Review: Saints Row 4

I honestly can't imagine how they're going to do another sequel in the Saints Row series.  They've managed each time to keep stepping up the level of the threat the Saints crew faces, and while I wouldn't mind another game where you just try to take over a city and come up with some new ways of doing things, it's a bit hard to come back from the story set-up of this game.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This is my review of Saints Row 4.

I need to preface this with something:

The Saints Row series of games are, in my opinion, some of the greatest games every made for the current console generation.  They take every complaint I had about my attempts to play other large, open-world sandbox games, dress them up in their best outfits to present them to me, and promptly execute them in the back of the head, gangster-style.

So many games give the illusion of an "open world" without actually letting you play with all of the toys that it's become rather ridiculous.  Saints Row dodges this question by saying "sure, you can have anything you want, you just have to level it up a bit more, or you'll only be able to use it once or twice before having to give back a little to use it again."  Do you want hugely destructive weaponry?  Saints Row 3 gives you a weaponized satellite death laser within the first couple of missions.  Want a huge piece of mobile warfare under your thumb?  Nothing's stopping you from running into that military base right off the bat and stealing a tank...just getting it back might be a bit of a challenge.  Do you want superpowers?  Saints Row 4 gives them to you.

And they are fantastic.

The game itself opens up with a continuation from the third game, having you confront one of the lingering villains and having to disarm a nuclear missile launched at Washington.  This is, of course, while you're clinging to the side of the missile, your crew are expressing their heartfelt goodbyes, and Aerosmith's Don't Wanna Miss A Thing plays.

A few instances of awesomeness later, and you wind up being elected President of the United States.  And then aliens invade.

What I'm trying to say is that Saints Row, as a series, doesn't believe in starting "small."  It likes to pick you up, show you the sheer amount of toys floating around in the deep end of the pool, and then bodily chucks you into the water figuring "eh, you'll learn how to swim."

The Saints Row series are well known for being a massive satire towards everything in pop culture, whether it's trying to run through a Matrix-like video game while someone drops down a command prompt to try to hack the game around you (you'll also catch references to Wargames, Jurassic Park, and Star Wars: Episode 3 within fifteen seconds of each other, and it actually flows pretty seamlessly), or doing your best to destabilize a computer world built shamelessly around the concept of Pleasantville.

One thing I've always loved is how much customization you get for your own character and how you can upload your character from one game to another to keep the "story" straight.  Now, having listened to a lot of the voices, I decided to have this be my character:

Because if I'm going to be punching aliens into next week and driving tanks through traffic, I should be comfy.

Now, I'll admit that the game earns its "M" rating.  If you want, you can have your character run around naked with proportions that would make most porn stars blush. You can dress them up in mascot outfits wielding extremely phallic weapons.  You can have them dress up like some thirteen year old boy's idea of the "ideal nun."

...for the record, I only bought that costume so I could upload it to show you guys.  Honest.

Not only does the game not punish you for anything you try to do in the game, it actually rewards you for it.  That "running around naked" bit I mentioned above?  There's an entire mini game based on shocking pedestrians on the street while streaking.  Want to use telekinesis to to throw people into the ocean?  Do it enough times, the game gives you a prize.  Want to drive on the wrong side of the street and yell expletives in a British accent at your screen?  The game counts how far you go to reward you later.

The game is pure, mindless, fun, with a sharp sense of humor and a willingness to never put itself up on a pedestal.  However, it does somehow manage to do something very few video games I've played have done.

Have you ever played a game where you go through a huge battle?  Sure you have.  Maybe you take out a boss the size of a skyscraper, or you maneuver through a racetrack with explosions happening around you, or you sneak through an entire facility to grab the document you need, and as you're discovered you trigger all the explosives you planted?

Have you ever noticed how the characters never take a moment to go "holy @*^! that was AWESOME?"

