertaining in isolation. Wingsuit Saboteur asks you to place satchel charges on rooftop satellite dishes to blow them up before launching yourself upward using a weather-monitoring station so you can glide over to the next roof. Choplifting grants you a helicopter to ferry heavy loads from one location to another. You'll steal food vans to use for smuggling drugs, and hotwire cars to bring back to the local chop shop per the owner's requests. Later, you'll engage in field tests for high-tech equipment, or take part in cleanup operations that require you to dispose of vehicles in a variety of ways while avoiding alerting the police. Yet if the idea is to make your version of Santo Ileso distinct from other players, it's only partly successful: you're limited to placing them in fixed locations, and they have no impact on the surrounding area. The one point of difference is territorial: to boost the venture's earnings (which accrue passively), you'll need to force out several groups of whichever faction previously controlled that part of the city.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/1729922664.jpg]
By then, you will have already faced the hard-hitting Los Panteros, the moneyed Marshall troops with their technologically advanced kit, and the fame-hungry Idols, hipsters with Daft Punk helmets who have a neat line in disruptive, disorienting techniques. You would imagine fighting one faction to feel distinct from the rest, but the differences in practice are marginal: Los Panteros tr tend to rush you a little more than the others, but by and large groups comprise a mix of ranged and close-quarters fighters that are defeated in very similar fashion. Regardless of what they're wearing, they'll frequently stand in the open, sometimes get confounded by scenery, occasionally make mistakes that defy belief, and are always more likely to beat you through sheer weight of numbers than intelligence. "Eh, it's the murder business," your boss says at one point. "The fundamentals don't change, just the uniform." How very true.
Skills unlocked one by one as you level up - also factor in, bound to a 'flow' gauge that refills automatically as you fight, but none seems quite so effective as the very first, Pineapple Express, which lets you grab a nearby opponent, shove a grenade in their pants, and url them back toward their allies (though splash damage isn't significant). Another lets you recover health by dealing damage, though a more reliable method is through melee takedowns: there's an appreciable selection of randomly generated animations when you press the button, ranging from repeated slaps to more brutal John Wick-style executions, but the sheer volume of enemies means you'll see them all dozens of times. There are passive perks besides, but the cost of buying a slot to equip the most effective ones is eye-wateringly expensive particularly given you'll need that money for the more costly ventures, with a late-game story mission demanding that you've built up your criminal empire sufficiently before letting you in. A further requirement to have completed every mission for several ventures only exacerbates the repetition of these tasks. Given the degree to which you must speculate before you can begin to accumulate, we end up leaving the game idling for a full morning to earn the right to continue.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/6561177927.jpg]
For every positive there is a caveat. The aforementioned cleanup operations come with bizarrely strict time limits, certainly compared to the other timed activities, with errant waypoint markers often forcing you into breathless sprints to reach the mission start point in time. Photographing landmarks to activate them as fast-travel points is a fine idea, but given the effort and expense in unlocking them, it's unfathomable that your own businesses don't have that functionality. The multi-purpose Triangle button can cause problems, too. While trying to start one mission we leap feet first through the windshield of a passing car, somehow offending a nearby taxi driver who immediately gives chase. Later, we inadvertently beat to death a customer in the doughnut queue, causing an instant mission failure despite the very same NPC promptly attacking us when our face shows up on the game's Wanted app, encouraging passersby to engage in some vigilante justice. Sandstorms occasionally blow in, presumably because Avalanche's Mad Max made such effective use of them though here they're little more than a visibility reducing irritant, even if we're amused when we can barely see past our nose in a mission called Observe And Report. And when the final act delivers more fantastical elements, we can only wonder why Volition waited until the game was almost over to hand out its best toys.
In terms of performance, the PS5 version we've tested is lacking, beyond its underwhelming presentation: traffic in the middle distance vanishes as you approach, and vehicles sometimes lift off vertically when bumping into lampposts and the like. Occasionally our skills go missing; sometimes we lose our weapons; three times the game seizes up entirely and we're forced to quit and restart; two quest-givers become unresponsive when we try to start a conversation. Some bugs provoke hilarity: after we land a helicopter next to a laundromat, three nearby pedestrians freak out, performing a ritual dance around the chopper while sporadically screaming. We eventually tire of this and take off, only to notice four others have joined in. The group then moves into the road, still spinning and cowering, whereupon a car ploughs through them, leaving three bodies in its wake.
