Saints Row IV Review

[IamLEAM1983]

There's a point in Saints Row IV where you realize that the franchise that started as a me-too for GTA San Andreas has more than come into its own. The Third Street Saints have found themselves through ruthless applications of parody and alternated uses of clever mission design and toilet humour. Its creed is the Rule of Fun and gosh darn it all, if that means abandoning the Crime Drama roots of the series, then the game is absolutely, unabashedly okay with doing so. The end result is a game that revels in its own nature as a piece of artifice and as a diversion, a product that does meta-humour to the extent that you'll start to wonder why Rockstar ever thought that ditching the cray for a stronger focus on character studies and social critique would be a good idea.

In my case, that realization came when I found myself super-speeding through Steelport with two Shaundis as my wingmen – both the fun-loving Eliza Dushku Shaundi and the no-nonsense and belligerent Danielle Nicolet Shaundi, the game deliberately glitching out as a result of my character's in-simulation projection having inhaled some alien drugs (i.e. bad code). The simulants of Fake Steelport start glitching out thanks to clever reproductions of standard bugs (and a few non-standard ones), the entire screen occasionally turns into a garbled mess; and all the while there's some extremely cheerful Indie Rock tidbit playing in the background.

To me, that's the game saying that I had its permission to have fun, to stop worrying about the Boss' sociopathic underpinnings and to revel in the insanity of it all. It's the game saying it knows it's a game, and that attempting to act as anything other than an entertaining diversion would only spell disaster. It's so rare, nowadays, to find a game that's actually committed to fun stuff.

And then some of my friends wonder why I hated Grand Theft Auto IV or why I'm not looking forward to the fifth iteration.

I've already gone over the opening and the basic hooks, so let me do this quickly : you've been elected as President of the United States when you're the last person who ever should have business in the White House, and your presidency is marked by aliens invading Earth and sticking the best and brightest of us into a computer simulation as part of some sort of aggressive conquest and exploitation effort by the galaxy-spanning Zin Empire. You'll hack your way out of Fake and Simulated Steelport thanks to bog-standard open-world activities redressed as Elite Haxxor stuff.

The traversal gameplay is awesome. The subversion of the game's nature is a great hook. Characters manage the weird act of being absolute monsters and still come off as sympathetic sorts – especially the protagonist – and the antagonist chews the scenery with such relish that you're sad to see him go. Zinyak has reached my personal pantheon of Awesome Video Game Villains, up there with Vaas and Handsome Jack.

It's sad, then, that the meat of the game feels like an artificially inflated “expandalone”. It has Blood Dragon's mission variety (as in, very little), but it tries to stretch things out to the sixty-hour mark by packing more and more and more of the same things you used to do back in the game's early hours. Saints Row IV is a game that has many strengths, but the staving-off of boredom is not one of them.

Part of that problem rests with the fact that if Saints Row The Third was open-world Crime Drama gameplay cranked up to eleven, the fourth game understands that to go higher, it has to shed its earthly coil – metaphorically speaking. This means that SRIV is less Scarface than it is Kick-Ass and The Matrix. Once you'll learn that former Radical Entertainment employees and devs joined Volition prior to THQ folding, you'll recognize several things in Fake Steelport's mechanics as being direct lifts from Prototype and The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Everything down to your super-running animations and the one you use when super-stomping the ground feels rehashed, and that can be a bit disheartening. Seeing as you gain access to your main traversal tools within the first hour, the last remnant of the Crime Drama roots is unceremoniously dropped – making the time-honored tradition of lifting cars and getting them tricked-out at the closest Rim Jobs absolutely pointless. Sink time into the Crackdown-esque activity of hunting for snippets of corrupt code throughout Fake Steelport, and you'll quickly earn the ability to run up walls, glide across entire boroughs in one leap or even run on water. Streets and GPS-imposed detours become laughable artifacts from a game genre that's very quickly abandoned, which means you'll spend most of your time looking at your virtual playground from a bird's-eye perspective. It's fun, even awesome at first – but then you realize you'll never feel the need to hunt for a Temptress or a Blade again.

Similarly, the concept of taking the city over is here rehashed as your attempt to corrupt the simulation. Zinyak rigged Fake Steelport to more or less be a read-only environment for the Boss, but Kinzie Kenzington comes in faster than you can say “gameplay convenience” and immediately proceeds to blow the hinges out of the earlier-mentioned limitations. With store ownership being gated by a simple hacking minigame as opposed to a pay wall, there's no real work involved if you're trying to own every ounce of Steelport. The hacking minigame is yet another Pipe Dream-esque mechanic, with its thirty-four puzzles playing out in the same order no matter which stores you hack first. If anything, the game acknowledges that you're in the process of turning Simulation 31 into a buggy mess, with the above-mentioned intentional rigging or animation-related fuckups growing more and more prevalent.

