Open world games have become monotonous lately. Each studio aspires to deliver the “biggest open world” regardless of content and attention to detail. With the unveiling of a new part of the Saints Row series and the assertion that the game will be a complete Reboot of this world, we hoped that we would get a unique experience that would compensate fans of the series for the disappointing recent parts, but also compensate all fans of open-world games who had bad experiences over the years. past.
Unfortunately, the new Saints Row game did not provide us with this expected compensation, and the final product is nothing but a traditional and ordinary action experience that we have obtained dozens of times from other games. But luckily, there are some elements that make the experience at least “fun”!
Saints Row’s story is so mundane that it becomes forgotten after the game is closed
The story of Saints Row takes place in an all-new city for the series, Santo Ileso. The game follows your fully customizable main character (The Boss), a character who gets paid for his work and remains in a state of despair until they decide to create an all-new criminal organization, The Saints, to take over the city. Throughout the events of the game’s story, you will have to eliminate other criminal organizations that reside in the city of Santo Ileso until you are the sole ruler of the city and impose your control over it. This is generally the main story of the game, with other details about the characters that help you (and we won’t spoil it for you, of course).
Unfortunately, the story isn’t the best thing about Saints Row as we were expecting more drama and details about the backstory of each of the main characters in The Saints gang. Even the other gangs and their bosses are not presented in the best possible way, they are just bad guys that you have to eliminate.
In general, do not expect a strong story from Saints Row because its story will not really provide you with the enjoyment you want, especially since it will not attract you at first sight in any way, and for us, we would forget where we stood in the story when we closed it because there are not many missions that affect in you or makes you anticipate what will happen next. Fortunately, there are a handful of interesting main missions that introduce some creativity into the narrative. Mix this up with a few jokes thrown right, and the story at the end is quite mundane and you can enjoy it quite a bit as you play the game.
Creativity appears in the style of play
The entire beauty of Saints Row is in the gameplay. Volition Studio has really excelled in providing an exciting action experience based mainly on violence and confronting enemies face to face. Each of the game’s weapons has its own character and you can diversify them in different combat scenarios. The game also allows you to modify weapons and their shape to make each weapon have its own distinctive and varied shape.
Speaking of customization and modification, you can modify everything in the game from the appearance of your main character to your vehicle and the headquarters you establish with The Saints. Every detail of everything in the world of Saints Row is exceptionally customizable and this system is among the best we’ve seen in the industry.
The city of Santo Ileso itself is relatively large and transportation within it will be by means of various vehicles. Driving style in Saints Row is a mixture of realism and fun. You will not get a driving experience like Forza Horizon, for example, but at the same time you will not get a driving experience like Blur. It’s a unique combination that makes Saints Row’s driving style its own.
The problem with Santo Ileso is that it’s a city that doesn’t catch the eye and doesn’t make you want to explore and move around a lot, especially since a large part of its landmarks are very close to each other. The city is still at least better than what was presented in the fourth part, but we wanted something better than that. The same applies to the side quests, which were very weak. In Saints Row you own your phone and with it you can activate various missions. Focus initially on the main missions because they are the most fun, and if you finish them and want to spend more time in this world, go to the side missions, but don’t expect too much from them.
Another problem that you will see clearly in Saints Row is the artificial intelligence, which we wouldn’t call “intelligence”, but the best description for this thing is “artificial stupidity”. Our experience of the game was on normal difficulty, and that is the normal difficulty that we play most games on, as it offers a kind of challenge while providing an entertaining experience at the same time. We didn’t feel like the game was challenging us with anything the whole time we tried it, and we even found the AI of the enemies so weak that we didn’t feel the gravity of the situation and we didn’t die at all!
The skill tree in Saints Row is not deep, and that is not a negative in our view, as it makes the system of assigning skills and adding the appropriate skills easy for most players, and they do not need to delve too much until they find the right style of play for them.
All in all, the most fun thing about Saints Row is getting into confrontations with enemies and using the environment and its fantastic physics to destroy them one by one. The game also has a deep Takedowns system that makes you feel like John Wick in these close-range encounters, and you won’t get bored of doing Takedowns over and over again as there are a variety of them.
