SAINTS ROW (2022) – It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City

Saints Row
Publisher: Deep Silver
Developer: Volition
Platform: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Google Stadia (Tested on PC and PS5)
Release Date: August 23, 2022

The 2022 reboot of Saints Row came out shortly after this blog went on its two-year hiatus, and I was planning to cover it at some point to finish up the Saints Row Megareview, but just didn’t get around to doing so. One reason is that I didn’t expect the game itself to be very memorable or interesting to talk about. Another reason is that I wanted Volition to actually finish the game before covering it, but of course we know what happened to Volition.

If you don’t know what happened to Volition, well, they got shut down by parent company Embracer Group in August 2023 after Saints Row failed to move the needle. Now, it should be noted that the closure of Volition was not solely due to Saints Row underperforming, as Embracer has gone on a bit of a kill frenzy over the past year or so and axed multiple studios to cut costs. This stems from the company’s own questionable decisions such as buying 9,000 different studios and IPs without being able to pay for them, expecting that their massive $2 billion USD deal with Saudi Arabian backers would go through without a hitch.

Of course, the Saudis ended up backing out instead, and Embracer were left with a bunch of assets they couldn’t afford. And when that happens, the ones who get punished aren’t the bigwig executives.

Losing a studio with a storied 30-year history in the games industry is of course a massive blow. Volition’s last couple of games might not have been great, but that doesn’t mean the people behind them deserved to lose their jobs. I hope they’ve managed to land on their feet, but knowing the general state of the industry at the moment, things seem more than a little bleak.

Volition’s closure also probably means we’re never getting the updated PC version of Saints Row 2, which Mike “IdolNinja” Watson had been working on until his untimely death from cancer in 2021. Before his passing, Watson stated he had appointed people to replace him on the project, but I think at this point it’s safe to say it’s never coming out unless Embracer (or Deep Silver or Plaion or whatever subsidiary holds the rights now) decides to release what the team did manage to finish. It’s a real shame because getting this done no matter what was basically IdolNinja’s dying wish, and now that’s been denied. No room for sentimentality in the games industry, only profit. Preferably infinitely increasing profit.

R.I.P. IdolNinja. You were the man. I still have the Gentlemen of the Row t-shirt I bought in 2011, and I don’t plan to throw it away anytime soon despite… erm, bulking up in the years since and not really fitting in it.

The new Saints Row was confirmed to be in development in 2019, with the first public reveal happening at Gamescom 2021 and confirming that this was indeed a full reboot of the series. No more Johnny Gat or Pierce or Shaundi or any of those guys. At one point, the plan was in fact to bring back the original Saints and have them build up their empire again in a new timeline (my idea was always an alternate Saints Row 2 set in a timeline where the Playa doesn’t get blown up thanks to timeline shenanigans courtesy of Gat Out of Hell‘s ending), but that didn’t materialize and the choice was made to do something completely different. Something much less over the top than the Saints going to cyberspace or hell.

The reception to the all-new cast and story was, shall we say, mixed. Even when discounting the usual toxic internet bullshit, the overall reactions to the trailer seemed to convey a sense of “Ehhh… I don’t know about this.” I wasn’t exactly sold on the new Saints myself, but I figured I’d give them a chance. Yes, even the nerd who always wears a bowtie like a doofus and acts exactly as you’d expect a guy like that to act.

At this point, I didn’t think we’d particularly need to see Johnny Gat for the sixth time, seventh if you count Agents of Mayhem, and the story had turned into such nonsense that a full reboot was welcome. Unless, of course, you liked the nonsense, in which case this more grounded approach probably wasn’t to your taste. I said years ago that any new Saints Row could not possibly please both us Stilwater OGs and those who prefer the wackier later games, and here we saw exactly that in action.

What didn’t help was the fact the Gamescom reveal completely ignored the character creation features! While the official website and other preview materials did very clearly mention the customization, the complete lack of emphasis in the initial reveal was confusing and slightly worrying. From what I recall, Volition’s official response was that they didn’t think it needed to be mentioned because of course Saints Row has all the customization you’ll ever want. The problem with that was the fact their previous game – Agents of Mayhem – had none whatsoever, and neither did Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell. With that in mind, it might have been worth it to at least mention the customization returning and being better than ever, but what do I know?

