

At it's core this is the same saints row as before, but there is nothing more. I am a huge fan of Saints Row series since SR2 and it's very sad to see what happened to reboot. This is, indeed, the death of a once fun franchise. Saints Row 4 accurately predicted this with their parody signs reading: "REBOOT IS DEATH". This is a dumbed down, forgettable, "politically correct" version of the Saints and it feels like a game the original Saints Row would have absolutely pilloried. I cannot recommend this game, especially not to Saints Row fans. 26 hours played to reach 100% completion and I only bothered because I didn't have anything better to play at the moment. And the list of bugs I encountered, many minor, some gamebreaking, would be too long to list. Unstable frame rates, copious frame drops, stutters, extreme texture pop in, missing textures, the list goes on. Visually the game looks like something from mid-last gen only with volumetric fog and heat distortion effects for the hell of it - but there's nothing here that can excuse the game's absolutely awful performance. The “gang building” is but a pale imitation of the first two SR games. Driving and shooting is janky af, the vast majority of missions are just “go here, pick up thing, bring it back”, even the main story missions. Student loans, yadda yadda yadda, late stage capitalism, yadda yadda yadda, evil imperialist corporation… If the Steve Buscemi “how do you do fellow kids” scene/meme were a video game, this would be it. Sanitized, bland, characters with very little humor and the whole thing just felt like a bunch of boomers and older Gen X’ers trying to write what they thought would appeal to millennials and zoomers. If I hadn’t known anything about the game beforehand and someone told me it was a remaster of a game from 14 years ago, I would believe them based on design and gameplay. Everything else was bland, soulless, open-world-by-numbers corporate game design.

Second best is the synthwave radio station.

Sanitized, bland, characters The best part of the new Saints Row is the character creator. The best part of the new Saints Row is the character creator.