We could have coped with technical issues, curious UI choices and unsophisticated mission design had Saints Row given us even half as many memorable moments as previous entries The Third and IV. We could even forgive a Portal joke that would have felt old hat a decade ago. But this whole enterprise feels misbegotten, even before the story goes wildly off the rails, belatedly introducing a new threat, before wrapping up with an ending that almost feels algorithmically generated. Referring to her former employer, our boss says, "As far as hired killers go, I'd give 'em a 7." Alas, we're not feeling nearly so generous.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/5624475662.jpg]
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO LARP
For the most...
Publisher Deep Silver
Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Release Out now
The Saints' boss sighs deeply, as her plans for a team-bonding day are spoiled yet again by a rival gang. "How many motherfuckers do we have to kill to have a goddamn day off?" she growls. Our thoughts precisely. The shootout that follows is, like almost every other encounter in Volition's misguided reboot, aggressively protracted: one more bout of effortful but numbingly repetitive carnage involving waves of moronic but frustratingly hardy enemies. This one is complicated slightly in this instance by your AI teammates' unfortunate habit of walking into explosions, but at least when one perishes we're not forced to sit through the introductory preamble we usually get when restarting a mission. Nor, on this occasion, have our skill shortcuts inexplicably disappeared, though our ability to fast-travel appears to have been disabled. We've grown accustomed to that during missions as well as the map screen being out of commission - but not outside of them.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/2246545655.jpg]
Welcome, then, to Santo Ileso, a fictional city in the American Southwest, and an urban sandbox that would prefer you to forget that the past ten years ever happened. To a point, you can understand Volition opting for the throwback approach - Saints Row had escalated to such preposterous extremes that the only realistic option it had was to return to first principles. On paper, the idea of a more grounded type of rags-to-riches crime story makes sense. But the result feels deeply compromised, falling awkwardly between the Saints Row of old and the series it became. It seems unsure of how weird and outlandish it should get; consequently, it settles on an approach that feels like it's holding back yet whose sillier elements fatally undermine the storytelling.
That story opens with a choppy, awkward mix of action and cinematics that immediately bodes ill for the rest of the game: your self-created player-character begins their first shift at PMC Marshall Industries, which involves capturing a dangerous criminal, in typically chaotic fashion. After being admonished by superior Gwen - who has clearly subsumed her status as a personality trait - for showing initiative rather than following orders, she launches a volley of invective on the drive home that feels so self-consciously edgy it's almost enough to have us swearing off profanity entirely.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/7766922675.jpg]
Saints Row's one big idea doesn't arrive until a little way in, when your housemates and friends (hot-tempered right-hand woman Neenah, persistently shirtless DJ Kevin, and business-minded nerd Eli) have agreed it's time to seek alternative means to pay the rent. By then, they've used their prior connections to the city's three main factions to give your new startup a leg up, but it's not long until you've made enough noise and cash that they're all after you. Time, then, for a bit of aggressive expansion: inside a rundown church, you set up base, and gather around your 'criminal empire table' to spend your ill-gotten gains on various business ventures, establishing legitimate fronts for nefarious activities on empty lots dotted about Santo Ileso.
Each generates a set of side missions, and some of these are reasonably entertaining in isolation. Wingsuit Saboteur asks you to place satchel charges on rooftop satellite dishes to blow them up before launching yourself upward using a weather-monitoring station so you can glide over to the next roof. Choplifting grants you a helicopter to ferry heavy loads from one location to another. You'll steal food vans to use for smuggling drugs, and hotwire cars to bring back to the local chop shop per the owner's requests. Later, you'll engage in field tests for high-tech equipment, or take part in cleanup operations that require you to dispose of vehicles in a variety of ways while avoiding alerting the police. Yet if the idea is to make your version of Santo Ileso distinct from other players, it's only partly successful: you're limited to placing them in fixed locations, and they have no impact on the surrounding area. The one point of difference is territorial: to boost the venture's earnings (which accrue passively), you'll need to force out several groups of whichever faction previously controlled that part of the city.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/1729922664.jpg]
By then, you will have already faced the hard-hitting Los Panteros, the moneyed Marshall troops with their technologically advanced kit, and the fame-hungry Idols, hipsters with Daft Punk helmets who have a neat line in disruptive, disorienting techniques. You would imagine fighting one faction to feel distinct from the rest, but the differences in practice are marginal: Los Panteros tr tend to rush you a little more than the others, but by and large groups comprise a mix of ranged and close-quarters fighters that are defeated in very similar fashion. Regardless of what they're wearing, they'll frequently stand in the open, sometimes get confounded by scenery, occasionally make mistakes that defy belief, and are always more likely to beat you through sheer weight of numbers than intelligence. "Eh, it's the murder business," your boss says at one point. "The fundamentals don't change, just the uniform." How very true.
