[News] Saints Row Review - Open-World Nostalgia

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It's been nine years since Saints Row IV was released, pitting the 3rd Street Saints against an alien invasion that featured superpowers, time-travel, Matrix-style simulations, and the complete destruction of Earth. Where do you go after a game so ridiculous and outlandish? After a period of absence, rebooting the series sounds like a logical next step, and that's exactly what developer Deep Silver Volition has done with this new, stripped-back Saints Row.

It's still not "realistic" by any stretch of the imagination, but it is slightly more grounded. However, you still shouldn't envisage finding many of the modern trappings of open-world games. For as much as Saints Row differentiates itself from the bombast of its past few entries, it still closely resembles a game from the same era, leading to an experience that often feels stale and dated.

For the most part, this isn't something you could level at Saints Row IV's approach to freedom around character identity and gender, and this has carried over into the rebooted Saints Row. The character creator lets you design pretty much any person you want. There's a broad range of prosthetic options, various types of vitiligo, a number of sliders for body options that do away with binary gender selection, a choice of six distinct voices, and the ability to make an asymmetrical face, to name just a few of the available options. You can also hop back into the character creator at any point and change your entire look. This sounds like an insignificant feature, but it isn't always a given and speaks to Saints Row's focus on inclusivity.

You can create a character that represents you, or simply delve into some of the more eccentric customization options and devise a creation with metal skin, demonic eyes, and glowing red hair. There are already some fairly accurate recreations of Shrek being shared, just to give you an idea of how exhaustive the process is.

Once you've finished creating your ideal gang boss, you're thrown into a story centered around four young friends who share a dingy apartment and commit crimes to try and make rent. Saints Row adopts an anti-capitalist stance and touches on some socially conscious issues throughout its first few hours, with characters bemoaning their crippling student debt and lack of health insurance, while also taking a satirical swipe at toxic corporate culture. Alluding to these issues makes the cast somewhat relatable, but it doesn't take long before you're building a criminal empire and discarding these topics in favor of more outlandish endeavors.

Link: https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/saints-row-review-open-world-nostalgia/1900-6417945/