None of that would bother me overly much if the side missions weren't simply more of this, repeated ad nauseam. I can understand hacking stores or other buildings if Kinzie or Matt Miller (the other tech-head who's taken to working with the last surviving POTUS) ask me to; but when Shaundi asks me the same thing four times, I start to feel a bit exasperated.

No matter your cabinet member's respective personalities, they'll all have the same things to ask of you, in roughly the same order: hack a couple stores, take a few Hot Spots – which are Matrixified versions of the large rival gang clusters you'd find in the previous game – climb a few towers because, hey, Assassin's Creed gameplay references make us cool – or cause generalized mayhem over a specific span of time in order to better propagate a computer virus. Each instance of these activities is tied to a specific spot on the map, and you're entirely free to take to Steelport in a freeform manner. This means that you'll frequently bump into instances where, say, Pierce Washington gives you a set of tasks, only for you to have previously handled each individual item on his list on your own.

Uh... Okay. Guess I'll just take my reward. Never mind that I didn't have to lift a finger to get it. Thanks, Pierce. I guess.

The more you play, the more you'll find that you're robbing the side missions of their integrity simply by playing the game. The more you do so, the more you realize that the side missions are padding, and especially padding of the worst possible kind. The Third treated its diversions as precisely that – optional stuff you'd do for cash or increased zone control. The new game, on the other hand, makes you jump through all of those hoops, presenting you with the illusion of freedom. By the time you'll have defeated Zinyak, Virtual Steelport will be entirely and completely yours, no matter what you'll do. That sucks all replayability out of the game.

Thankfully, each cabinet member comes with his or her loyalty mission. It's a bit of a silly choice for a name, as most of the President's associates are former hard-bitten criminals who've stuck it out with their Boss for well over twenty years if you go by the series' timeline. These missions provide more character-focused humour and stand apart from the endless morass of the excessively exploited hacking or racing diversions – so these, in particular, are absolutely worth playing. Shaundi's loyalty mission sees you help her confront the demons of her past in the form of her former stoner self, while Pierce has channelled his hate of his status as the Saints' media icon through a manifested literal phobia for Saints Flow mascots.

In other words, you're stuck helping him crush soda cans with arms and legs that happen to be packing heat. Just when you think you'll be done, a Godzilla-sized anthro Saints Flow can starts trashing the gang's former penthouse, leaving you to possess the statue of Joe Magarac so you can go on a one-on-one set of fisticuffs. Asha Odekar's own mission involves a clever parody of everything Metal Gear Solid-related, right down to the antagonist of the moment being an evil version of yourself regardless of gender – its evil nature represented through an eye patch and a goatee.

Again, regardless of gender.

The initial brilliance the game's first few hours shows can be found in these missions, but the problem is that they bring the total play time to something like a dozen hours or so – your typical expansion or DLC length, in a sense. Considering, the padding begins to make a little more sense, but it's honestly sad. Why didn't Deep Silver allow Volition to focus on what was strong and what was actually funny and engaging? Why restructure the game so the padding becomes an inescapable part of gameplay?

It's really unfortunate. One moment you'll be grinning from ear to ear while causing widespread chaos as Emperor Zinyak reads the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice aloud to you, or because you've stumbled on an oldschool text-based adventure à la Zork that doesn't take itself seriously at all. Or Zinyak will try and confront the Boss with his or her general lack of anything that even remotely resembles a general culture or education, only for the protagonist's retort to be amusingly flippant. It also doesn't help that Zinyak takes to his Affable Villain trope with all the relish and gusto he can muster, throwing you into another text adventure that crams The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado into a single piece of ASCII art.

Obviously, your character doesn't get any of these references, much to Zinyak's frustration. The Boss is happily, blissfully, carelessly and recklessly stupid – so the idea of sticking an exceedingly learned (and therefore quite British because stereotypes) alien overlord as your comedic foil is the stuff of genius.

And then – you'll be hacking shops, and more shops and more shops. You'll be going through the same endlessly repeated Mayhem activities in their three or four variations. You'll be going through Rifts in the simulation's code to help an imprisoned A.I. whose idea of disrupting a 3D space involves chucking colour-coded grenades at corresponding lights. You'll be running really fast along a predetermined path, because going fast supposedly makes the simulation panic. You'll be claiming Hot Spots and towers because Red is bad and Blue is good. You'll power yourself up to such an extent that in order to die on Hard, you'll need to stand still in a small gaggle of alerted enemies, and let them shoot at you for all of ten minutes. The very same things that set you free, such as the Boss' near-godliness once hacked superpowers enter the fray, also become things that kill the gameplay's potential. Even the craziest of all guns-and-explosions-everywhere setpiece won't knock out more than one third of your massive health bar, and to regain health, all you have to do is kill people.