Skills unlocked one by one as you level up - also factor in, bound to a 'flow' gauge that refills automatically as you fight, but none seems quite so effective as the very first, Pineapple Express, which lets you grab a nearby opponent, shove a grenade in their pants, and url them back toward their allies (though splash damage isn't significant). Another lets you recover health by dealing damage, though a more reliable method is through melee takedowns: there's an appreciable selection of randomly generated animations when you press the button, ranging from repeated slaps to more brutal John Wick-style executions, but the sheer volume of enemies means you'll see them all dozens of times. There are passive perks besides, but the cost of buying a slot to equip the most effective ones is eye-wateringly expensive particularly given you'll need that money for the more costly ventures, with a late-game story mission demanding that you've built up your criminal empire sufficiently before letting you in. A further requirement to have completed every mission for several ventures only exacerbates the repetition of these tasks. Given the degree to which you must speculate before you can begin to accumulate, we end up leaving the game idling for a full morning to earn the right to continue.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/6561177927.jpg]
For every positive there is a caveat. The aforementioned cleanup operations come with bizarrely strict time limits, certainly compared to the other timed activities, with errant waypoint markers often forcing you into breathless sprints to reach the mission start point in time. Photographing landmarks to activate them as fast-travel points is a fine idea, but given the effort and expense in unlocking them, it's unfathomable that your own businesses don't have that functionality. The multi-purpose Triangle button can cause problems, too. While trying to start one mission we leap feet first through the windshield of a passing car, somehow offending a nearby taxi driver who immediately gives chase. Later, we inadvertently beat to death a customer in the doughnut queue, causing an instant mission failure despite the very same NPC promptly attacking us when our face shows up on the game's Wanted app, encouraging passersby to engage in some vigilante justice. Sandstorms occasionally blow in, presumably because Avalanche's Mad Max made such effective use of them though here they're little more than a visibility reducing irritant, even if we're amused when we can barely see past our nose in a mission called Observe And Report. And when the final act delivers more fantastical elements, we can only wonder why Volition waited until the game was almost over to hand out its best toys.
In terms of performance, the PS5 version we've tested is lacking, beyond its underwhelming presentation: traffic in the middle distance vanishes as you approach, and vehicles sometimes lift off vertically when bumping into lampposts and the like. Occasionally our skills go missing; sometimes we lose our weapons; three times the game seizes up entirely and we're forced to quit and restart; two quest-givers become unresponsive when we try to start a conversation. Some bugs provoke hilarity: after we land a helicopter next to a laundromat, three nearby pedestrians freak out, performing a ritual dance around the chopper while sporadically screaming. We eventually tire of this and take off, only to notice four others have joined in. The group then moves into the road, still spinning and cowering, whereupon a car ploughs through them, leaving three bodies in its wake.
We could have coped with technical issues, curious UI choices and unsophisticated mission design had Saints Row given us even half as many memorable moments as previous entries The Third and IV. We could even forgive a Portal joke that would have felt old hat a decade ago. But this whole enterprise feels misbegotten, even before the story goes wildly off the rails, belatedly introducing a new threat, before wrapping up with an ending that almost feels algorithmically generated. Referring to her former employer, our boss says, "As far as hired killers go, I'd give 'em a 7." Alas, we're not feeling nearly so generous.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/VXt5t3dGO1662981012228/5624475662.jpg]
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO LARP
For the most...
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Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2022