I’ve wanted to write game reviews for a while now, but for whatever reason never got around to it. I’ve recently finished the story of Saints Row IV, so I figured now would be a great time to write a review for it. Please offer any constructive criticism you can, as I feel my writing could always use some improvements.

Before I get started with the review, I’d like to say that I haven’t played any of the previous Saints Row games, I started with Saints Row IV. Thus, I can’t compare it to the previous games and say that it’s gotten to ridiculous or anything like that. I can only judge this game by itself and not part of a series. With that said, let’s start with the review.

The Saints Row series, as far as I know, focuses on the gang known as the 3rd Street Saints, and the games have you play as their boss. By the time Saints Row IV starts, after one quick tutorial mission, the Boss has become the President of the United States. I thought that this was extremely cool, especially when I found out that Keith David (who voiced Anderson in Mass Effect) was the Vice President. Unfortunetly, you don’t get to actually do a lot as President. You make one decision, punch a guy who disagrees with you, and possibly high five one person, and that’s it. There are references to the Boss being President throughout the game, but you don’t actually do anything as President throughout the rest of the game.

After this section, the real plot of the game begins. The alien race known as the Zin, led by their leader Zinyak, are invading Earth and abducting the members of the Saints. You end up fighting the Zin in a simulation of the city Steelport, which I believe is where Saints Row The Third took place.

The special thing about the simulation is that you’re able to use superpowers in it. Initially all you get is super speed, strength, and the ability to jump high. However, throughout the game, you’ll get the ability to upgrade your powers and unlock new ones. These superpowers are really fun to use, both in combat and just messing around looking for collectables. It may sound like this would get repetitive, but it surprisingly doesn’t. You get a lot of powers as you progress through the game, allowing lots of variety for combat. There honestly might be a bit too many powers, as there were some I often forgot I had.

One thing I didn’t like about the powers though was that I couldn’t use them in most story missions. Not all of them, but most story missions come up with a reason for your powers not to work, which makes me wonder why I even bother to upgrade them. But then the mission is over and I’m able to go hunting for collectables again, reminding me why I loved them so much.

I have two other problems with the superpowers, which wasn’t a problem with the powers themselves, more of a problem with how they designed the game. For one thing, vehicles are completely useless. You can run and glide faster than any car in the game, so why would you want one? If I worked on the car customization in this game, I’d feel pretty insulted.

There are also some flying vehicles you can get, but I personally didn’t like most of them. They were cool at first, but I had a hard time controlling them, and you can get around faster using your powers.

My other complaint about the powers is that they make the world feel small. I can travel across the entire map in an extremely short amount of time, and I can get up so high that the game will create a force field to prevent me from going up any higher. When I can get that high up in an open world game and can travel across the entire map without touching the ground, I just don’t feel like I’m in a big open world. Some might say the world wasn’t that big to begin with, but I personally couldn’t tell you because I used the powers to get around which made it feel small to begin with.

Personally, I think they should have waited until Act 3 of the game to give you your powers. It would have been a great way to fix my previous complaints, make the climax seem more interesting, and the post-game stuff would feel like an entirely different game. However, I guess it would remove some of the appeal from the game.

Getting back into more positive stuff, I mentioned before that there’s a lot of variety in the gameplay. Aside from all the different superpowers, you also get some guns and a melee weapon. Some of the weapons are normal stuff like a pistol, shotgun, heavy SMG, sniper rifle, baseball bat, and other boring stuff like that. You get a lot of stuff like that, but alien versions that don’t run on ammo and instead have an overheat system. You also get some insanely cool weapons such as one of my personal favorites, the Dubstep gun. There’s also a Black Hole Launcher which is just insanely overpowered and fun, despite the long recharge time. There’a also the inflato-ray that I know a lot of people loved, but I personally got too freaked out by seeing people’s eyes grow like that to use it.

I could go on listing the cool weapons in the game, but I won’t because it would take too long. The only other weapon I want to talk about is the dildo bat. I walked into a weapon store to get some ammo and see if there were any weapons I missed, and I saw this thing sitting there. Can I ask why? Is is supposed to be funny? Is it supposed to be shocking? Wacky? I didn’t think it was any of those things, I just thought it was stupid. Not the fun kind of stupid, just the facepalm worthy stupid. I’m going to assume this was something the developers thought players would find funny to use. Some might have, but I personally didn’t and just went back to using the energy sword.

Continuing with that, some of the humor in the game just fell flat and wasn’t funny. An example would be during one loyalty mission where the Boss ends up wearing barely any clothing and does a dance at a strip club in a scene Quick Time Events. I think this was supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t. I was just embarrassed to play it.

