Saint's Row 4

Saint’s Row 4

Have you ever wanted to be president? Have you ever wanted to run around a big city breaking everything and everyone in it? Well good news you odd mix of psychopath and patriot with big aspirations because now you can. The saints are back in all their glory and everything starts off this time around with your character busting through a facility, jumping onto a rocket and disabling it thousands of feet in the air before, letting go and free-falling right through the white house roof into your office. Start as we mean to go on and Saint’s Row means to speed through everything with a mix of joy and confusion, barely giving you time to dwell on your most recent dubious act as you smash right into a pile of cars and people. Suddenly, aliens invade and kidnap you and your friends, trapping each of you inside personally tailored nightmares in the form of simulations. After breaking out of your simulation with thanks to you appointed secretary/resident computer nerd, you find yourself on a space ship just in time to watch the earth get blown up. I’m sure you’re reeling from all that breakneck exposition and this all happens in the first five minutes.

 Saint’s Row as a franchise has always been a wacky, off the wall Grand Theft Auto (GTA) clone, and over the years it’s just kept getting wackier. From the weapons you acquire to the people you meet to clothes you can buy, the absurdity runs true through it all. Previous Saint’s Row games had you spraying shit at house, giving a tiger a lift while it rips you face off or fighting a luchador wrestler on mars. Easy to say maturity isn’t this game forte but that’s its charm, the best part about a video game is that you can escape and lose yourself in another world. Saint’s Row 4 is happy to oblige and keeps the madcap trend going, the character building is less extensive this time around and instead of sliders you have a handful of body types to choose from, none of them varying much from the others. You can still have fun with it though, for instance I made my character look like Prince, and there is still enough modification to keep most players satisfied, no matter what image you would like to see ploughing through the city like a tiny Godzilla.

Your overarching goal is to find and retrieve your friends from there nightmares, but that gets swiftly lost under all the side missions you can do. These range from the sandbox standard; finding a guy and killing him, to seeing how much money you can rack up playing in traffic and getting hit by cars for an insurance fraud scam. Watching your character rag-doll through the air, spinning and twirling and finally dropping to the ground with a thud and a splat, is a delight. Saint’s Row is cathartic and very good at it, mixed with a sandbox environment It’s easy to get drawn in; shooting up a gang of aliens and taking them out one by one with a shotgun blast to the stomach, jacking a car and power-sliding into a crowd of computer-generated pedestrians, climbing every building to find the collectibles, then you realize three hours have past and you haven’t even done a story mission yet.

Speaking of story, Saint’s Row 4’s is probably one of the weirdest and with the change in setting comes the opportunity for new mechanics. Still taking place in a city is nothing new, the simulation is what makes this interesting, throughout the game you can unlock abilities such as super speed, super jumping and throwing elemental attacks at your enemies. With the addition of super speed, I felt like cars had become obsolete which upset me a bit, driving around at way over the speed limit was fun and most important of all you got to listen to the radio. Once I got the ability to super jump and glide all over the city, I don’t think I touched a car unless I was zooming by and sending it hurling into the nearest house. The other abilities are useful but not as necessary meaning, they get introduced, used to defeat one enemy type and then are just there for you to play with. Not that I’m complaining, the more ways to cause destruction and panic the better.

While breaking your friends out of their simulated hell’s, each being subjected to a constant loop designed to grind down their will, you start on taking down your alien kidnappers. Along the way we meet some classic characters from previous games while bolstering out your attack force, revisit some old stomping grounds and even delve into unknown territory with certain people. In all honesty, it’s probably the most coherent story a Saint’s Row game has ever had, mile a minute intro not with-standing, and weirdly in this case that’s a bad thing. GTA is good at the linear story and mindless mini games on a backdrop of grey but Saint’s Row knows how to let loose and party while bathed in a rainbow glow. It gives you a couple of tools and lets you run free in the fun-house, smashing things and setting stuff on fire and applauds you for it. Except in Saint’s Row 4’s case, it put on its slightly more pretentious hat with its cleaner, sleeker look and retro game call outs every other mission like it’s just discovered a NES and really wants to share it with you.

If you’re looking for a colourful, crazy, dumb fun sort of game, then Saint’s Row doesn’t disappoint. You can easily sink twenty hours into it and still find more things to have fun with from the clothes customization to causing the game physics to glitch. Towards the end I was suffering a lot of freezing issues and had to keep reloading my save, so I would recommend it but on a current gen console (Xbox one/PS4) or Steam.

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