I wouldn’t exactly call the new Saints Row a major disappointment or a certified franchise-killer if it didn’t become obvious before that this wouldn’t really work. Saints Row has been in arrested development since the beginning in trying to cope with its own identity and every subsequent entry, at least from 2 onwards, has hit this problem harder than this could’ve in one sweeping stroke. Nothing Volition could accomplish here could honestly tarnish the integrity of the brand even more than some of their previous attempts did. But what it could’ve accomplished is the opportunity for Volition to salvage the Saints Row name, learn from what went right to what went wrong, and prove themselves as developers still worth keeping an eye on.
On paper, starting all over from scratch to distance themselves from the mess of the previous games while supposedly trying to harken back to earlier roots of the series seemed like a smart direction to both course correct and draw in a potential new audience of fans. Saints Row 2 especially seemed like the perfect type of game to retrace from nowadays while Rockstar is starving the GTA audience because online microtransactions are the plague. Not to mention that video games have improved a lot in recent years which Volition could benefit from by working on a big project like this. The moment the trailers started popping up everywhere and the game came out finally, the first sight of high-tech military dudes with laser guns and anti-capitalist gangsters wearing neon cat helmets destroyed any hopes I had of a throwback to early Saints Row (2). Instead, it felt like more of the same of what we got with Saints Row ¾ but with a new sheen of modern paint. This sentiment isn’t entirely true, to be fair, but it’s not exactly off base with everything I didn’t like from SR3/4 which the reboot shared too much with while presenting newer problems that those games didn’t even have. The Saints Row Reboot isn’t a game of interesting quality worth calling this franchise sinking disaster. I understand where this comes from though because while it doesn’t damage Saints Row in any new way it sure as hell doesn’t redeem it either. At its uppermost best, parts of it are just okay, if not very safe and unwilling to test the waters, while the overwhelming rest of it is just painfully boring and mediocre. This still sticks by the Saints Row formula you’d be familiar with but it resembles it in the most artificial sense possible.
The player customization, which is the one thing Saints Row nailed well in 2, is surprisingly shoddy here. Calling it a step up from SR3/4’s customization is like saying getting shot in the leg isn’t as bad as having your leg just hacked off and eaten. I guess you can say that and I wouldn’t disagree but there’s not enough done with it to elevate it higher than what you’d usually see in similar games offering similar experiences. The options, sliders, and presets offered when creating your character’s physical appearance are limited or confusing to work and build off from. I have no idea what the hell Volition were thinking with some of the presets and what the hell each of them even meant to players going into this the first time. You can still theoretically create whatever wholly unique specific character you’d want, but I found it an uneasy challenge given what the game provides you with which pales compared to how simple and tight SR2’s character creator was. They fixed clothing by having a healthy variety of just “normal” clothes that feel worth customizing and wearing, so I’ll give props for that. The only two big improvements this brought to the table was being able to save your characters’ appearances to switch between easily and weapon customization which is the most flexible by far. Besides that, there’s not much here that I can say is a general improvement upon how Saints Row approached customization before. It feels like an awkward half-step forward than anything.
Santo Ileso is a thoroughly unimpressive open-world. The biggest compliment that I can give it is just that it’s not Steelport based on trying to have a vaguely better defined aesthetic. Which as far as Southwestern settings have gone (and I’ve seen through quite a bit of Southwestern backdrops strangely enough) it’s some of the most inauthentic and dead. I guess setting it around a desert, making everything look brown or yellow, and having some really basic Mexican iconography littered around created some illusion that it's actually an interesting setting worth exploring. But as I said earlier, trying to say “X” is better than SR3/4 is neither the flex or high praise for this franchise at all. And even then the open-world still has lots of the same kinds of problems that Steelport had back in SR3/4; the map doesn’t feature any memorably designed districts or landmarks, the confusing lack of gang presence through territories SR2-style to make it feel more reactive, and side content which feels like the absolute worst this series ever offered. The challenges suck and aren’t worth it. The criminal ventures are badly designed especially when the game forces you to do it in order to progress certain missions. The activities didn’t even feel worth it anymore because all the fun was just sucked out. It actually felt like the developer who handled this part of the game got fucking lazy and instead created an AI that got fed with big budgeted AAA games released in the past decade to their job for them. The core gameplay suffers from this too. The shooting feels generic, the weapons don’t have any kickback to them, and includes bullet-sponge enemies with MMO styled health bars, damage protection, and a bunch of pop up notifications on screen whenever you do anything in combat. The driving is the worst in the series too. Many of the vehicles you can get your hands-on feel incredibly stiff to steer and actually driving them is just as miserable as it felt in Cyberpunk 2077.
