Ahh, Saints Row! The antagonist to Grand Theft Auto. Usually, we bet on the protagonist to win, but in the Grand Theft Auto vs Saint’s row brawl, I will happily bet on the Saints. The reason is simple: Grand Theft Auto started as chaotic fun games but eventually became too serious for their good. At the same time: Saints Row started as chaotic serious games before throwing the seriousness away to be stupidly fun games. 

Over the years, Saints Row has gone from being semi-serious games (Saints Row 1 & 2) to being hyper-over-the-top games with insanely dumb writing, over the top acting in worlds that you cannot help but love. They have not only been the antagonists to Grand Theft Auto but also the antagonists to the Politically Correct Brigade, the correct speech brigade as well as the idiot brigade. Saints Row has never tried to be correct; they have always tried to be fun, and that is why we welcome the latest instalment with open arms. So… has Saints Row come back as Saints Row, or has it lost what made it great to a world trying to overly correct itself.

Story:

We have a very standard rags-to-riches story; what Saints Row does differently is that it doesn’t fucking try to add any emotion to the story. Over the full story arc, there is no sense of pain, loss, or risk. I get that it is a Saints Row story but come on! Put some effort into it. The main arc is incredibly lacklustre with nothing pulling it up, the side stories that take place do try to make you feel closer to the side characters but by the end, you don’t feel even half as close to the side characters as you did for Johhny Gat after the first 20 minutes of Saints Row 2 or 3… or Gat Out of Hell.

The writing does feel very weak not only in the story department but also in the dialogue department. While corny and over the top, which fits a Saints Row; the dialogue never feels natural to either the player character or the sidekicks, it feels shoehorned in. The most obvious point of this lacklustre dialogue is how quickly the cast goes from being well-grounded to being murder machines in the blink of an eye.

I just want to point this out: when the game came out there were a lot of people saying that the game is “CRINGE!” (God! I hate that word) and woke. What people call cringe today is what most normal people will call unexpected gags or purposefully being dumb. It isn’t bad and oddly brought a smile to my face, maybe even a happy exhale a few times. As for the woke bit: I didn’t notice it at all unless woke means bi-sexual characters or calling out streamers/influencers for being annoying and easily enraged. I think people are calling the game woke not because it is but because it is making fun of them. I side with the game in that regard, it is Saints Row after all.

Sound:

The music is a high point. The radio stations are top-notch, with peppy driving tracks and real headbangers to listen to as you drive around Santo Ileso. The choice of background music in the missions keeps the trend going with great tracks that pump you up for combat… Most of the time, there are occasions when the tracks feel like they were picked last second.

Weapon sounds are all over the place with the shotgun feeling right but everything else feels very weak, especially the assault rifle and RPGs though explosions do have a decent if not great BOOM! Vehicles have the same problem; they all feel like they are electric cars unless you look out for the engine sound. Vehicles have it worse because explosions from a vehicle sound weaker.

Guess I’ve put it off enough. Time to talk about the voice acting: Since Saints Row lets you pick the voice you want, there are some choices. I checked in with all of them, and only one feels like it wasn’t phoned in (voice 7). All the others range from being funny due to the accent but not always feeling equally well done to being dull most of the time to have some breakout moment in a cinematic. It is just all over the place. As for the voice actors for the side cast, not bad at all. The early missions have a delivery that feels flat, but once the game gets going, the voice actors join in showing off a range of emotions… Within what the story lets them, the voice actor for Myra Starr (Anna Vocino) is great at her job.

Graphics:

I’ve said this once, and I’m going to say it till studios get it into their heads: games don’t need hyper-detailed graphics; they need clear graphics. Let me elaborate on that: A game doesn’t need to be well detailed; it doesn’t need everyone’s noses to be perfect, and it doesn’t need to be realistic. What games need graphically is easily identifiable objectives, characters, and markers. Tons of games have got this right, even within the Saints Row family. Saints Row 2022 has failed here! 

The world has a PS3/Xbox360 era shade of brown that ticks me off beyond belief. This shade alone doesn’t make the game feel like a 2022 game, even more so because we’ve had 2 great colourful games launch while I’ve been writing this. Maybe it would get some credit if the character and vehicle models or the world were amazing, but they are not. The character and car models are acceptable, not good, or great. The world is just shit (the brown shade isn’t helping it here at all), there are a lot of rough edges where there shouldn’t be any, and the foliage looks like the last generation. 

