4/24/2023 0 Comments Saints row 2 map size![]() There are bugs and mechanical issues aplenty here, one of the most egregious of which being an issue where we repeatedly lost control of our protagonist during missions, the game suddenly refusing to respond to our button presses, with the only resolution being to quit the game entirely and reload, causing us to lose great big chunks of progress in the process. It's a tired and uninspired gameplay loop that's made even worse by the fact the game is so rough and unpolished. All of this stuff is as uninspired and bland as can be and 90% of your time is spent driving somewhere, getting into a fight, then rinsing and repeating. You'll hunt down assassination targets and kill them for cash, steal cars to sell at a chop shop, take to the skies in helicopters to nick armoured vehicles, rock up onto rival turf for street fights, find tourist sights to take photos of for XP, dumpster dive for prizes, leave bad ratings at businesses in order to kick off wave defence sequences against your foes and so on and so forth. From here things kick off properly and you're thrown into the game's core loop of dull campaign missions and endless side activities that've been cribbed from every other urban open world game that you've ever played - except here they don't work as good. Soon after arriving in Santo Ileso for the first time, you and your crew decide to make a go of it and set up your very own criminal organisation, at which point you quickly check available local property, find a big old church with the Saints Row logo emblazoned on its floor and then name your new gang after one of the very first things you happen to see upon entering the building. It's not like we're not asking for an overly complex narrative, we're not expecting the Saints to explain away every death they cause as they rampage across the world map, but a little more depth sure would have helped give us something to cling to as we ploughed through the repetitive missions on offer here. Yep, where the likes of GTA and, to a lesser extent, Watch Dogs, tend to at least attempt to set their protagonists up with somewhat intriguing motivations for their spiral into a life of crime and violence, here you do it because hey, we gots to pay dem bills. It's here we're introduced to the all-new Saints, a terminally dull bunch of worriers who're struggling to pay their student loans - almost as much as we're struggling to remember their names - and need to pull their various criminal skills together in order to make some serious money. Once you've created your in-game avatar - in the admittedly rather flexible character creation suite - you'll be let loose in Santo Ileso, a south-west American city that's a rough mashing together of the likes of Reno and Vegas, where three rival gangs, the Panteros, the Idols and Marshall Defense Industries are engaged in a struggle for supremacy. It's not a good introduction, and things honestly never really improve. Somewhere, somebody must have thought this was edgy, cool, a good first impression to strike at the beginning of a fresh franchise reset, but in reality it just comes across as desperately lame, a needlessly infantile start to proceedings that will surely only appeal to folk who think that profanity alone is comedy gold. Things get off to an immediately bad start, with a cringe-inducing opening sequence that culminates in the game's title arriving on your screen just as your customised character - the new leader of the titular Saints - screams a string of obscenities from his vehicle whilst blasting down the freeway. There's barely a single gameplay system in Saints Row that works as it ought to, barely a single scene's worth of dialogue that didn't make us wince, and it results in an action-adventure game that we had to just grit our teeth and plough through, one miserable cookie cutter mission at a time. Over the course of the roughly 20 or so hours we spent with this one, we've been genuinely gobsmacked at just how rough, how janky and how bizarrely old-fashioned this failed attempt at a reboot really is. It's a shame, then, that what we've actually got here is one of the worst urban open world games we've played in recent memory. ![]() Here was a chance to pull things back from the brink, to step away from the dildo bats, dubstep guns and fart jar grenades, to drag their rough and ready street gang into the here and now. A ground-up reworking seemed like a great opportunity for the developer, a chance to make a clean break, to refresh and reset a series that was struggling somewhat having gone to increasingly ridiculous lengths to entertain with each and every new addition. Volition's decision to reboot their long-running Saints Row franchise has had us intrigued, excited even, ever since this brand new entry was officially announced back in 2021.
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