Saints Row 2022 hands-on preview – pure sandbox fun
As a series, Saints Row didn’t just jump the shark. It jumped entire skyscrapers. What started off as a tongue-in-cheek GTA clone morphed into a superpowered action game where cars became obsolete unless you were booting them at someone. It had more of an identity crisis than I did when I first loaded up the new Saints Row’s character creator.
Developer Volition has solved this by taking the Saints back to the start. It’s Saints Row reimagined in a new rags to riches story for our current times.
The story takes us to Santo Ileso, a fictional city in the American Southwest. There are bright lights and big cities, dusty plains, dueling diplodocid statues, and even its own version of the iconic Route 66. I played for a few hours and felt like I’d only seen a postcard.
Of course, it doesn’t hold up against Rockstar’s worlds. Hell, it doesn’t hold up to Ubisoft’s. It feels more like a sandbox for fun than a lived-in place, but it absolutely achieves what the developers set out to do. It’s a world full of things that go boom. Here’s a rocket launcher. Have at it.
The story starts with your first day on the job as one of the Marshalls, a private military corporation that follows the code of TLC – “technologically advanced weapons, loose morals, and a history of conflict”. One minute you’re shooting your way through a gang hideout styled after the Old West as your low-paid peers die all around you, and the next you’re hanging from the side of a hover jet. I swear to you that it has toned down. I didn’t say it wasn’t still ridiculous.
The formation of the Saints happens a few missions later, after you’ve battled your way across a rolling convoy, jumping between moving cars and truck beds. When the boss of the Marshalls notices your talents, you’re then asked to head up security for an event which, predictably, all goes to hell. You’re fired from the Marshalls and you and your flatmates decide to cut out a slice of Santo Ileso gangland for yourselves. You know, so you can pay off your student loans and get a waffle maker. The usual crime stuff.
Your flatmates are an eclectic bunch. There is an accountant and safecracker who drinks white wine spritzers, there’s a musclebound bisexual hunk who hates T-shirts and has a flair for social media, and there’s a Latinx mechanic who can outdrive anyone. They’re new-age gangsters who listen to self-help podcasts and care about their carbon footprint, but don’t mind leaving bloody ones – especially on people’s faces.
Once you’ve established the Saints by taking over a church – naturally – the game is all about territory control. You access a war table in your hideout and choose where to build businesses that act as fronts for your operations. Not only do you choose where, but you also choose what. From insurance fraud companies to toxic waste dumps, there are plenty to unlock as you progress, and each opens up a range of side hustles for you to take part in – from the brilliantly named Chop Lifting, where you steal things with a helicopter, to insurance scams where you purposely throw yourself into traffic. Yes, the best side missions from classic Saints Row are back. There are also activities in your in-game phone, such as a Wanted app that lets you track down criminals if you fancy some straight-up action.
As with the old games, combat is run and gun. There’s no contextual cover system here. There is, however, a dedicated kick button, brutal contextual takedowns, and more environmental hazards than a kid’s bedroom after an all-night Lego session. While you can aim and shoot things like explosive barrels, you can also tap a button to instantly shoot these hazards, which lends the action a breakneck pace. There’s also a move called Pineapple Express, which lets you shove a grenade down an enemy’s pants before throwing them at their pals.
Everything in Saints Row is built around keeping up the pace. Enter a car and you double foot it straight through the window, kicking the driver out in the process. When you exit a vehicle, you almost eject. Take on car theft missions for a local garage and every car of the type you need to rob is conveniently marked on the map. It’s like the antithesis of Rockstar’s push for realism, where every single drawer must be opened in real-time when you loot a house. I love Rockstar’s games, but it’s refreshing to play something so unapologetically old-school.
“When it comes to the traversal mechanics in our game, we definitely wanted to make it fun,” principal designer Damien Allen explains. “You can leap into a vehicle, hop on the roof, get into a wingsuit and fly before landing on another vehicle.”
The only thing that drags Saints Row down a little is the vehicle handling, which feels a bit like you’re controlling a shopping cart with three wheels. Across an ice rink. While drunk. It’s intentional on the developer’s part, but it doesn’t feel as instantly gratifying as some other open-world games.
“We lean for more of an arcade feel for the driving mechanics,” Allen says.
It’s more Ridge Racer than Gran Turismo, in other words – driving is dominated by wide drifts and silly jumps. Accelerate into a car and it’ll explode in a fireball as you continue on your way. Sideswipe someone and they’ll flip down the highway. There’s even a specific button you can press to trigger a sideways shunt into another vehicle.
“The sideswipe mechanic is something you could do in theory ,” Allen explains. “You could sideswipe another vehicle and have it go careening off. But we wanted to make it easier for the player and have your car in vehicular combat without having to be spinning the camera and aiming behind you and doing all these more technical things. You can still spin the camera around and shoot out the window if you want. But we were looking for the rough edges and trying to sand them down.”
You might as well be driving a tank, no matter what vehicle you’re using – they’re wrecking balls.
Saints Row itself is a bit of a wrecking ball, too. It’s a game built around constant forward momentum.
Even the wingsuit feeds into this. You can drive down the road, hop onto your car’s roof, then wingsuit off, land on another car, and instantly jack it. Upgrade your abilities and you can even use enemies and pedestrians as launch pads to keep up your momentum. Play Saints Row in two-player co-op and the possibilities open up even more. It’s pure sandbox fun.
It makes sense for the moment-to-moment play to be as unhinged as the missions themselves. It’s a delicate balance to strike because the series lost me when it started messing with alien invasions and trips to Hell, but Saints Row seems to have nailed it from what I’ve seen so far. Not a single leap over a skyscraper in sight. Wingsuits are much more civilized than superpowered legs. Still, we’ll find out if it sticks the landing when it releases on Aug. 23.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.