Saint’s Row 4 review: Saint Misbehavin’

After an hour of playing the video game Saint’s Row 4, I began to imagine an odd, high-society scenario. And I don’t mean the kind found in this nonsensical open-world game. Here, you control a former gangbanger turned president of the United States who leaps around like a superhero, swings dildo bats, and shoots dubstep guns (certainly rich enough imagination-fodder).

Rather, I thought of this scene: A high-ranking executive at Koch Media has just come home from a corporate auction flush with good news. He’s secured the rights to a giant video game series thanks to the bankruptcy of former publisher THQ. His obnoxious pre-teen son Caleb enters the room when dad utters the words “Saint’s Row.”

Little Caleb squeals with delight. His parents are oblivious enough to ignore game ratings and buy their son an open-world game as violent and titillating as Saint’s Row, one that has always competed with Grand Theft Auto by turning the wild dial up to 11. Caleb immediately issues demands. The pushy brat wants the next Saint’s Row to be more like all of the other games he plays: Halo, Crackdown, inFamous, Skyrim, Mass Effect, Splinter Cell, and on and on. Oh, and it should borrow ideas from The Matrix, Transformers, Godzilla, and every other action movie he can think of.

Dad’s not much of a gamer, but even he wonders what the heck Caleb is talking about. In spite of Saint’s Row being a pretty wild series, this all sounds like overkill. But you know how Caleb gets when things don’t go his way.

If you’re following along, Saint’s Row 4 feels like a game driven by a bratty 12-year-old as lead producer—which actually isn’t the worst move for a series that peaked in 2011 by going the gonzo route. Hyperactivity, stupidity, and schizophrenia all plague this massive romp, but its real weakness comes from how grossly it mishandles its soup of ideas. Saint’s Row 4 may be the most boring dildo-fueled game ever made.

A long, strange trip

From the outset, Saint’s Row 4 will confuse players about what the heck they’re getting into. Even encyclopedic SR fans will wonder why they’re bouncing from a linear spy-movie assault on a military base to a linear shoot-every-alien battle from within the White House—and then to a hallucinatory introduction of a ’50s American suburb.

The weirdness may be expected, but the linear, hand-holding stuff stretches on for too long before the game’s premise finally emerges. You, the leader of the Third Row Saints gang, have somehow become president. In the middle of your reign, you’re attacked by aliens who blow up the planet and trap your posse in a Matrix-style series of Earth simulations. Or something. I’ve gone through the intro a couple of times and still don’t quite get the conceit.

Logic seems like an intentional casualty so that the developers at Volition can pile on the crazy. Your open-world adventure to save your friends takes place in a simulation, right? Full of aliens? Well, there’s Saint’s Row 4‘s special sauce. Bring on overcharged laser guns, monstrous foes, general impunity when killing pedestrians, and, perhaps most crucially, a series of superpowers. If you’d rather not steal a car to go a long way, you can jump, sprint, and glide through the city, even running up the sides of walls, Flash-style. When baddies appear in droves, shoot fireballs or punch the ground to send shockwaves.

This stuff shamelessly borrows from the open-world games inFamous and Crackdown. In a reverential nod to the latter, the game also hides collectible orbs on its rooftops. But the completionist fuel doesn’t stop there. With every ally you rescue, more optional side quests appear, unlocking superpowers, weapons, and outfits. In Elder Scrolls fashion, your every action—from reckless driving to aimed gun shots—pays off in XP to be spent on upgrades.

But a different kind of secret sauce is missing in that loop of quests and rewards. Consider the journey to unlock the dubstep gun, which shoots lasers to the beat of Skrillex-like tunes. The gun may be powerful and amusing, but both novelties wear off quickly, and the fetch/battle quests needed to unlock the gun are slogs.

Your superpowers take a while to recharge, so you don’t get to lay down unadulterated waste between point A and point B. Even after being upgraded at chop shops, vehicles don’t deliver the kind of wild destruction you’d expect from, say, a Just Cause game. Buildings and other structures don’t crumble a la Red Faction games. Planes and other super-powered vehicles take too long to appear as a regular option.

For a game that advertises itself as a wild romp, its core open-world play tends to feel pedestrian, stifled, and dated—and that’s not accounting for the wide difficulty divide between pesky peons and supercharged bosses. You’ll need to run, jump, gun, and wield superpowers all at once when dealing with the latter, and that juggle couldn’t feel more inelegant. Since the main plot missions don’t really require completing the optional stuff (and some side-quest bonuses don’t even apply to main missions), you’ll feel no remorse in skipping them.

Most of the main quest is painfully linear, which voids open-world perks like gang members and equippable guns. In a few plot missions, you’ll climb into a giant mech suit loaded with unlimited rockets, only to stomp in a straight line through a claustrophobic, Halo-inspired corridor. Or you’ll riff on Metal Gear Solid in a “stealth” segment as simple and one-dimensional as its jokes about hiding in cardboard boxes or a guard’s “solid snake.”