Jump to content
passwords have all been force reset. please recover password to reset ×
MFGamers

Saints Row (2022)


AndyKurosaki
 Share

Recommended Posts

  • 4 months later...

TBF I'm having some fun with this - trouble is it's exactly the same dumb fun, with lots of side mission/ challenge diversions, that I'd have if I stuck in SR/SR2 into the 360 and played a 15 yr old game.

 

So, as long as I think of it as a retro title then it's alright, and most things are reasonably forgivable - but, as a 2022 release.......

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

Credits rolling and I had a blast.

 

It's "Saints Row San Andreas" reimagined, would have been fantastic had it come out a few years back, and if you treat it as such you'll have a good time - so a one for the bargain bin perhaps (once you have that inkling to play an old school sandbox).

 

It was surprising, albeit in a good way, that despite other gangs controlling different areas, they don't bother directly attacking your assets, which they have done in the previous SR (and GTA SA) games - but after the first couple of time it always felt bit of a ballache anyway to stop what your doing to drive back & defend your territory - so was happy to see that'd been dropped.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And that's a wrap, with the post credits mission completed too.

Spoiler

Best Friends Forever - requires you to max out a few of your ventures/areas and gather $8m to build the Saints Tower, so takes a few more hours to gather that much cash.

 

It was sort of worth it though :- as you get the team doing a karaoke version of Love Shack, with clips from the game interwoven - nice !

 

It remains as an open world to wrap up anything to 100% if you really want to, but for me it's a good time to move on.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

A roadmap of free and paid for DLC, from now until August, as been announced:

https://saintsrow.com/news/Roadmap

 

MAY

The Heist and The Hazardous Campaign DLC – comes with the Expansion Pass

 

Sunshine Springs New District – Free for all players

 

Quality of Life Update – including Selfie Mode, combat improvements and so SO much more – Free for all players

 

JULY

Doc Ketchum’s Murder Circus New Game Mode – comes with the Expansion Pass

 

Quality of Life Update – more to be revealed – free for all players

 

AUGUST

Expansion 3 – Campaign DLC – included in the Expansion Pass

 

New district – more to be revealed – Free for all players

 

Quality of Life Update – more to be revealed – free for all players

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 months later...
  • 2 months later...

bO8pRdF.png

 

😟

 

Played the first 90 minutes yesterday until a specific bug/oversight* started to drive me nuts. It emphasises just how black and white online discourse about games has become, everything is either GOTY or trash and I remember distinctly this being put into the latter category last year.

 

While I certainly haven't seen much of it, this is by no means an abysmally bad game. It runs fine, it controls fine, there's a staggering amount of settings from graphical modes to accessibility options that only Sony currently can match. The writing and humour isn't as bad as it was made out either. Very early impressions is that this is a serviceable mid-tier open world game that for some reason got marketed as triple-A and, for some other reason, also cost as much to make. Which is interesting because with how long-standing Volition as a developer was, and also being one that didn't struggle at all during the problematic transition to the HD-gen, you'd imagine they'd be more proficient. But I have no doubts we'll get the full story at some point, now that the studio is gone.

 

(*it turns out that if you decrease the deadzone of the right stick to the minimum, the camera doesn't automatically realign behind your car anymore. Which makes driving around borderline impossible. Had to google how to fix it because I would never have made the connection between the deadzone settings and this.)

 

Anyway, I'll post again after I've seen a bit more. A shame Andy made some tabula rasa in here, I was interested in reading his thoughts back from around release day.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Right, I remember it being really buggy on release. The current version is 1.6X, so quite a lot of patches down the road. It's hardly a polished game, but also doesn't scream unfinished anymore. Vehicle physics are still an issue though, there's simply no weight to them, they all stick to the road like RC cars.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

Ok. So what was my problem with this game? It’s tempting go “It sucked” and leave it at that. But, I can do better than that. 
 

I’ve always loved the Saints Row series. The first one, way back on the OG Xbox, was pretty decent. 2 was a vast improvement, and often had me in hysterics, particularly with the ‘Cockney’ accent character voice. 3 was even better, some people didn’t like how ridiculous the series was getting, with its dildo baseball bats. Personally, ridiculous is my jam, so I adored it. 4 was brilliant, though once you’ve got super powers and gone into space, you’ve pretty much put yourself into a corner. I didn’t have an issue with a reboot as such. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a huge mistake…

 

I hated the new Saints, pretty much from the start. They’re all exceptionally unlikeable. From the main character bitching and moaning about work, from the stereotypical Black nerd, to a brainless jock utterly obsessed with waffles for some bloody reason. One minute they’re broke, complaining about the rent. The next it’s “Haha, let’s rip off a pay day loan company”. In one mission, the jock complains that because he was an orphan, he never had a Happy Meal toy. So you go on a massive killing spree, ending in you getting 500 of them. But he then goes “I only wanted 1. Let’s donate the rest to an orphanage”. Which made me think “Sure, no problem. We just murdered half the town, so we’ve made plenty of fresh new orphans”. 
All of them were just absolute bell-ends. When you’re playing a game, and think “I hate all of these wankers”, it’s quite a fuck up. And I’m definitely not the only person that thought “They replaced the Saints, with these pricks?”

