Back with a bang – GTA’s beautiful, bonkers sibling: PETER HOSKIN reviews Saints Row
Saints Row (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £59.99)
Rating:
Verdict: Cosy carnage
Things used to be so simple. There was Grand Theft Auto, a series of pretty unhinged crime games. Then there was Saints Row, which played like Grand Theft Auto’s even more unhinged, adolescent sibling — with aliens, superpowers, bigger explosions, and crasser jokes.
But then GTA became wackier and wackier. And Saints Row? Well…
…it disappeared for almost a decade after 2013’s Saints Row IV, but now it’s back with a new game that’s confusingly titled just Saints Row. And I think the two series have finally met in the middle. This really feels like another GTA.
Saints Row: Here you are in a big, open city (again), building a criminal empire (again), while occasionally hurtling off to perform silly stunts in the desert (again). For all the fluorescent stylings and loud gun battles, it’s a comfortingly familiar type of game
Here you are in a big, open city (again), building a criminal empire (again), while occasionally hurtling off to perform silly stunts in the desert (again). For all the fluorescent stylings and loud gun battles, it’s a comfortingly familiar type of game.
But this isn’t to totally dismiss the new Saints Row. It’s old-fashioned in a few new ways. The city itself, a place called Santo Ileso in the American Southwest, wrings everything out of modern consoles — and is among the most beautiful and credible digital sprawls that I’ve ever wandered through.
Saints Row’s missions are similarly expansive. There are reality show-inspired battles on islands and big, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired battles inside cardboard castles. This is not a game that lacks for imagination
And Saints Row’s missions are similarly expansive. There are reality show-inspired battles on islands and big, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired battles inside cardboard castles. This is not a game that lacks for imagination.
So it’s shame that it does (currently) lack for finetuning. There are dozens of different vehicles to drive, but they all feel weirdly similar. There are dozens of bugs in the code, some of which crashed my computer.
Once all that’s fixed, though, Santo Ileso will be a fine place to watch the sun go down, after a heavy day of chaos.
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