Saints Row does.  The primary character (read: you) will regularly comment when something ridiculously huge occurs and would react the way I suspect most of us would.  Instead of simply shrugging off the huge boss you just defeated as if it happens every day, the leader of the Saints will grab everybody they can find and shout at them "DID YOU SEE WHAT I JUST DID?  OH MY GOD, THAT WAS AWESOME.  I AM A FORCE OF NATURE ON TWO LEGS!  I NEED TO PUNCH A BUILDING JUST TO GET THE ADRENALINE OUT OF MY SYSTEM!"

The game also manages to be amazingly self-aware.  There's a moment early in Saints Row 4 where you're presented with a choice.  The main bad guy brings up records of all the stuff your character has done in earlier games (if you played them) and points out that you've, in essence, been just as much a threat to people as the aliens are.  "All the times you decided that driving on the sidewalk was faster.  All the times you used a rocket instead of a bullet."  I actually had to sit there and think about it, because it can sometimes be easy to forget that, even if you're destroying a major criminal empire or blowing up alien starships, you're not a very good person.

Now, there is one thing I really wanted to bring up in this review.  Not too long ago, I talked about sex in video games, and how I don't think you can really consider sex as something games are handling with any kind of maturity as long as it's a "reward" for game play.  I still stand by this, because I think it severely cheapens any kind of in-game relationship when you're going to just pick things to say and actions to take so you can get to see another character strip down to their underwear and climb into bed with you.

Saints Row 4 does something that manages to be grossly immature and surprisingly sophisticated when it comes to sex.  You can have a "romance" with any of your crew members, and when I say "any" I'm not making a big deal out of the fact you can hook up with someone the same gender, I'm including the ones who are simply giant floating robot balls.

Have I mentioned that the game has almost no shame?

Anyway, "romances" are pretty simple.  Walk up to a character, press a button, you ask them if they want to have sex, the screen fades to black, cheesy porn music plays.  There's no wacky camera angle nudity, there's no lengthy speeches, it's just "let's do it" followed by "okay."  And that's it.

Well, almost, so far actor-turned-vice president Keith David keeps turning me down, saying I'm his boss and it'd be weird, or that he just doesn't want to.  But that's okay, because his voice intimidates me more than anything else in the game, to be honest.

There is some rather wacky stuff in it, though.  One of my favorite NPCs is Kinzie Kensington, a computer hacker who used to work for the FBI.  Approaching her for sex literally does just come down to walking up to her and saying "Hey, Kinzie, wanna [censored]?"

...of course, I'm still slightly unsettled that her response is to punch you in the face and then pounce on you with a devilish grin...but hey, whatever, right?  It takes all types.

Now, obviously, just letting you walk up to people and essentially going "Press X to say you scored" isn't the most mature method of incorporating sex into a game, but somehow Saints Row 4 manages to strip away all the stuff that other game developers (looking at you, Bioware) have played up as being "big deals" in their games.  Same sex relationships?  Why should that even be an issue?  Sex being the "prize" you try to earn?  Pfft, it's not a prize, it's just...y'know, something that happens.  Getting someone in bed shouldn't be a miniature game you play within the game just to get a smaller "you win" victory and some on-camera cheesecake...in fact, Saints Row 4, a game that I'll once again point out has a mini game based on streaking (granted, it conveniently pixelates any part of the body that might be deemed "offensive") doesn't show any skin when you hook up with someone.  They don't even take off their shoes, it just fades to black and then the game resumes like all you did was get a soda or look out a window.

It's not the ideal presentation of sex in a game, but I found it rather refreshing instead of finding my character in situations where two NPCs have differing opinions of what to do, and instead of picking the opinion I agree with I simply choose the opinion of the character I'd rather my character hook up with because I want to, literally, "earn points with them."

I'm still playing Saints Row 4 even as I write this, but unless the game suddenly turns solely into Reader Rabbit and gets rid of everything that gives the game its distinctive personality, I can almost guarantee that it's going to be one of my favorite games I played this year.  Look forward to seeing it on my eventual "Top X Of The Year" list as the month goes on.