Speaking of Volition’s responses to criticism, they did not handle it well to say the least. On their socials, any criticism directed at the game was smugly dismissed. While a portion of the “feedback” they received was of the toxic internet bullshit variety and didn’t deserve any real engagement, shrugging off fans’ genuine concerns and questions with pithy one-liners was perhaps not the ideal approach and didn’t help generate any positive buzz about this release.

Another minor issue at the time was the fact Deep Silver somehow managed to screw up the official US preorder links. According to a former Volition staffer who talked to Matt McMuscles in the What Happened episode for Saints Row 2022, these were broken for days until someone finally got around to fixing them. The same former staffer also said Deep Silver isn’t really capable of AAA publishing, and I’m inclined to agree as some of their efforts over the years haven’t been very successful. Remember Mighty No. 9 and its infamous “cry like an anime fan on prom night” trailer? Yep, that was them.

Whether or not Saints Row ever even was a triple-A franchise is debatable. This particular game did have a lot of money thrown at it, although that mostly had to do with keeping the extremely troubled development going for several years. Saints Row has never really had the same production values as something like Grand Theft Auto, which was ostensibly its main competitor at one point (which now seems completely absurd), or even many other open world games. At least I’ve always seen Saints Row as more of a double-A franchise, a scrappy underdog not quite up there with the big hitters. The slowly dying THQ, and later Deep Silver, didn’t have the deep pockets some of the bigger publishers did, and that was clear from the previous games. I’m just speculating here, but expecting the reboot to compete in the AAA space might have been a tall order to begin with.

As 2022 progressed, previews started coming out and painting a picture of a game that was rough around the edges with plenty of bugs and glitches but still an enjoyable Saints Row experience at its core. Unfortunately, that cautious optimism quickly turned sour as the launch on August 23, 2022 was accompanied by middling-at-best reviews (naturally, Deep Silver had a Metacritic score bonus system in place, and everyone knew long before launch that the comically overinflated metascore would not be hit). The game was obviously rushed, unfinished in many areas and riddled with bugs, and it was clear from the disjointed mess of a story and the constantly fluctuating tone that something had gone badly wrong in development. Any potential that might have been observed during the preview stage failed to manifest in the released version.

Want to know how unfinished this game was at launch? When I played this on the PS5 on release day, there was no player icon on the map in the pause menu. It was either bugged or just hadn’t been implemented yet, so the big map had zero indication as to where you were. The only way to find that out was to set a waypoint, which would draw a line from your location to the destination. There was a player icon on the minimap, but that’s the minimap so it’s not very helpful since it only shows a small portion of the map. I have played plenty of unfinished and buggy games in my time, but I have never seen anything quite like this. Todd Howard himself would be proud. Again, I must note I don’t blame the developers for this, because by all accounts they did everything they could to push this project across the finish line.

The launch was preceded by the release of the Saints Row Boss Factory, which let you create your character beforehand and import them to the game, similarly to the standalone character creators Saints Row The Third and Saints Row IV had. This seemed like a good idea because the character customization is the best part of the game, but most reviews seemed to agree that it was also basically the ONLY part of the game that was worth a damn. I maybe wouldn’t go that far, but I understand why some would.

The character customization here is indeed very, very detailed, with more sliders and options than anyone will ever need. It is genuinely very good and, again, the best part of the game by quite a margin. We haven’t seen this amount of customization in this series since my beloved Saints Row 2, and unlike Saints Row 2, most of the hair and clothing options here actually look really good. I’ve spent a lot of time playing dressup with my Boss in this game, and I think it makes up for a lot of the game’s shortcomings. Your mileage may vary, of course, and there are plenty of shortcomings.

The gritty urban and industrial environments of Stilwater and Steelport have been left behind in favor of Santo Ileso, located somewhere in the American southwest near the Mexican border and surrounded by a desert. Santo Ileso does have plenty of urban areas in its own right, including a flashy business district, but even then it has a completely different vibe than Stilwater or Steelport and generally looks very pretty, especially the lighting and volumetrics. Even the most critical reviews usually admit those aspects look extremely nice.