However, some of the humor was actually good. An example would be the romances, which are obviously meant to parody Mass Effect. These I honestly did find funny. I could list more examples, but this is what first came to my mind when I was thinking of funny stuff from the game. There is some great dialogue and other stuff. The game does parodies of a bunch of stuff, such as one level I believe was from Metal Gear Solid. There were also a few times where the gameplay style was completely changed up to match older games, such as my favorite where it becomes like an old 2D beat em’ up. There was also a point where the game turns into a 1950s sitcom, which was pretty cool.

One of my favorite things about the game was the character customization, which is by far the best in any game I’ve seen. They give you a lot of stuff to choose from, some of it normal while other stuff is just insanely out there (such as orange skin and tons of the hair styles). There’s also great clothing you can wear in the game. Some of it is serious (such as a leather jacket & jeans), some of it is serious but crazy for the situation (such as a tuxedo & top hat), and others that are just completely crazy (such as a zombie outfit). You can also choose you character’s voice, which is the first time I’ve seen that in a game. For anyone curious, here’s a picture of how I customized my character. I used the female voice 1 for her. Sorry for the poor quality picks, I took them on a cell phone.

Gallery

Since I just covered the main character, I might as well talk about the other characters. They were all great. I really don’t have a problem with any character in the game. Every character also had a good voice actor/actress. All of the members of the Saints were great, and I felt like I knew them for a long time, even though I haven’t played the previous games. There were loyalty missions you have to do for all the members of the Saints before the final mission (obviously taken from Mass Effect 2), and I enjoyed bonding with the Saints throughout all of these.

Zinyak, the game’s main villain, was also a surprisingly good character. He was just cool and fun villain, and now has a place among my favorite game villains.

If anyone’s curious, my favorite characters (not counting the Boss) would probably have to be Johnny Gat, Kinzie, Zinyak, Keith David, & CID.

Also, there’s a surprise that I don’t want to ruin for anyone who hasn’t played the game. But there’s one character that shows up in the game that I loved. If you’re not a fan of professional wrestling, it won’t matter to you. But if you are, you should love it.

Following up what I mentioned a little bit ago with the loyalty missions, I have mixed feelings towards the side missions in the game. The loyalty missions are all great, but there’s also sidequests that don’t really matter in the end. These do give you some nice rewards, such as new weapons and outfits. However, they just get repetitive after a while, as they all come down to either killing the same things over and over, hacking things, or driving things. I suppose that could be described as the entire game, but it just got a lot more repetitive here for whatever reason.

And while they aren’t quite side quests, there are also little mini-games that you can do. Some are as simple as racing or destroying stuff, but most of them are fun. My personal favorite is fraud, which I’m not sure I could explain. Go to this video to watch someone play fraud if you want to see it. He plays it a bit differently than me, but it shows the main concept.

This is a small nitpick, but is still something I want to cover. Throughout the entire game, there is no day/night cycle like you see in some open world games. You’re stuck with night throughout the whole game, which I got sick of after a while. After you beat the story, you can change the time of day for the world. Why wouldn’t they just let you do that during the main game? I also don’t like the way they make you change the setting. You have to run around and find a computer on the ship to change the setting. However, it isn’t just night/day, there’s a whole list of stuff you have to choose from. They also don’t give you any pictures to show what the city will look like, leaving you to guess. If you go back into the simulation and realize you don’t like what you picked, you then have to go through a loading screen to change it, randomly pick one again, sit through another loading screen, and hope this one looks better. This all could have been fixed by putting this option in the pause menu, but they didn’t for whatever reason.

Before I finish this review, I have a few small problems with the final mission & boss fight. It is fun and very satisfying, but that doesn’t excuse the problems. First off, there’s an annoying free falling section that I kept dying on because they randomly threw a new set of controls at me out of nowhere. Secondly, the final boss glitched out and allowed me to shoot him all I wanted while he was just standing there, and he wouldn’t move until a scripted event ocurred where he had to. And throughout the game, killing enemies (and civilians if you bought the upgrade) would give you health orbs to obviously let you regain your health. However, this ability is removed in the final boss fight for whatever reason and they replace it with regenerating health, which is something I see a lot of modern games do that they just need to stop with.

Overall, Saints Row IV is a really fun game. There are a few small annoyances, but nothing too major to take away from the game. I paid $17.00 for the game, have played for a little over 25 hours and have 71% completion and definitely feel like I got my money’s worth for it. If you have some free time and want something that’s just mindless fun to play, Saints Row IV is a perfect. Overall, I’m going to give Saints Row IV an 8 out of 10. It’s very good, but could use some improvements. That’s it for the review and I hope you enjoyed it. See you guys in the next review.

Summary

The Good:

• Gameplay is fun and has nice variety
• A lot of fun & creative weapons
• Great characters
• A lot of the humor is good
• Great character customization
• Fun mini-games
• Side quests give good rewards

The Bad:

• Powers make the world feel small and vehicles useless, and can't be used in story missions
• Being President is a wasted opportunity.
• Some of the humor isn't funny and tries too hard
• Side quests get repetitive
• No Day/night cycle

Overall Score for Saints Row IV: 8/10