With its recycled map and wildly overpowered abilities, playing Saints Row IV feels like a lot like enabling god-like cheat codes in Saints Row The Third and going nuts. Which is a shame, because precious few of them are actually any good. You don’t need to acquire all of the dozen ventures in order to complete Saints Row’s campaign, but buying up roughly half of them is mandatory in order to unlock its final story missions. Buying one of these businesses and completing its associated set of missions boosts the Saints’ hourly revenue, giving you access to a slowly swelling pool of cash to spend on more weapons and clothing. It’s a nice way to organically display Saints Row’s collectibles, and finally answers the question of what would Animal Crossing be like if its residents were 100 percent more homicidal? Repeat BusinessĪs you progress through Saints Row’s story and strengthen your gang's stranglehold on the streets of Santo Ileso, an increasing number of criminal ventures become available to purchase. This robust cosmetic customisation extends to your weapons arsenal and garage, and even the Saints’ HQ, which is an abandoned church that evolves and expands over course of the journey and can be augmented with dozens of decorations found hidden across Santo Ileso, from abstract art to hulking pieces of Americana like giant football helmets and cowboy boots. But you really can let your imagination run wild if you want to get creative, especially in tandem with the numerous clothing options to unlock, whether you want high-end fashion or perhaps merely a taco hat and tissue boxes on your feet. I’m a fairly simple man with simple tastes, and so I basically bought the mariachi outfit, equipped the Three Amigos pelvic thrust salute emote, and kept them for the 30 hours I spent playing. However, you can certainly change yourself, and Saints Row’s impressive character customisation tool can be accessed at any time via the in-game phone, allowing you to completely alter your appearance either by crafting it yourself or importing one of the growing number of community creations. I’d have preferred to have Eli with me on more missions, but you can’t change who you’re stuck with. It reminded me of the sticks-and-stones-style warfare of South Park: The Stick of Truth, and provided an enjoyable shift in tone from the more murderous mayhem found elsewhere. The actual combat experience in these sections remained fundamentally the same as every other shooting gallery sequence, but it was funny to hear the characters make the gunshot sounds with their mouths and perform pretend executions, or to come upon enemies who would stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that you shot them instead of lying down and playing dead. None of these partners in crime have particularly interesting personalities, but the one I warmed to the most by far was the brainy pacifist, Eli, mainly because his side story missions involved donning some cardboard armour and swapping my assault rifle for a Nerf gun in a series of live-action role-playing battles. They can also be summoned via your phone’s contacts to fight alongside you in the streets, which comes in handy later on when you’re trying to clear out rival gangs from your turf and you want to get the repetitive fights over with in a slightly speedier fashion. ![]() Joining your created boss character, who is a self-described “walking murder party”, are three other foundational members of the new Saints who accompany you as AI partners on certain missions and provide some consistently cringe-inducing banter in the cutscenes in between. The fact that you can scramble onto the roof at speed and launch into a wingsuit glide (a move straight out of Just Cause) also makes for some spectacular getaways, although it seems like an oversight that you can’t do the same thing from a motorbike’s saddle. ![]() The floaty and largely homogenized handling meant that I never really grew to favour any one vehicle over the other (aside from the glorious hoverbike unlocked late in the story), but the ability to drift and sideswipe other cars at the tap of a button does give chase sequences a welcome burst of Burnout-style gratification. Though there are a handful of aircraft and boats to discover, most of my time in Santo Ileso was spent behind the wheel of a healthy fleet of land vehicles, from motorbikes to monster trucks and everything in between. It’s also fairly conventional in its approach to driving.
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