More districts were added via updates and DLC to fill in parts of the map that didn’t have much going on, a welcome addition because the empty desert to city ratio was somewhat skewed towards the former at launch. There are some fun side missions in the desert we’ll get to later, and you can find various collectibles scattered around, but it’s not particularly exciting to explore in general.

My least favorite aspect of Santo Ileso is the big lake in the middle of the map. The city is built around the lake, and there is simply too much water and too few bridges. As a result, getting from one district to another can be needlessly frustrating, especially during missions where you obviously can’t fast travel and don’t usually have access to flying vehicles, and ESPECIALLY if you’re trying to go from the north to the south or vice versa as that requires driving around the lake. There used to be a lot more driving all over the place in certain side missions at launch, but patches have improved the situation considerably.

I also have to complain about the narrow roads of Santo Ileso. A lot of the time, there just isn’t enough room for drifting or weaving through traffic, which loves to get in your way and often just drive into you. When you’re just exploring, this is not a big deal, but it can get frustrating in certain missions. One side activity requires you to drive a toxic waste truck from point A to B, and any collision will cause a leak which then means having to haul ass to the waste dump before the whole thing blows. Idiot AI traffic can be a real hassle in this activity in particular.

Santo Ileso is also home to the Panteros and Idols gangs. Los Panteros like loud music and even louder cars, and they control the southeast part of the city. The Idols are an anarchist cult all about dressing up in flashy neon helmets and Sticking It To The Man (or so they claim), inhabiting the northeast. The western part of Santo Ileso is controlled by Marshall Defense Industries, a private military company protecting the interests of the rich and powerful. And in the middle of Panteros territory, we find a certain bunch of misfits living in a crappy apartment and struggling to pay the rent. This is our main crew that will eventually become the Saints.

There’s Kevin, an Idols DJ with an aversion to wearing shirts. Then there’s Neenah, a Panteros member, art enthusiast and the best getaway driver in the city. Eli is the “strategic thinker” of the group, which means he always wears a terrible suit and bowtie, listens to motivational tapes, and wants to become a big time real estate guru. I don’t like Eli. Finally, there’s Snickerdoodle, who is a cat. None of them have the money to pay the rent or their student loans for their useless degrees (they’re just like me fr fr). Oh, and I guess there’s also the nameless goofball we play as. We’ll just call them the Boss even though at this point they’re anything but.

Actually, hold up a bit. The game starts in medias res with the Saints, firmly established, hosting a massive party at their HQ. This is where we create our character, who promptly gets buried alive when the party is attacked by unknown assailants. We flash back to a few months earlier, and that’s where the story properly begins as the Boss starts their first day working as a Marshall grunt. The mission is to apprehend the Nahualli, some sort of super criminal and vest and mustache enthusiast for some reason that doesn’t matter (and unless I missed something, we’re never even told). We just need to follow orders and stick to the plan.

Naturally, the Boss is a hot-headed idiot who completely sucks at following orders and sticking to any sort of plan, but they are very effective at killing guys and blowing things up, so eventually they do manage to take down the Nahualli… sort of… and expect hefty payment for their efforts. Which they don’t receive because they completely ignored the orders of their commanding officer, so now they have to go home and tell the others things didn’t go well and we don’t have the rent money. Dumbass.

For some reason, there is another character customization segment at this point. I get that this is where you’re supposed to choose your casual clothing, but why did we even need to create the character at the party five minutes ago? Why was the party segment even there? Why not start with the tutorial mission and put you in a Marshall uniform with a full-face helmet and masked voice, and then create the character after the mission? That’s what Saints Row The Third and Saints Row IV did, and it worked alright. Maybe just let the player customize a few basic things like body shape before the mission? In any event, this debacle and ensuing lack of cash leads to the crew robbing a sketchy loan office, an operation that could hardly be described as smooth but is ultimately successful.

Following a series of shenanigans involving a stolen MacGuffin, the Boss gets fired from Marshall while Neenah and Kev fall out with their respective gangs. That means it’s time to BE YOUR OWN BOSS, as is oft repeated in Eli’s insufferable motivational tapes and the game’s marketing, and that means starting our own criminal enterprise and taking over the city. I understand they’re trying to do a story where the crew can’t find jobs so they turn to crime instead, but the way this is done feels abrupt and contrived to say the least. Our crew also seem to think the concept of organized crime is somehow a novel idea nobody’s ever thought of before.

