Saints Row is an action-adventure crime game developed by Volition and published by Deep Silver. The game has its fun moments, but they're mired behind an endless cavalcade of glitches, performance issues, and a story that wraps up just when it feels as if it's starting.
The latest Saints Row is a reboot of the franchise. Gone are the familiar faces from the old games, like Johnny Gat and Shaundi, as they have been replaced by a new crew of Saints. Saints Row is set in the city of Santo Ileso, which is home to different warring factions: Marshall Defense Industries, a hi-tech weapons manufactor that lives for profit; the Idols, a group of anarchists/terrorists with a flashy nightclub aesthetic; and Los Panteros, a more traditional gang that deals in street level crime.The new incarnation of the Saints include disenfranchised members of these gangs, who are sick of stealing in order to pay rent, so they start their own criminal empire. With the aid of their business advisor, a cat, and an abandoned church, they call themselves the Saints and begin to take Saint Ileso for their own, one street at a time.
The main character in Saints Row is The Boss, who acts as the leader of the growing Saints organization. The player designs their own incarnation of The Boss using Saints Row 's stunning amount of character customization options, and the fun doesn't end there, as the player can create lots of designs for the boss and switch them when able to use their phone. There are also new outfits and options that can be purchased in stores or earned through missions. The sheer amount of character customization options in Saints Row are easily the most impressive part of the game, as the players have the tools to design the character they want, or recreate their favorite fictional hero in Santo Ileso.
The problem with picking out an outfit for a character is that it will sometimes just vanish from their body, because Saints Row is absolutely riddled with bugs on every level, ranging from: game-ending crashes, to The Boss standing alongside their motorcycle while it rides, to enemies spawning out of the reach of the player, to SWAT teams riot shields expanding and shrinking in size, to vehicles getting caught on scenery and making missions impossible to complete. Saints Row lacks polish, with a ton of environmental pop-in when driving, which is surprising, considering the visuals aren't exactly high-quality to begin with. This also has the effect of making enemies and their vehicles seem as if they're teleporting a few feet away from the player in some missions, rather than appearing on the scene naturally. Saints Row should have been delayed again in order to make sure these issues where fixed. While not quite as awful as Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, the glitches in Saints Row are bad enough to be a constant distraction, and are outright infuriating when they cause a mission to be restarted, even with the checkpoint system.
In terms of gameplay, the main missions and the loyalty missions are the highlight of Saints Row, and the shootout sections tend not to be as buggy as the driving segments. There are a couple of standout missions in the bunch, such as a prison break that quickly devolves into a riot, and an extended LARPing campaign, where people have to respect the rules of the game. As the player progresses through the story, they can place Criminal Ventures on the map, which will slowly generate money over time. The Criminal Venture missions are just busy work, with basic mission types that are repetitive, and the player cannot totally avoid them, as some of the main story missions cannot be played until a number of the Criminal Venture missions are complete. It also doesn't help that Santo Ileso as a city just feels dead, with barely any pedestrians around, giving the impression that the only people in town are the Saints and their enemies.
The three main Saints other than The Boss (Eli, Kevin, and Neenah) are a lot of fun, and it's shame that there isn't more to their individual stories and loyalty missions, as one of the big issues with Saints Row is that it feels more like it's telling a prologue than a full story. The motivations behind the three enemy factions are barely explored, and winning the achievement for finishing all of the Loyalty missions feels surprising, as the player barely gets to learn anything about the companions during their time together. The final mission ends just as it feels like things are getting started, leaving the story of these new Saints feeling rushed and incomplete.
There is an enjoyable Saints Row experience buried under the bugs and polish issues, so long as the player sticks to the main content and doesn't waste too much time in the barren parts of Santo Ileso. The series needed to go back to its roots after Saints Row IV introduced aliens and the Matrix into the mix, and the concept behind Saints Row is a solid one. The new Saints Row stumbles when it comes to bringing its world to life, which is a shame, as the story of the new Saints would have benefited from a much better sandbox for them to play in.
Saint's Row will be released for Google Stadia, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on August 23, 2022. Screen Rant was provided with an Xbox code for the purposes of this review and it was played on an Xbox Series X.