As for animation: minimal effort has been taken outside of the cutscenes. If anyone has played Saints Row 3 or later, you will notice that the jumping, walking, and grenade throwing animations are the same, even the enemy dodge spins are reused. I know that is low-bearing fruit that I’m picking at, but these animations were over the top in the last games, so when reused, they stand out like a sore thumb. 

Gameplay:

A sandbox game needs a sandbox, so let’s start with that. The fucking open world. Steelport (home of Saints Row 3, 4, and Gat out of hell) was never going to compete with Yakuza’s Kamurochō, S.T.A.L.K.E.R’s Zone or keeping it closer to home: Sleeping Dog’s Hong Kong, but it was a fun city to drive around in with plenty of tight alleys, chaotic intersections and interesting areas like military bases. 

Santo Ileso on the other hand is not great, I wouldn’t call it bad, but there is nothing to love about it. The city and suburbs are alright but not intriguing, there are no areas that make you curious, nothing with a wow factor. The city layout is a serious downgrade from Steelport making driving to an objective dull and sometimes annoying. The outskirts are a complete waste with absolutely fuck-all to do, they exist to give the fast travel value. There were sections I passed during my playthrough where there could have been great cross-country sections but are randomly blocked by rock formations that act like walls. All this makes Santo Ileso a boring city where not even rain visits (I Googled to see if this was a bug and found this).

There are still tons of collectables, but unlike Saints Row 3 or 4, they are a chore to collect. You must pull over before interacting with them, or worse- pull over your car, take out your phone and use the camera app to take a picture. This process has too many steps! This is even true for fast travel points: you cannot activate a fast travel point by passing it; to activate a fast travel point, you must take a picture of it with your phone, and only then may you use it. After all this, the payout for the collectables is negligible. The only people who will go after the collectables in this game are those jobless platinum trophy hunters.

To get around Santo Ileso, you need vehicles that are in abundance. There are cars, bikes, helicopters, hoverbikes, tanks, a VTOL, and even a hoverboard. The vehicle variety is one place where Saints Row has stuck to its roots. The road-going vehicles feel nice on the roads, there is even a drifting button for the cars to make those tight turns. The driving is solid as you cruise down the roads of Santo Ileso… until you hit something and the physics engine goes to complete shit. The vehicle physics is pure horse jizz, the slightest bump will cause your car to get air, I got a full two seconds of air time by hitting a fire hydrant. To add to the confusion is the vehicle strength, most of the time, the cars act as tanks but sometimes they are as strong as Papier-mâché for absolutely no reason.

The on-foot controls are par for the course, they are the bog standard that we have seen a hundred times before with the only new addition being a wingsuit that you can deploy while falling. Except for the delay before you can activate it, I have no complaints about the wingsuit, it is functional and works as expected. There are two cool ways to start wing suiting:

• Find a weather station to launch you into the air
• Get onto the roof of your car and jump

Both methods are great ways to start flying other than the obvious method of jumping out of a helicopter, especially since you are very rarely high enough to just jump off a building.

Guns? Yes please: The guns are functional, they are not great, they are not good, but they work. The starting assault rifle is more than enough after an upgrade or two, you will never need anything else. All the other guns feel boring and at points useless: like the pistol, which was my weapon of choice in Saints Row 3 is now a pea shooter with hardly any damage. The shotgun again, while functional, feels like it is missing most of its punch, it is not great for clearing even tight rooms, it makes more sense to pull out the assault rifle and mow people down. 

Some weapons are fun like the minigun, even though it slows you down and the sniper rifle which is the definition of one shot, one kill! Overall, the shooting doesn’t feel as tight as it did in Saints Row 3 which was superb for an open-world game. Also, funny guns like the dubstep gun and the octopus bazooka are missing, all the guns are sane… sadly!

Vehicles and weapons – both have upgrades like before but like the collectables, they are over-complicated. Normal weapon upgrades can be bought from any store for the right price, for cars on the other hand there is only a specific garage that can upgrade your cars which becomes very annoying if you find a car that you like far away from the garage. The special upgrades for both have a very stupid system behind them: you must complete challenges with the weapon/vehicle before they are unlocked, there is an oversight here where some vehicles are just not capable of their challenges (like wing suiting from a car with no roof) and some guns are too underpowered to do their challenges (like the shotgun), the bigger oversight is that the special upgrades are not fun so screw them.

