Right so, Saints Row is coming back! The absolutely insane counterpart to the already insane GTA got a trailer a few days ago and oh boy has it got a few trousers tight.
Looks rad right?!
Now, there have been a few naysayers out there, because it’s a video game and people will come out of the woodwork till the end of time to sh*t on a video game. The biggest gripe seems to come from people believing that they have dialled back the crazy. The devs have not even pretended to deny this, admitting they dialled back the lunacy to Saints Row 3 levels… yeah isn’t that just a gigantic step back.
Its been a few years since we last saw the saints outside of the spin off Agents of Mayhem that we wont discuss. The last proper game in the series was Gat out of Hell, a strange title where you took series regular Johnny Gat on a whirlwind trip to the depths of hell to rescue his boss. Not something I can imagine most people in the world doing…
So since then, the world of Saints Row has been dead silent for 6 years. A whole six years where I haven’t been able to beat my enemies to death with a 6ft long purple dildo sword or shoot people with chum leading to their death by land shark.
Now obviously we have very little to go on so far with only a short CG trailer, a few gameplay snippets and a promise of a series reboot, but I have to hope that just maybe there will be at least a few bright sparks on the development team who want to bring the series back to what it does best, zany action that even the crass GTA wouldn’t touch with a barge pole anymore.
The last time I played a Saints game to completion, was the superpowered Saints Row 4. At the time I have to say I was fairly enamoured with the title but as time went on, I saw more and more flaws in what I did. Making the game entirely set in a simulation and giving out superpowers, while fun, made a lot of the actual content feel a little bit meaningless. Most of the real fun during the game was in the loyalty missions you could do with your homies, side quests that would unlock their own superpowers and give them hilarious new costumes. The actual story is something that I honestly can’t even remember. This however, isn’t the case for Saints Row the Third which I still remember pretty clearly and enjoyed every moment of! Notice above my mentions of the shark gun and dildo sword, both of these came into play in the third game of the series!
There we have it, while there are the vocal minority out there afraid of what a subtraction in lunacy will do, I have faith that if the team are taking things back to how they were in Saints 3? We should be in for a good, wild time! And who knows? Maybe this time it won’t be full of forgettable moments with well spoken alien warlords…