Saints Row Review WTF Happened_ _Buy_ Wait for Sale_ Never Touch__

 happens when you remove almost everything from a game's general identity and reformat it as a reboot of a beloved franchise especially if that game was known as one of the more over-the-top politically incorrectbtitles in the world poking fun at evenbthe most over-the-top games like itsbcompetitor grand theft auto can it stillbsucceed and is success the same as beingbgood the last question we already knowbthe answer to success doesn't mean beingbgood but we want them to combine in ourbgames just like third person open worldbgames have grown to let us shoot andbdrive and glide and boat and tornadobattack enemies the mixing of all thesebthings into one and how they comebtogether will give us the answer and i'mbgonna give you the answer here in mybreview for saints row reboot which isbout soon on every device but the switchbwhat do you think of it here's what i dobas always i buy a copy of every singlebgame even if the devs give me a code and give away that game to somebody who subscribes or a patron or somebody who comments and if you're one of the first 1000 people to comment you will be the first 1 000 people to comment and i thank you saints row blasts out of the gates differently than the original namesake

but at the same time it does pay a bit of an homage to those original titles i don't want to spoil all that much of it i will just say there's a death maybe

some flashbacks then you're hired by the colonel sanders and military contractors then fired from that job only to decide to team up with your friends to make your own gang if that sounds like plot whiplash let me tell you it is the game is trying to set up the triple threat that we've known of in the prior titles your own groups and politics gangs and military contractors here it's driving you through a tutorial until you're jobless with your poor ass pals hanging out in an apartment speaking of the pals you got one dude dressed like a leprechaun an urkel you have a completely normal woman and then another dude who has urban beets lime green on his head and likes waffles so much he has a tattoo of one on his chest and to add this group of misfits you got yourself your own boss and that's where that starting customization comes in now i did my best i like to make characters whose faces look like some place other people travel to in rocket ships i made a dude that's a bit like donnie trejo's younger brother bonnie there's a good number of options you can still make some outlandish characters if that's what you want to do now the entire game is driven by the group's desire at first to get a waffle maker so they break into crime then later they decide to form their own gang to do as you would in these titles you take on main missions side missions local jobs and activities collections as well as building out your crime empire by going through the game world and planting out new buildings on empty lots and then performing jobs that connect to them to increase their weekly take you pick up bounties hijack brings trucks with helicopters and large  magnets and force out the other gangs all the while the world's broken into eight or nine territories each one offering a bit of a different graphical look like a down and out section somewhat like the outskirts of reno deep city locations with skyscrapers no end of places to wingsuit and a ton of spots in between now nina kevin and eli your friends help you make and take out the missions and most of what you see you've seen before in other games collecting grabbing vehicles taking them back to your own garage to have them unlock four customizations and colors and getting into all sorts of trouble luckily doing so control doesn't really let you down it is definitely third person driving arcadey style and that's a bit because the developers have aimed to make sure that the vehicles not only are used in combat more but that each one has its own skill like kneecap or spikes that come out of your axles and otherwise keyboard and mouse and controller can all be adjusted easily with keybindings as well as sensitivity settings so there's no real harm regardless of what control scheme you choose i never love driving with a mouse and keyboard but it works fine here now you level up a number of things in the game not only your own empire using the empire desk that has you throw down these buildings wherever you want to expand but you also update your character as you take on these jobs each level usually gives you a skill or a perk being able to be locked into four buttons if it's a skill so these skills are like dragon punches

gravity grenades and everything in between where perks are unlocked almost like cell phone memory blocks where you buy one and then you add a passivevability into it like running faster whenvyou're closer to death triggering lessvnotoriety when doing illegal things andvother passive kinds of skills notorietyvgoes up of course as you create morevchaos and you have different types ofvnotoriety for example you can have onevfor the military contractor or the police now when you fill up the gauge for specials you can also do takedowns while in combat if you're close enough you can trigger an unstoppable killin move like a series of huge punches spin kicks hits with clotheslines and even a torpedo leap into the enemy's guts but a great deal of what you're going to be doing is using weapons and i want to talk about this in particular while others view the removal of the purple ding dong bat at some point of focus and a total thematic change including the developers who couldn't stop talking about it it's actually much more telling as an indicator of how focused that part was it's like some kind of calling card to saints row for them where fans who've played the games from first last remember a massive number of elements that are far beyond that one particular thing shotguns rpgs assault rifles smg's up close weapons including non-lethal ones each gun has an upgrade as well as a special ability you unlock in the course of collecting items and finding secrets in the game world now this sense of discovery is spread across all the other items in the game including the cars the motorbikes the boats and otherwise each one has a special ability unlocked in some way like doing barrel rolls taking out enemies or in particular missions being able to unlock those and switching between those taking out enemies driving around then whippin out your knife for some opportunities when you go into the special takedown mode is quite enjoyable but it never really feels like it's doing anything unique or different at all and you ca start to see where that focus might have heard it it's like listening to a politician puppy dogging their way through an election by repeating the one bullet point that fits particular blocks that they grew up in and then not realizing everyone outside of that didn't grow up in that block so they have no damned idea what he's worried about and unfortunately this rolls out to the missions themselves they are exactly what you expect with nothing unique you go to a location you take out various actions you become a taxi for one guy fighting off enemies for another