There’s factions, but like Saints Row 3, there’s no work to be done with them to feel like satisfying threats needed to overcome. They’re even more pointless to include than they were in SR3 because besides being annoying cannon fodder to shoot down during missions they do nothing. You never get scenes like you did in Saints Row 2 where the respective gangs and their bosses felt like well-defined characters with motivations and agency beyond the player. It made the gang warfare aspect of Saints Row feel truly full of character and having the right sense of edge when the real shit just happens. It reinforced these conflicts being more personal for a Saint to take down and show everyone who’s the real boss. This isn’t even approached in the reboot at all. Building the Saints as a criminal empire from scratch made the journey to the very top feel hollow because there’s no tension or conflict that exists to overcome. The Marshalls dip into the plot here and here but are largely impersonal antagonists. The Idols don’t work at all as a big baddie because they’re too faceless and lack substance to pose a serious threat. The Panteros could fill this role pretty okay, they have a basic enough theming and a clear figurehead to latch onto, but this repeated the SR3 problem where this hardly amounted to anything and unceremoniously kills the bad buy before you could even have a chance to confront him one-on-one.
Which leads right into the game finally having a real antagonist whose sudden reveal left me more dumbfounded than it did as a shocking twist. The villain in question was not built up well for this revelation to strike and this happens way too late into the game’s climax that it appeared unintentionally awkward than anything. This is the point that the game takes an unusual turn by trying to be taken more seriously while Volition just accidentally discovered that the theme of this (barely a) story is about the apparent power of friendship I guess. Maybe this could’ve been effective if they rewrote the story to be better paced, had weight to it, and the new Saints had more than a semblance of real character. I would hate these guys as much as everyone else does but they’re just the byproduct of the way the tone and writing of the game just is. It feels like it's written by middle-aged-out-of-touch white guys trying to appeal to younger millennials and zoomers while harboring what feels like absolute resentment against this new generation they’re trying to drag in with the most boomer takes imaginable. Like think the kind of boomers or disgruntled old millennials who get weirdly too angry at young kids playing Fortnite, going on TikTok, and calling them out for saying the minimum wage in America shouldn't be raised higher because they're entitled and shut up. That's the vibe of the new Saints and the entire Idols faction. You get loyalty missions for each of the Saints but besides the LARPing one they don’t do a good job developing them to be better.
The worst thing about the Saints Row Reboot is that it’s just disposable and forgettable. It didn’t oversell itself and came out embarrassingly short like more infamous games of recent memory (though nothing game breaking the bugs I came across were kinda funny). It didn’t go out of its own way to change the foundation of Saints Row in any meaningful way. I doubt this even did its job as a reboot in attracting new fans because I can’t imagine any modern gamer looking at this in the aisle of their local GameStop and buying it. This isn’t exactly the mindlessly dumb dated mess that people liked in SR3/4. This doesn’t even feel like a true back-to-basics to earlier Saints Row beyond the premise you’re reading on this game’s page. It’s far too sanitized to appeal to either of these niches the fandom would eat up. It appealed to no one but Volition I guess and that may as well be what sealed the fate of Saints Row.
On paper, starting all over from scratch to distance themselves from the mess of the previous games while supposedly trying to harken back to earlier roots of the series seemed like a smart direction to both course correct and draw in a potential new audience of fans. Saints Row 2 especially seemed like the perfect type of game to retrace from nowadays while Rockstar is starving the GTA audience because online microtransactions are the plague. Not to mention that video games have improved a lot in recent years which Volition could benefit from by working on a big project like this. The moment the trailers started popping up everywhere and the game came out finally, the first sight of high-tech military dudes with laser guns and anti-capitalist gangsters wearing neon cat helmets destroyed any hopes I had of a throwback to early Saints Row (2). Instead, it felt like more of the same of what we got with Saints Row ¾ but with a new sheen of modern paint. This sentiment isn’t entirely true, to be fair, but it’s not exactly off base with everything I didn’t like from SR3/4 which the reboot shared too much with while presenting newer problems that those games didn’t even have. The Saints Row Reboot isn’t a game of interesting quality worth calling this franchise sinking disaster. I understand where this comes from though because while it doesn’t damage Saints Row in any new way it sure as hell doesn’t redeem it either. At its uppermost best, parts of it are just okay, if not very safe and unwilling to test the waters, while the overwhelming rest of it is just painfully boring and mediocre. This still sticks by the Saints Row formula you’d be familiar with but it resembles it in the most artificial sense possible.
The player customization, which is the one thing Saints Row nailed well in 2, is surprisingly shoddy here. Calling it a step up from SR3/4’s customization is like saying getting shot in the leg isn’t as bad as having your leg just hacked off and eaten. I guess you can say that and I wouldn’t disagree but there’s not enough done with it to elevate it higher than what you’d usually see in similar games offering similar experiences. The options, sliders, and presets offered when creating your character’s physical appearance are limited or confusing to work and build off from. I have no idea what the hell Volition were thinking with some of the presets and what the hell each of them even meant to players going into this the first time. You can still theoretically create whatever wholly unique specific character you’d want, but I found it an uneasy challenge given what the game provides you with which pales compared to how simple and tight SR2’s character creator was. They fixed clothing by having a healthy variety of just “normal” clothes that feel worth customizing and wearing, so I’ll give props for that. The only two big improvements this brought to the table was being able to save your characters’ appearances to switch between easily and weapon customization which is the most flexible by far. Besides that, there’s not much here that I can say is a general improvement upon how Saints Row approached customization before. It feels like an awkward half-step forward than anything.