Even on the hardest difficulty setting, you absolutely cannot die. Nothing can stop you, and barely anything tries to stop you. Absolute domination on the battlefield is fun for a bit, but I soon found myself ignoring my supercharged wrestling moves and falling back on my guns because guns kill enemies slower. As soon as your fists enter the picture, you're saddled up for an endless stream of one-hit kills.

Yawn.

Otherwise, the game isn't terribly stable. It's crashed twice for me and its framerate inexplicably tanks every once in a great while. There's a lack of optimization at play here, but none of it is as criminal as the lack of challenge. Playing as an unmitigated badass is fun for ten minutes, but I've always found that mortal peril more than effectively spices things up in my open-world adventures. Skyrim never lets you feel like a god among men unless you go out farming bandit hideouts, and Prototype had the sense of featuring a plot that included a steady increase of the military response's effectiveness in stopping you. InFAMOUS was extremely good at making you sweat even if you'd maxed out your Good or Bad Karma skillsets – but Saints Row IV doesn't even try. It goes to the point where any potential desire I might have to come back later and mess with the game with a trainer has gone out the window entirely. As-is, I'll just clear the game, uninstall it for a while, and come back to it later.

Understand, though – there's plenty of reasons to like this game. It features the kind of freedom of movement few open-world games stick to, the humour is always spot-on, the script is witty when it doesn't disappear behind its erected wall of mindless drudgery, and even the worst elected scumbags ever turn out to be lovable rogues who just happen to have a thing for casual murders.

The press is still gushing over it, but I think some perspective is lacking. It's a great game, but I think Deep Silver should have allowed it to continue onwards as the DLC it was supposed to be. The plot, characters and general bits of insanity to be expected of a Saints Row game would have shined brighter in a tighter package, whereas the current final product only diminishes the earnestness that is very much perceptible and might enable the more cynical types to think it's just another cash grab.

If I have to hack another store by connecting lines à la Gunpey, it'll be too soon.

[IamLEAM1983]

So apparently, the Boss is a Grinch in the making. He doesn't give two shits about Crimbo and realistically, that shouldn't matter. The Earth got blown up by Zinyak and all of Humanity can be summed up to the Saints' seven or eight members. It somehow does matter, though, because Zinyak captured Santa and forced him to endure the depredations of his evil twin, Santa Clawz, across Fake Steelport.

According to Future Cyborg Shaundi, jolly old Saint Nick needs to be saved from the Matrix. That involves defeating Clawz and introducing the Boss to the Spirit of Christmas.

It can also involve licking a candy cane barricade until the Boss goes all woozy from diabetic shock, all depending on you. There's also giant elves (which are really regular-sized people clad in Will Ferrell Elf-ish attire, and killer cyborg nutcrackers and reindeer. Plus homicidal gingerbread men.

There's also call-backs to A Christmas Story and How the Grinch Saved Christmas, with the whole concept of Santa Clawz immediately reminding me of The Nightmare Before Christmas' Sandy Claws reference. While the game was piping its best Yuletide Dubstep, I was humming Kidnap the Sandy Claws.

It's fun, it's stupid, and you get to air-bomb nice households with presents and to pelt naughty ones with flaming coal. The nice ones sprout big-ass candy canes on the rooftops, the naughty ones sprout Krampus horns. Volition also threw a bone to the less Judeo-Christian among us, by having you use your Fire Blast powers to light up Kwanzaa candles and a giant menorah. For the really non-denominational among us, the Festivus pole is featured; as well as its associated tradition of “airing grievances”. Obviously Kinzie's the one with the most shit to belt out, feeling constantly over-utilized as a plot device.

My only regrets have to do with the DLC's length in response to the price, and the fact that only the core voice actors turn a performance in. There's no Terry Crews as Ben King in sight, and Fun Shaundi is disappointingly absent. What I really would've liked, though, would've been a verbose and passionate explanation by Zinyak as to why kidnapping Santa mattered so much if he was going to blow the planet up anyway.

But – ya know. Vidjas don't need logic. Not necessarily, at the very least.

Shit, now I'm stuck with Kidnap the Sandy Claws... I'll have to watch that damn movie all over again.