taking out leaders and helping out your main leaders as well after a while you can upgrade and customize the gang itself change their look adjust their

cars that they drive around and basically take more charge that doesn't mean there aren't some fun missions in there for example the cosplay missions i'm not going to say much about this but you help out one of your teammates in a huge larp that's across the world with different weapons car designs fake cardboard armors hell even the characters in the game react differently when you're using those weapons in the game world that is very cool during some of the missions you can also call your pals to hang out and take down the missions with you and this can help a good deal if you have the difficulty up harder or if you just run into something that seems just harder to actually do however be aware that the ai for friends can span from fine to absolutely out of control one of the big points is that sometimes i'll leap into cars or motorbikes to follow you ignoring your car even if you honk the horn right beside them other times they don't and they just jog behind you like a dog left at home whenever you go to the beach other times they teleport around the game world behind you fading into view getting hit by cars killing pedestrians with their own it's random there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason between what their choices are and that hurts the game immensely especially when some of the missions themselves require you to be a little bit safer or play it a little bit differently this is a huge misstep it would have been a lot nicer to be able to force them into the vehicle with you or maybe force them to get into another vehicle but i could never figure that out also they should toggle this somewhat like the ai's mission following escort missions ai because those guys  are so far up your ass they should get colostomy bonuses at the end of the missions those guys are always tracking you and yet your own ai doesn't the game does have full co-op which allows for people to jump into each other's games with their own boss and engage in missions with the other person so that is very nice and it definitely does help when the ai for the game itself isn't the greatest something i've talked about for years is the use of microsoft's accessibility controller and it's changes that have been allowed but here we see a good number of graphical and control changes as well super high contrast versions hud changes even the ability to massively adjust the timed objective difficulty up and down turning it all the way off but it doesn't stop there something we've talked about in the walking the walk videos the game also allows for you to toggle almost every single action in the game between

a button press and a hold this allows for things like acceleration drift reverse looking also to be done that way so if you hate holding down the thumb

stick to look behind you while you're in a mission you can just tap it once boom switch that easily and the game is actually much more enjoyable that way

and those adjustments continue allowing you to change the game to put the subs all in caps the reticle size minimap size adjusting all the settings for the

mission driving indicators and more it takes all of these parts and tries to make a saints row game out of it but what's interesting is they may have

taken the one cohesive concrete element that allowed for saints row to be itself which is poking fun at other open world games as well as the world itself and when they've put the more mundane things in there that we expect even focusing more on the action like a lot of the impressions that the developers have talked about about particular fictions they look forward to for example the fast and furious movies but what's interesting about saints row is it

wasn't just the sexual innuendo in the game which was there but it wasn't everything but a good fan will have so many other experiences of over-the-top

bits this just shifted so dramatically to one side that it's shown that a lot of open world games with just a boatload of activities doesn't always make a good open world game saints row feels like the future of modern open world games where the narrative so milk toast and laid back and lacking in anything that's interesting to say but the actions still sort of mimic the same things the prior games did the murder the mayhem through its reflection of today's day and age mentalities that's fine but it also at the same time mows down any real elegance in delivering something that's worth really watching or playing and instead what you get is a game that feels a little bit like some kind of buffet where everything wasn't seasoned and once you come out of it it feels

like it's almost a scathing indictment to fear development so afraid to say anything that deciding that they want to make an open world sandbox game is going to cause a two-hour argument about the color of the sand and the width of the border it's worse than that though it really is a pinpoint alert that while fun can carry something a bit of the way which this game has and expectations perhaps help you get some of the discussion going the world's passed by

saints row and maybe really had already passed by it when the first game came out it's not just that edginess that mattered one of the leads is stated that

movies like john wick the fast and the furious games and baby driver were inspirations and you can feel that because you drive and you also get to pull things around behind you and sometimes things blow up but those three mixed together and especially the lack of really anything other than the special takedowns being any reflection of john wick feels very hollow and what makes it even worse are the bugs i'll bring up the graphical ones in a bit these are gameplay bugs only i'd restart about 21 missions in my playthrough with enemies spawning under buildings into freeways above me beyond me below me i even tried to track down some in the game but the game would warn me that i was leaving the mission area in fact one time i killed them by shooting a car with an rpg that then flew through the air into the freeway to kill them and it was the only way to get through more than a dozen times the game's inputs just stopped working except for kicking and ducking controller and keyboard both showed this it was tested on three different computers by two users while the devs have said that they have plans for some kind of day one patch every developer patches after release that's pretty expected unless they abandon the

game that's a lot to fix and speaking of a lot to fix when i covered this in my preview there were a lot of graphical issues let's talk about the graphics