 

It was also very boring, quite often. None of the music stations were any good, so I’d often drive around with the radio off. For the size of the map, it never really felt like there was much to actually do. 
 

And in terms of gameplay, it was an absolute mess. Guns would often glitch out, so either you couldn’t reload them, or they did no damage. Your special ability worked if and when it felt like it. In Skill Up’s YouTube review, he pointed out one mission that was utterly impossible to finish due to a glitch, and I experienced the same problem. You’d get halfway through the mission, then be asked to kill a bunch of rival gang members. Unfortunately, they’d spawn on an overhead bridge, meaning you couldn’t get a shot on them. And if you thought “I’ll drive closer to them so I can actually bloody see them”, the game would refuse, and warn you that you was leaving the mission area, turn back now or it’s Game Over. I restarted that same mission, 3 times. And each time, the same bloody glitch kicked in. I only got past it by eventually blowing up the cars that the enemies were hiding behind, and even that took bloody ages. 
 

After about 10 hours or so, I’d utterly had enough. The game play was frequently broken. The story was utterly boring. And the Saints were total wankers. So, I gave up. It was definitely one of the most disappointing games, I’ve ever played. 
 

The reviews ripped it to shreds, and having experienced just how bad it really was for myself, I agreed. It was one of the worst games of the year, and an insult to the series. Agents Of Mayhem, their previous game, had been a bit meh, in comparison to SR3 and 4. But this, in my opinion, was the worst game they’d ever done. It was an absolute shitshow. 
 

Having said that, I was gutted that because it dramatically underperformed (hardly surprising, it was utter wank), Volition ultimately ending up being closed down for good. As bad as this game was, and it was very, very bad, seeing them shut down, was not a good thing. But these days, one fuck up can be all it takes, to spell the end of road. 
 

So to sum up, in the words of Mr Horse, “No sir, i didn’t like it”. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wasn't trying to force a cathartic essay out of you, but I get what you're saying. I think the biggest difference is that I approached it with very different expectations, as I haven't played any other SR game and I also went into this expecting Gollum-levels of trash after how it got reviewed upon release. To a lesser degree I'm also playing a patched-up version which is, more or less, glitch-free so far as I can tell after roughly ten hours.

 

Party members are meh, that's for sure, but I actually like the protagonist. Or at least 'my' protagonist, who's female and speaks posh British, which is so hilariously out of place both geographically and thematically that I can't help but love it. But that's presumably one of the many mismanagement reasons why this game ultimately killed off Volition. I realise voice actors aren't particularly well-paid unless they have reached a certain stardom, but why on earth would you provide the option of six (!) different VOs for the main character? I also think being cross-gen hurt this a lot. It's not a remarkably pretty game on current systems even in quality mode, it runs at an instable 60fps in performance mode and god knows what would happen if I put it into my Xbox One. But I really don't blame Volition for this, that whole period was nightmarish for small/mid-size developers and this being in full production at the height of Covid certainly didn't help at all.

 

I'm not saying this would have been the gold standard for GTA clones if everything went right of course, but to be shut down after such a (presumably) messy production must have felt awful. I'm enjoying the game for what it is and mostly play it for 30-60 in my downtime between coming off work and making dinner and it's perfect for that. The thing that worries me a bit is that games that don't hit a certain threshold of excellence get completely dismissed these days. See also Immortals of Aveum, or that other Immortals from UbiSoft etc. Would titles like Nier or Deadly Premonition have the opportunity to become cult classics today, or would the general media and public just dismiss them as ugly, frustrating and sluggish messes? Not saying this game even remotely has the idiosyncratic charm of those, but it makes me wonder if we will lose out on some things in the future because the rough, first stepping stone might never find an audience.

 

(Also the synth-electro radio station is quite good I think btw.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, it couldn’t hurt, I guess. Don’t expect much from it, and maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised. It’s not King Kong/Golem levels of total bollocks. But it’s extremely mediocre, in my opinion. 
 

They’ve always had multiple options of voice options for the main Saint. 2 and 3 featured an over-the-top Cockney, which I always used. Mainly because I found it hilarious giving everyone the wanker gesture, and literally telling them to fuck off. But I’m easily amused 😄

 

For a lot of long time Saints fans, when they showed trailers of the new Saints, there was a lot of vocal uproar. I was willing to give the new crew a chance, as the previous Saints weren’t exactly Shakespeare. But I just hated them, from start to finish, or when I gave up. They talked shit, murdered people without a care in the world, and bitched about being unemployed and broke. I just couldn’t be arsed, with any of them. I didn’t want to see them rise up, and become a new Saints empire. They were all bell-ends, and I wanted nothing to do with any of them. 
 

But, it was really sad to see Volition shut down completely. I still feel that Saints 2/3 and 4 are some of the most fun games I’ve ever played. But the reboot lost that fun factor, and pissing off their fanbase was a gamble that ultimately backfired, big time. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...