Finally, before we get to the missions, we must talk about the combat. The on-foot combat and car combat is the same as in the previous games. On foot, you pull out a gun and shoot, nothing special. What is special on foot are the special abilities that are fun to use and useful in a fight. As for melee combat: it has been heavily downgraded from the previous games, there are only simple kicks that do next to nothing. Thankfully the melee combat has a saving grace in the form of takedowns that need to be charged up by killing enemies, when finally usable, takedowns return health which is nice because health does not fully recharge in combat. As for the car combat: boring! You can fire single-handed weapons when driving or just about anything if you are a passenger by climbing onto the roof. Cars can also ram left and right like in Sleeping Dogs but if you try it, be very careful as the physics system will show up to throw you where you don’t want to go. Just shoot the enemies and avoid the ram system.

Alright, time to get to the nitty gritty: the missions. The mission design is great for the most part. They are decently planned, even though the reasons for the Saints to carry them out are quite dumb. They either take place in the open world or in their private little worlds. The missions in the open world are brought down a little by… being in the open world and dealing with its problems but they are well laid out while fun to play. The private world missions are better as they can range from a very crappy stealth section to a fun escape over roofs of a prison in a getaway attempt. Some missions will be your first introduction to either some nice guns or special abilities that can be used after the mission finishes. The missions are the highlight of the game.

The missions themselves are great but they have a very annoying starting process. To start a mission, you call up someone and that person will tell you to meet them somewhere. You have no clue where this place is when you make the phone call so you end up having to drive across the city to wherever the mission starts. The worst part of this: once the call has been made all side missions are inaccessible, fast travel is disabled, and gang activity that you need to clean out vanishes. The best way to get around this is:

1. Make the call 
2. Find the actual mission start on the map
3. Abandon the mission
4. Mark the mission’s actual starting point
5. Drive or fast travel to that location while doing whatever else you want on the way
6. Once at the start, make the call again

Open world missions have an additional problem: the area that each fight takes part in is quite small, while enemies can spawn outside this area, you cannot leave the area for more than a few seconds before the mission fails. This is exceptionally true for a mission called “Drawing Heat” where you need to take out a bunch of cops but they don’t spawn nearby, they spawn on an overpass which they cannot get down from and you cannot get to without leaving the mission area making the mission impossible to complete unless you have a rocket launcher or a sniper rifle… or are patient with a pistol.

The side quests are just bland, they are not bad, just boring which is probably worse. All the side missions take part in the open world so they already have a problem. For some reason, some of them compound the problem by being against the clock which would be fine in some cases but is usually not in Saints Row 2022. The culmination of Saints Rows’ problems can be seen in a side mission called “Pony Express” which is great in concept. Drive against the clock and enemies from point A to point B, simple enough till the physics engine throws your vehicle around for no reason or an invisible wall blocks your off-roading. You could take the roads but that path is too slow… so what do you do? Avoid them of course!

Speaking of side missions: Only 5 of them are available from the get-go, the others need to be unlocked by purchasing companies that are part of the empire building. Once you purchase and place a company a unique set of side quests associated with the company pops up along with some enemy activity that needs to be stopped. The side quests don’t even form in the same area as the company, they can form anywhere on the map. The worst part of these side quests is that you need to finish all of them to complete a business that the story demands twice, so you can’t even dodge them. 

Conclusion:

Saints Row 2022 had some good ideas, but it was never the ideas that were the problem, it was the implementation. The lazy writing, the boring world, the annoying as hell physics engine, and the unnecessary complications to simple things like collectables and upgrades lets down what starts as a game with fun over-the-top missions that you want to play.

Overall Saints Row 2022 is a downgrade from any Saints Row. It could have been an easy 8 if it just continued where Saints Row 4 left off with time travel. It could have been an easier 7 by just fixing the physics engine, making the collectables easier to collect, and copying Saints Row 3’s side missions. It could have been a simple 6 by deleting the challenges. It could have been a dirt easy 5 by not having the Saints Row title on it. Since it didn’t do any of those but I still like the main missions.

Pros	Cons
Great Missions	Poor Side Missions
Open world	The physics engine
Great soundtrack	Shit weapon sounds
Lots of weapons	No Saints Row weapons
Lots of ideas	Poorly implemented ideas

Recommended Purchase Price: $5 or ₹200

Final Score: 4/10