Saints Row went through rewrite after rewrite during its troubled development, but even in its final form it gives us very little reason to care about the main cast. For the most part, these characters might as well be cut from the side of a cereal box. Neenah at least gets some backstory in-game as we learn why her project car is so important to her and why she reacts so strongly when it’s stolen and trashed by the Panteros.

One review actually complained about the plot point about her sick mother not being followed up on and said that was an example of the game’s poor writing, but the dialog heavily implies her mother died of cancer when she was young so I’m not sure what exactly they’re supposed to follow up on. Now, this has nothing to do with the game’s writing, but Neenah also happens to look very similar to my Boss from the original games so I’m already inclined to like her more than the others.

Neenah also wins by default because Kev and Eli get nothing meaningful at all in terms of story or character development. Even the cat gets more than these guys. Am I being too harsh? After all, it’s not like the original cast of Saints Row was very well defined either. I feel the difference here is that these characters are supposed to genuinely be our friends and we’re meant to actually care about them, judging from how the Boss reacts when they’re all in danger of being killed.

The Saints in the original Saints Row were there mostly to give you missions and an extra gun or two when needed, and you were just some random guy they literally grabbed off the street in the opening. In the second game, the Boss got some opportunities to bond with the new crew but was mostly driven by revenge, so a lot of the bonding involved murder. Despite that, when Carlos is tortured by the Brotherhood and has to be mercy-killed by the Boss in Saints Row 2, you feel it because this is a character you’ve come to know and who’s been helping you out since the start of the game, when nobody else had your back. This story, on the other hand, desperately wants and expects us to care about these characters and their problems, but it doesn’t give us much reason to care and keeps undermining itself on the rare occasions it does.

I feel like the game should’ve started with the player character moving to Santo Ileso (you could even keep the plot point of them joining Marshall and say they moved here because they got the job) and meeting the crew for the first time. It would not fix all the issues with the writing and I would still probably hate Eli with the burning passion of a thousand suns exploding into supernovas, but at least this approach would allow us to get to know these characters and give us time to maybe form some kind of attachment to them, rather than just having the game say “Hey, these are your friends, you should like them!” before we ever meet them. I do realize the plot we got is already the result of many rewrites (including several late additions that were meant to give us more reason to care about the cast) and extremely fraught development, and there was only so much that could be done.

As far as the general writing goes, if the original Saints Row had powerful “white nerds trying too hard to act gangsta” energy, this has “older white nerds trying too hard to appeal to millennial audiences or possibly zoomers” vibes. It’s kind of hard to tell which one, because I am a defective early model millennial and I have never seen anyone who acts even remotely like any of these people that I assume were meant to be relatable and likable. The dialog can occasionally be fun when it’s not trying to be overly cute with the banter, but most of the time it’s overstuffed with Marvel-style quips because that’s what young people like these days, isn’t it?

The most baffling part of the plot is the fact that instead of any sort of actual story or something that would fit him as a character (the idea of Eli hawking a Saints-themed cryptocurrency scam called Saintcoin and getting himself in trouble came into my mind far, far too easily), Eli gets an extended questline focusing entirely on LARPing, and it takes forever to slog through. Seriously, it’s just a few missions, but it feels like half the game because there are so few proper story missions in general. I really don’t know why, but Saints Row loves LARPing and even the last DLC pack is based around it. It doesn’t help Eli at all.

I haven’t gotten around to playing any of the DLC as of yet, but the LARP content in the main game varies from mildly amusing to completely insufferable. The tabletop RPG parody stuff (which I realize is not LARPing, but close enough) in Borderlands 2 is funnier than this. When you manage to be less funny than Borderlands 2, you should probably go back to the drawing board. There’s a joke about microtransactions shoehorned into one of the LARP missions. As we all know, microtransactions are extremely common in LARPing. It’s barely a joke to begin with.