In addition, like the third and fourth parts, the new Saints Row game supports cooperative play between players over the Internet. You can explore the game world and complete all missions and challenges with one of your friends without any problems. And yes, the progress in the game will be calculated for each player in you, even if you do not play together again, and this means that you will not need to re-try the tasks again individually after you leave your friend’s world, and vice versa!
Graphics, acoustics, and technical performance
Distinctive graphic style
Saints Row is based on an improved version of Volition’s proprietary engine on which Saints Row 3 and 4 were built, and like the rest of the series, the game’s graphic style is still the most unique in offering the perfect blend of realism and cartoonishness. Saints Row’s graphics have always been something different that we don’t see very often in the gaming world. The design of the characters and environments is very realistic, but the action, explosions, and battles take on an enthusiastic cartoon character that will not happen in real life at all. Indeed, the new Saints Row has perfectly mastered this combination.
The only problem with the game’s graphics is the ray tracing technology. We were excited when we learned that the game supports ray tracing technology in lighting, but by activating this technology we found that the technical performance had decreased significantly, and at the same time we did not get the graphic upgrade we were waiting for. We do not recommend activating ray tracing technology, as it does not provide anything significant on the game’s graphics and lighting.
Great soundtrack
Perhaps the thing that made us immersed the most in the encounters and the gameplay is the interesting soundtrack that adds a wonderful atmosphere to the game world. Since the whole game is based on action and direct confrontations, it was necessary to master the presentation of the interesting and enthusiastic soundtrack, and the game Saints Row succeeded in providing that deservedly. In addition, the game offers you loads of famous songs that you can listen to on the radio while driving your car around Santo Ileso. Some of these songs even appear in the main story missions and make them more exciting and fun.
Acting performances are acceptable (sort of)
Like you can customize the look of your character, the look of your car, and the look of your criminal area, you can also customize the voice of the main character in the game. The game offers you 8 voices to choose from, 4 male voices, and 4 female voices. As explained, we had been playing the entire game with a female Boss, and we chose the British accent and this was a very good choice as it more conveys the strong and violent feel of the Boss in many scenes. The voice acting for the main characters was pretty good, but most of the side characters were boring.
The other boring thing about Saints Row is the comedy, although there are some great jokes thrown throughout the game, most of the other jokes are so thin and make you feel disgusted rather than laugh!
Technical performance is not good enough
Frankly, we do not know what to say about the technical performance of the game. The technical performance has advantages, but it suffers from a huge number of defects at the same time. Let’s talk first about the features, these are the specifications on which we tried the game:
- Intel Core i3 10100F
- 16 GB of RAM DDR4 2666 MHz
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB
- NVME M.2 SSD
The game ran without any issues on the highest settings and 1080p resolution with frame rates between 50 and 60fps. If you want to enable ray tracing technology, you have to reduce the settings to Medium or High in order to enjoy 60 stable frames, but as mentioned, ray tracing technology does not add much, so there is no need to activate it in general. In terms of technical flaws, this appears at first glance on the settings menu. We are talking about a game in 2022 that does not support any of the modern technologies for smoothing resolution and increasing performance, such as Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR. The game depends on its own Resolution Scaling system, and its implementation is very bad.
The game also suffers from a large number of technical problems and bugs that we encountered throughout our experience with it, and even crashed the game once or twice as far as we can remember. These problems should be resolved after release as soon as possible, and Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR technologies should also be added to help the various graphics cards to run the game without problems and more smoothly.
Conclusion
Saints Row is an entertaining experience, but that’s the only way we can describe the game. Will you get pleasure from your experience with it? surely. But if you expect to get a distinctive and different open world experience that goes back to the strong foundation of the series, this will not get it here, especially with a huge number of technical problems, and insufficient attention to presenting memorable characters or tasks. Despite this, Volition Studio is still on the right track with the series, and they will certainly learn from the mistakes of this game while working on the new part, so let’s hope that the next game will not disappoint.
Carryminate evaluation
Story and characters: 6
Play Style: 8
Graphics and sounds: 7
Technical performance: 5
Advantages
Good sense of humor
Distinctive design of some main story missions
The gameplay is fun
Countless customization possibilities
Master the graphic mix between realism and cartoonishness
Great upbeat soundtrack
Disadvantages
The story is easy to forget and so are the characters
An unattractive open world for you to explore
Lots of technical problems
Artificial intelligence is very weak
Insufficient use of ray tracing technology
No use of technologies such as Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR in 2022