Santo Ileso is a thoroughly unimpressive open-world. The biggest compliment that I can give it is just that it’s not Steelport based on trying to have a vaguely better defined aesthetic. Which as far as Southwestern settings have gone (and I’ve seen through quite a bit of Southwestern backdrops strangely enough) it’s some of the most inauthentic and dead. I guess setting it around a desert, making everything look brown or yellow, and having some really basic Mexican iconography littered around created some illusion that it's actually an interesting setting worth exploring. But as I said earlier, trying to say “X” is better than SR3/4 is neither the flex or high praise for this franchise at all. And even then the open-world still has lots of the same kinds of problems that Steelport had back in SR3/4; the map doesn’t feature any memorably designed districts or landmarks, the confusing lack of gang presence through territories SR2-style to make it feel more reactive, and side content which feels like the absolute worst this series ever offered. The challenges suck and aren’t worth it. The criminal ventures are badly designed especially when the game forces you to do it in order to progress certain missions. The activities didn’t even feel worth it anymore because all the fun was just sucked out. It actually felt like the developer who handled this part of the game got fucking lazy and instead created an AI that got fed with big budgeted AAA games released in the past decade to their job for them. The core gameplay suffers from this too. The shooting feels generic, the weapons don’t have any kickback to them, and includes bullet-sponge enemies with MMO styled health bars, damage protection, and a bunch of pop up notifications on screen whenever you do anything in combat. The driving is the worst in the series too. Many of the vehicles you can get your hands-on feel incredibly stiff to steer and actually driving them is just as miserable as it felt in Cyberpunk 2077.
There’s factions, but like Saints Row 3, there’s no work to be done with them to feel like satisfying threats needed to overcome. They’re even more pointless to include than they were in SR3 because besides being annoying cannon fodder to shoot down during missions they do nothing. You never get scenes like you did in Saints Row 2 where the respective gangs and their bosses felt like well-defined characters with motivations and agency beyond the player. It made the gang warfare aspect of Saints Row feel truly full of character and having the right sense of edge when the real shit just happens. It reinforced these conflicts being more personal for a Saint to take down and show everyone who’s the real boss. This isn’t even approached in the reboot at all. Building the Saints as a criminal empire from scratch made the journey to the very top feel hollow because there’s no tension or conflict that exists to overcome. The Marshalls dip into the plot here and here but are largely impersonal antagonists. The Idols don’t work at all as a big baddie because they’re too faceless and lack substance to pose a serious threat. The Panteros could fill this role pretty okay, they have a basic enough theming and a clear figurehead to latch onto, but this repeated the SR3 problem where this hardly amounted to anything and unceremoniously kills the bad buy before you could even have a chance to confront him one-on-one.
Which leads right into the game finally having a real antagonist whose sudden reveal left me more dumbfounded than it did as a shocking twist. The villain in question was not built up well for this revelation to strike and this happens way too late into the game’s climax that it appeared unintentionally awkward than anything. This is the point that the game takes an unusual turn by trying to be taken more seriously while Volition just accidentally discovered that the theme of this (barely a) story is about the apparent power of friendship I guess. Maybe this could’ve been effective if they rewrote the story to be better paced, had weight to it, and the new Saints had more than a semblance of real character. I would hate these guys as much as everyone else does but they’re just the byproduct of the way the tone and writing of the game just is. It feels like it's written by middle-aged-out-of-touch white guys trying to appeal to younger millennials and zoomers while harboring what feels like absolute resentment against this new generation they’re trying to drag in with the most boomer takes imaginable. Like think the kind of boomers or disgruntled old millennials who get weirdly too angry at young kids playing Fortnite, going on TikTok, and calling them out for saying the minimum wage in America shouldn't be raised higher because they're entitled and shut up. That's the vibe of the new Saints and the entire Idols faction. You get loyalty missions for each of the Saints but besides the LARPing one they don’t do a good job developing them to be better.
The worst thing about the Saints Row Reboot is that it’s just disposable and forgettable. It didn’t oversell itself and came out embarrassingly short like more infamous games of recent memory (though nothing game breaking the bugs I came across were kinda funny). It didn’t go out of its own way to change the foundation of Saints Row in any meaningful way. I doubt this even did its job as a reboot in attracting new fans because I can’t imagine any modern gamer looking at this in the aisle of their local GameStop and buying it. This isn’t exactly the mindlessly dumb dated mess that people liked in SR3/4. This doesn’t even feel like a true back-to-basics to earlier Saints Row beyond the premise you’re reading on this game’s page. It’s far too sanitized to appeal to either of these niches the fandom would eat up. It appealed to no one but Volition I guess and that may as well be what sealed the fate of Saints Row.