I suppose the LARP guns are kind of funny for a while. You can unlock these and use them at any point, pretending to shoot these clearly fake weapons at people, and everyone plays along with comically overacted death animations and dialog because apparently, everyone in Santo Ileso plays the game. Of course, you see all these “deaths” in the LARP missions and probably won’t care by the time you unlock the weapons for general use.

Once the Saints get set up, the empire table is unlocked. This is where you invest in properties around town and unlock their corresponding side activities. I already mentioned the toxic waste disposal, and this is also where you can find some of the classic Saints Row activities like Mayhem, Chop Shop, and Insurance Fraud. As you progress through the story, more properties are unlocked, and these get increasingly expensive. I have heard people complain they had to actually wait for income to accumulate for quite some time before being able to afford some of the later properties, but I didn’t encounter that particular problem when I played through the game.

At launch, some of these activities were incredibly grindy (the waste disposal had FOURTEEN levels, I think, which is completely ludicrous), and the Chop Shop missions only had one garage to drop vehicles in (meaning miles and miles of driving), but these have since been adjusted to respect your time a bit more. What hasn’t been adjusted is the fact many of these are just generally disappointing, like the heist missions you unlock when you invest in the Let’s Pretend store. You don’t get to participate in any of the heists, just play getaway driver. There is a heist mission DLC pack, which I haven’t tried yet but I certainly hope that includes some actual, you know, heists to take part in.

In addition to the business activities, the Boss can earn money by participating in Side Hustles. Riding Shotgun is essentially Trafficking from the previous games as you protect an NPC while they drive around town, Choplifting has you stealing a bunch of things with a skycrane, Wingsuit Saboteur has you flying around in a wingsuit – as you might expect – and blowing up various things, @TCHA lets you start gang fights by giving restaurants bad reviews (with increasingly hostile responses based on your star ratings, which also come with amusing comments), and Pony Express involves smuggling contraband in the desert while dodging law enforcement. Pony Express is my favorite of these, as you’re not given any specific route to your target and actually need to navigate around the police dragnets and find the quickest way to the destination. It’s a lot of fun.

Remember Rockstar San Diego’s Smuggler’s Run games? These missions remind me of Smuggler’s Run. There are twelve of them in total, and I actually wouldn’t mind more of them. The physics can occasionally glitch out and send you spinning into the scenery and the driving in general just doesn’t feel as good as it should, but for the most part the Pony Express missions are some of my favorite side activities in the game. Rockstar should make a new Smuggler’s Run.

There are also various scavenger hunt type missions you can undertake while exploring Santo Ileso and its outskirts. You can find areas of historical significance and learn about the history of the city or try some shooting ranges with annoyingly well-hidden targets, for example. These are not very exciting. Neither is dumpster-diving for money, clothing or other goodies, nor picking up drug stashes around town. Fortunately, these are optional unless you want to 100% every district.

Naturally, a Saints Row game involves plenty of shooting. This felt floaty and unsatisfying at launch but has since been patched to be slightly less floaty and unsatisfying (but still not what I’d call entertaining). You have all the various pistols, shotguns, SMGs and rifles and rocket launchers you’d expect, with many customization options to help you personalize your arsenal, and later in the game you also gain access to some wackier experimental tech.

There’s nothing as wonderfully ludicrous as the Shark-o-Matic or the Genki Manapult truck from Saints Row The Third or the various glitch weapons or the dubstep gun from Saints Row IV, or even the sillier additions included in SR2‘s Gentlemen of the Row mod, but you do at least get some fun toys like an actual wallhack device and a gun that blasts people into space.

To make the combat more varied, you unlock new skills and perks through leveling. Most of these aren’t memorable enough for me to list here, and I’d generally stick with boring skills like the active shield that absorbs a certain amount of damage. That was particularly useful at launch, when some of the enemies were able to deal massive amounts of damage even on the lower difficulties and vehicle combat in particular was quite frustrating on the default settings. You can also perform powerful melee takedowns, but charging them up during combat can take a while.

Various things can be unlocked by completing in-game challenges, which usually involve killing a certain number of enemies with specific weapons or performing various driving feats. This unlocks signature abilities for weapons and vehicles, and you can even find special loyalty outfits for each Saints member buried deep in the menu.

Unlocking these requires bringing Neenah, Kev, and Eli along to bust some gang member heads and vehicles, which can actually be quite annoying if you’ve taken over the respective gangs’ territories and unlocked some of the notoriety reduction abilities (I suppose you could replay the @TCHA side hustles, and you can also call each gang on your phone to start a fight). Sadly, your homies no longer have conversations with each other when you bring them along, and they’re not that useful in combat either so there’s not a lot of reason to hang out with them.

Each gang has their own special enemy types, all of which have entirely too much health (which can be adjusted in the aforementioned difficulty options, at least) and/or annoying gimmicks that make them a hassle to fight. My personal least favorite would be the Idols lady with the spinning swords or sticks or whatever she’s waving around, because she deflects all of your shots while doing that and only stops for a very brief moment every so often. Waiting around just isn’t very fun or interesting, although there are a couple of ways to mitigate the issue.

I briefly mentioned driving in an earlier paragraph, so let’s talk about it some more. It feels off in ways I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s competent enough, but the cars never feel like they have enough mass and often react in strange ways to control inputs and geometry. Spinning out or rolling the vehicle for no apparent reason happens every so often, which is not ideal during a mission.

Much like the shooting, I could describe the driving as floaty and unsatisfying, and even using nitrous doesn’t feel as good as it should. Driving has never really been Saints Row‘s strong suit as it has always tended to feel too weightless for its own good, but it seems to have gone backwards here. Helicopters handle even worse, and having to do precision maneuvers in them is genuinely frustrating. Watercraft are used so rarely their controls don’t really matter that much.

From a presentation standpoint, Saints Row bears the marks of a release originally designed for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and retrofitted into a PS5/Xbox Series game with some added visual flourishes such as ray-traced ambient occlusion. Indeed, the 8th generation version of the game looks very similar and runs okay even on base PS4/Xbox One hardware, and the last-gen compromises have a marginal-at-best effect on the presentation. That’s what I’ve gathered from videos such as Digital Foundry’s analysis, anyway.

As for the current generation, there is a plethora of visual modes to choose from on the PS5 and Series X, with different resolutions and settings depending on what you’re looking for… and none of them manage to hit a locked 60 frames per second, or at least that was the case at launch. The 1080p performance mode gets close and some of the other modes are also solid enough with some gentle coercing from variable refresh rate displays.

But what about the PlayStation Five Professional? While Saints Row doesn’t have a PS5 Pro update (as I’m quite sure the number of people who might care is in the single digits), the performance gets a noticeable boost on Sony’s premium console. The 1440p High Quality mode with RTAO enabled can now hit 60 fps and mostly remains over 50, so it’s quite playable on a VRR display such as my LG C4. It occasionally dips beneath the PS5’s VRR threshold of 48 FPS (no low frame rate compensation here) so the experience is not entirely judder-free, but I could actually see myself using this mode if I ever wished to return to the PS5 version.

The 1080p Ultra Quality mode with RTAO is smoother yet and seemed to lock to 60 while I was driving around the city so it’s also a great option for Pro users, but I should note I didn’t test it or the other modes as extensively as 1440p High Quality with RTAO. The native 4K mode largely runs in the 40s and low 50s, so it’s still not recommended especially when you lose RTAO and other settings to accommodate the higher resolution. The frame rate modes seem to hit a steady 60 in regular play, but I need to point out once more that I didn’t look too closely into them or 1440p High Quality without RTAO, which also seemed to run fine.

The PC version, originally an Epic exclusive but later receiving a Steam release as well (just before Volition got shuttered), is… fine, for the most part. It scales beyond the PS5 and Series X versions and the field of view slider is a godsend due to the uncomfortably low default FOV, but the 8th gen origins remain obvious even with every setting maxed out at native 4K. Even after all the patches, some technical issues remain – there is the occasional visual flicker in menus, FSR glitches causing strange flashing lights and that sort of thing, and at least one mission is broken at frame rates over 60. One part of this very early mission requires you to shoot a pursuing monster truck to slow it down and keep it away from JR’s car, which I simply could not do at 120 fps and got crushed multiple times. I doubt this was a skill issue because this section is not difficult and I’d previously cleared it easily on PS5, and indeed it became utterly trivial when I locked the frame rate to 60.

