![]() While I don’t care about the new crew in the same way as the scoundrels who grew into a close-knit family over the course of the original games, these characters haven’t had a bunch of sequels to develop. All these characters parody modern archetypes just like the old games’ wannabe energy drink mogul, post-hippie stoner, and Auto-Tuned pimp did back when they were relevant. Meanwhile, you work for a private security firm whose disposable employees often don’t survive training. One of the new Saints quit an unpaid internship to become a mechanic for a crime boss, one’s a startup entrepreneur who overdosed on motivational TED talks and podcasts, and the other’s a DJ who is allergic to wearing a shirt. Online I’ve seen these Saints called zoomers and millennials, as well as hipsters, which is an impressive range of meaningless descriptors that all amount to “young people I don’t understand.” The Saints Row reboot ditches the over-the-top aspects of its predecessor, but still feels like it’s trapped in the past. The reboot comes with a new cast they despised from the first trailer. A Saints Row about starting from the ground floor might please people who miss the ‘grit’ of Saints Row 2, but if the internet is anything to go by they hate it already. Which I guess is why, instead of making a new Saints Row where you time-travel or establish a branch on an alien planet or something, Volition hit the reboot button. Personally, I enjoyed the escalating wackiness of the series, but it didn’t leave itself a lot of places to go. When fans of SR2 say they miss how grounded it was, they mean they were OK with a game that had motorbike katana duels, but SR3 including a Japanese game show about straight-up murdering people crossed the line. Saints Row: The Third made you fight wrestlers, cyberpunks, and zombies, which Saints Row 4 bettered with an alien invasion, while its spin-off Gat Out of Hell had Satan as the final boss. Saints Row 2 had a villain with voodoo powers and your sidekick could take on an entire police force solo. Until now, every Saints Row sequel was more over-the-top than the one before, eventually finding new tops and then somehow over-ing them. EDM-themed criminals who twirl glowstick shields, Saints Row is a good time. That’s probably the only description I can come up with vague enough to describe every game in the series, including this new reboot, without just saying it’s Grand Theft Auto except the jokes are funny. The Saints are loveable sociopaths to be fair, who alternate between organised crime and high-spirited hijinx like throwing themselves into traffic for insurance money, and also some light drug trafficking on the side. Saints Row is a knockabout driving/shooting/flying ragdoll-em-up in which you lead a misnamed gang of sociopaths. By the time I had fully leveled up my character I had access to everything from flaming punches to the ability to shoot through walls, but rarely did I feel the need to use them in favour of the more traditional skills like throwing grenades and activating temporary armour which made for a mostly conventional brand of firefights. In addition, there’s a recharging skills system that allows you to bind special abilities to four hotkeys. ![]() ![]() It doesn’t exactly create a propulsive ballet of ballistics to rival Doom Eternal, but it’s a neatly streamlined setup that allows you to recover from damage without having to scramble for dropped medkits or fumble with a consumables menu. The combat itself is snappy and serviceable, and in the absence of a proper cover system is heavy on circle-strafing and pulling off occasional execution moves in order to replenish your health mid-fight. It doesn’t exactly create a propulsive ballet of ballistics to rival Doom Eternal DLC’s and updates. The only ones that really stand out are the garish, neon-soaked Idols who appear to have grown restless waiting for Ubisoft to announce a new Watch Dogs. But in between these peaks is a relentless rinse-and-repeat cycle of wave-based shootouts against a handful of rival gangs that are uniformly bullet spongy and largely indistinguishable from one another. That’s not to say I wasn’t entertained for significant stretches at a time, and while the rags-to-riches story of the new Saints gang in the sandswept city of Santo Ileso is anything but original it at least facilitates a handful of B-grade action scenes that do an admirable impersonation of Uncharted, with a car-hopping convoy chase and an explosive train robbery among the more dazzling high points along the way to the campaign’s somewhat underwhelming end.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |