How the ‘Saints Row’ Reboot Can Succeed Where ‘Saints Row 4’ Failed
Saints Row has always been an odd video franchise. It started off as a trashy ripoff of Grand Theft Auto but quickly started to become its own thing entirely. Saints Row really started to hit its stride with the second game. I beat that game so many times. From driving around the city spraying crap at buildings to flying through the air on insurance fraud missions to fighting off hordes of zombies in the super underrated Zombie Uprising minigame, the game was just a ton of fun.
Saints Row: The Third brought a lot of the things that made the second great back and dialed up the insanity. While 2 is still my favorite, 3 is probably the best representation of what a Saints Row game should look like. Unfortunately, the fourth game couldn’t live up to either.
Saints Row has made its bones of being complete insanity from a gameplay and story perspective. That’s a big reason why they’re so much fun. However, the fourth game completely jumped the shark. In the game, you are the president of the USA who is dealing with an alien invasion. That’s all well and good but the game is just ugly to look at. The sky is filled with clouds throughout the game which gives it a really ugly tint but that’s not even the worst part. The introduction of superpowers sounds great on the surface but it completely ruined the game. It was far too easy to do everything and just wasn’t as fun of a concept as it sounded on paper. I didn’t even play the game that long before giving up. I gave the Gat out of Hell expansion a try but that wasn’t very fun either. It just took the same map, put a hellish layer over it and had the same issues as the base game.
It looked like the fourth game killed the franchise but Volition is taking another stab at it. Unfortunately, there is concern that the reboot will fix the problems of the past. The recently released trailer didn’t show any gameplay but it certainly didn’t like it would be a game in the vein of the first two Saints Row games.
While fans are concerned about the reboot, Volition is promising that they’re dialing things back from Saints Row 4.
“By the time you were done in Saints Row 4 – and spoilers here – you were the ruler of the galaxy,” Volition’s Jim Boone said, via Euro Gamer. “Where would we take it from there? In Gat Out of Hell, well we went to hell – but there truly isn’t anywhere to go past there! Even though we loved the mechanics we came up with, the superpowers and everything, it didn’t leave us a lot of runway to fiugure out where we would go past that – so it was a pretty easy decision to go back to our roots with something contemporary.
“For me the comparison is Moonraker,” added Volition’s Jeremy Bernstein. “It’s so far beyond the realms of reality. Where do you possibly go from there? So you’ve got to go back to your roots. The only place to go when you’ve gone that far is to pull it back in.”
Going back to Saints Row’s roots would be a very good start to making the franchise fun again. Volition does deserve the benefit of the doubt until we see some gameplay but fans have every right to be concerned. If they can go back to something that resembles a happy medium between the second and third games, the game should be a big return to form.