If you’re anything like me – and I know I am – you probably associate Saints Row with some excellent licensed music, especially that of the 80s variety. Sure, Gat Out of Hell and Agents of Mayhem had none, but surely this big new Saints Row was going to be packed with classic bangers from years past, right? Right?!

Well, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. Out of the ~100 million dollars that went into this game’s development, very little went to music licensing (not that that’s a higher priority than paying your developers, of course), and Santo Ileso’s radio stations could be charitably described as forgettable. There are perfectly decent songs on there, including a small handful of classics like “Slam” by Onyx (which also plays during the game’s most memorable story mission) and the rest of the old school rap station which plays tracks from DMX, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest, and TLC to name a few examples, but most of the soundtrack just seems to be whatever they could scrounge up for cheap. This game doesn’t even include The Mix! And there’s an Accept song on the rock and metal station, but it’s not “Balls to the Wall”!

But hey, if you want 80s vibes, there’s a synthwave station for you (even though synthwave doesn’t really have anything to do with actual 80s music). Guess what this station is called. Go on, guess. Here’s a hint: it’s the least creative name you could possibly come up with for such a station unless you literally called it “Synthwave FM”, which they at least didn’t do.

If you guessed “OutRun”, congratulations! Don’t get too excited because this is definitely not the Kavinsky station that was rumored to be in GTA V before that game came out, and it most certainly isn’t the OutRun game soundtrack (which, I should note once again, has precisely fuck all to do with synthwave or vaporwave or any of that). It’s a bunch of generic synthwave, including a track I can only describe as “Legally Distinct Testarossa Autodrive“. Completely fine and inoffensive, but nothing more than that.

Oh, and I guess there is a karaoke singalong featuring the Saints and other characters if you complete the story and most of the side content (thankfully, you don’t need to collect every single thing in every single district, but that is still a lot of content and most of it is not very exciting). The main crew constantly talks about going to karaoke once all this unpleasant business is done, which I assumed was a joke but no, you do in fact get to hear the cast singing “Love Shack” by the B-52s. This is kind of fun but probably not worth the grinding you need to do to unlock the Saints Tower and this scene.

The audio mix is strange. For whatever reason, when driving vehicles around the city, the engine is barely audible even though the SFX volume is set to 100. Dialog, music, and other sound effects seem to come through just fine, so I’m not sure what’s going on here. This happens on both PC and console and is presumably one of the many remaining bugs that are unlikely to ever be fixed. You know, because Volition is dead now.

I could go on, but I don’t think there’s a whole lot more to say (which is just as well, because we’re currently at over 7,000 words and I think that’s gonna be more than enough about this particular game). The whole thing just makes me sad, really. I don’t hate Saints Row. In fact, I think it’s a perfectly okay open world game with excellent character customization and some fun over-the-top setpieces. The problem with that is the fact all of this was already done in the original series and while those original games are over a decade old (the first game will be 20 next year) and dated in many respects, this reboot doesn’t really do anything to set itself apart. It’s okay. It’s fine. But “fine” is just not enough.

Of course, even if this had been the best game in the series and sold gangbusters, Embracer might still have shuttered Volition because that’s just how the games industry works these days. You create a game that doesn’t sell an arbitrary number of units? You get laid off. You create a massive hit? You also get laid off. Gotta cut those costs, you know. Because otherwise, some executive somewhere might be unable to afford his seventh luxury yacht made entirely of platinum.

I really did not want the Saints Row Megareview to end in such a depressing way after more than a decade. Even though this reboot was largely considered a disappointment and I wasn’t particularly thrilled with it either, I quite enjoyed parts of it and was holding out hope for a sequel that would flesh out the new cast, improve on everything and carve out its own identity much like Saints Row 2 did in 2008, because despite my criticisms I do genuinely think there was potential here at one point. But due to a variety of reasons, any potential that might have been there will not be realized – certainly not by Volition. Maybe someone else will eventually pick up the IP and do something with it. Maybe not. Even if they do, it’s not going to be the same, is it?

RIP Volition. Thank you for all the memories.