Review: Saints Row is a painfully generic open-world malaise

Our overwhelming takeaway after finishing Saints Row was how badly the open-world genre needs Grand Theft Auto VI. How the genre is so past the point of relevance that it needs the flag bearer for the open-world action game to once again provide the roadmap forward.

Because between Saint’s Row’s lifeless city, terrible shooting, lacklustre characters and high frequency of bugs, this really does feel like the endpoint for this style of open-world action.

The premise of this reboot is that you’re tasked with building the Saints from the ground up in the city of Santo Ileso. A Las Vegas-ish open world that fails to capture the liveliness due to a population density that will make you wonder if the game is set after the end of the world.

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Johnny Gat, Shaundi and Kinzie are gone, replaced with Kev, Eli and Neenah. Despite some rough dialogue in the early missions, they aren’t overly offensive. The story is extremely bland, with every twist and turn visible from the international space station. But in a rare positive note, the missions themselves are generally tasking you with doing something a bit different each time, although most of that involves shooting, which brings up to our next point.

The shooting in Saints Row is dreadful. No matter what combination of sliders we tried, we couldn’t aim in a way that felt satisfactory, and it just drains every combat-focussed mission of fun. There is a good variety of weapons, and you can even adjust the gameplay in-menu to make enemies take fewer bullets to kill, or increase the frequency of tough baddies, but when the shooting is this bad, it’s little consolation.

There’s a flow system in which players fill a meter which will allow them to do certain special moves, like throwing a grenade or dropping a smoke bomb. This flow system feels like a last-minute restriction to stop people absolutely hammering the broken special moves, and doesn’t actually encourage dynamic play.

But the thing most people will be asking is, “Does it do the Saints Row stuff?” and by that, they mean, is it anarchic? Can you make your character look like a total idiot? Is insurance fraud in the game? And the answer is complicated.

There is a bit of that silliness in the game. For example, the taunt system is great for childish mischief, especially when you can do the “wanker” gesture during most dialogue, and even while running. Some of the beloved Saints Row sidequests are also in the game, this time in the form of side hustles are businesses that you’re building as your empire grows.

There’s actually a lot to do in the game, but it’s just such open-world number checking. Even the stuff that sounds great on paper, like the permanent wing suit that allows you to bounce off pedestrian’s heads to gain altitude, doesn’t work quite right.

You need to be so low to the ground to get it to work, then you only get a small boost from doing it. It feels like the developers were trying to make a compromise between the literal super powers that your character ended up with in the last game, and some kind of grounded approach akin to Saints Row 2. This middle ground is just awkward.

“There is a bit of that silliness in the game. For example, the taunt system is great for childish mischief, especially when you can do the ‘wanker’ gesture during most dialogue, and even while running.”

There are large sections of Saints Row that could be written off as generic, innofenssive open-world fluff, if not for the parade of bugs that greeted us throughout our time with the game. From the world not loading in correctly, leaving us dangling in the shadow realm, to characters T-posing, to the sniper rifle scope being permanently plastered to the screen, it’s an incredibly unstable game. The frame rate on PS5 is also completely erratic.

Speaking of visual performance, Saints Row is a very strange mix. Most, if not all of the world design, characters and set pieces look like they’re from an early PS4 game, but strangely, the lighting in the game, specifically in the open world, is unbelievable.

It’s such a weird contrast to go from a city which looks like it could have been from GTA Trilogy: Definitive, to these lighting and weather effects that are absolutely top notch. However, we don’t think many people are coming to the Saints Row reboot for the lighting.

Playing Saints Row was such a strange experience. The first night we got the game, we played it for a few hours, and outside of the lacklustre shooting, thought, “This is fine, it’s very dated, but the character creator is amazing, and it’s got some good childish crudeness about it”, but as the game went on and we visited more of the city, it really made us stop in our tracks.

The open-world action genre, specifically these kinds of games made in the shadow of GTA, are currently at their absolute low point. It felt like just after GTA 4 and GTA 5, there was an arms race to see who could make the game that would sit in the “Best GTA-like” category and funnily enough, Saints Row 3 won that.

But since then, there’s been a ceasefire as companies realised that just having a city to run around and do crime in isn’t as mind blowing as it was in the 2010s. This Saints Row revival feels like a game that was completed in 2015, then wasn’t released for some reason, only to resurface now. Dated doesn’t begin to cover it.

When this game was first shown, there was such an outcry about whether the game had “gone woke” or in some way had modernised to make it so it wasn’t a Saints Row game. You don’t need to worry about modernisation here.

It’s a below average open world game that’s stuffed to bursting with bugs, and the best thing we can say about it is that making our Tobias Fünke-inspired character crouch over and do the wanker gesture while he walked down the street made us laugh. Probably not quite worth the price of admission.