here and then i'll talk about sound music and voice and fun factor there's a lot to take in first saints row is trying to do a great deal like most open world games showing a number of environments many of them lit up with neon lighting and unique designs for storefronts and then lit up again with

the explosions of a huge number of vehicles as you and your buddies rip through it to get to a mission spot before time runs out that's where the

game is at its best sitting on top of a car shooting a shotgun into the police car below you having it explode and barrel roll over the top of you is a

movie moment graphically i like a lot of the game lots of unique locations from out in the desert and spots to see hikers steal your fair share of range

rover copies to the deeper city with the skyscrapers and freeways runways and highways characters are pretty okay looking though saints road does try to

mimic some of the over-the-top bits from the original games it's a bit more of its own a little bit more cartoony explosions special effects and car damage like hoods and doors trunks  shattered windows and an assortment of damages flying around you does make the game look more action-packed sadly saints row has a huge number of technical issues a massive first of all the pop-in it could literally be a terrorist weapon it's horrendous all the time it's everywhere no matter what your setting is no matter how low you set it what grouping you try what adjustments you make the world is consistently drawing in items shadows people cars walls everything performance is also not where it should be you can see what they've suggested as their typical stylings for a low medium and high in ultra settings that they've released in their paperwork but it's really not there yet with a 1080 ti 1440p 60fps is probably not going to be possible if you have the settings maxed you can set some of these down and some of them have such a small change in the graphics that you can see on screen i would suggest you do one huge positive to this game is most of those settings allow for you to see the settings as you're adjusting them showing the open world as you're adjusting those really allows for you to fine-tune your game well a 3080 and a new i-9 still sees huge drops in 4k on ultra the game also has no dlss or fsr settings to speak of it does have a normal resolution setting that allows for you to lower it and it'll use general upscaling but that is pretty damned muddy that brings us to some of the options i want to go through them graphical options the game lets you choose between the main full screen windowed borderless and window modes as well as adjust your fov and ray tracing ambient occlusion be aware that that ray trace in ambient occlusion doesn't mean ray tracing for the entire game that's not here it is simply ambient occlusion then you can jump into the main options after you look at the locking the fps or unlocking after jumping into that you have different settings you can use anda couple i want to point out  anti-aliasing first there's fxaa there's none and there's tsaa eight times use that that's a temporal solution it works best and i'm telling you right now just use it no matter what you do none or fxaa results in a headache-inducing shimmering mess it is really nasty now you can jump to your scene detail this adjusts the items on the screen their complexity yo have shadow quality it's just that can be adjusted a good amount without a huge detrimental impact to the overall screen

image water quality lets you of course adjust that including the far away effects and look of reflections and refractions on the water and then you

have undergrowth this lets you adjust foliage itself with low resolution almost none and high pretty packed with adaptive altering it to get a smooth

frame rate then you have effects and post-processing effects this handles all kinds of small elements like explosions and around signs smoke specific places

in the game you can adjust these down and not really impact anything as well the last two that matter are general reflections and planar reflections both

making big differences on cars and some signs and especially when you're in the boat you'll notice those making some big differences on far away buildings and lastly you have global illumination and hbao which is your ambient occlusion those darker shadows around objects but even if the pop-in went totally away the game still has a large number of other issues the number of times that my character ended up holding the gun backwards as countless just backwards i couldn't fire it switch it in and out or do anything but reload the save i looked back at an ai character for too long during many missions and when i flashed back to forward view you would actually see the car teleport in front of me like a spaceship entering warp flashing past me then resetting the game's shadows also consistently flit back and forth around and above you below you as if they're hitting items that don't exist this may all sound bad but i want to enthis on a good note one of the kudos is that mad max mini gaming larp world a cosplay then is dust walkers fighting for command for cardboard and wood constructed items around the game world everything from kills with nerf guns to tearing out enemies hearts like temple of doom but doing that different heartbeat animation everyone reacts totally different when shot with the guns running around on the ground or pretending to die in overacting moments that was very very cool now when it comes to presentation audio also matters guys we're really good at what we do so why are we doing it for other people and not ourselves i mean you know how to start a business kev knows how to get attention i'm a walking murder party and nina nina's the best goddamn driver in the business who could touch us hell we just took on two crews at once and walked away just fine firstly music some good music in the customization scenes the cars the gangs the motorbikes the boats and later on there are various cutscenes with good music and the stations themselves aren't bad at all they range from heavy punk to industrial edm to country and a lot of new service systems you can also unlock an in-game app to make your way

into your own station grabbing different songs from various stations and making your own mix when it comes to the voices this is just sort of a thing no one

really has a terrible voice but the writing is borderline ai created not much is ever really said and when something does it might be replaced with the most boring way to say something ever the game looks like it's prepping to tell you some unique story but not until the end does that at least somewhat get interesting and the characters introduced hired or trained just don't say anything much at all at the end of the video i played around with ai voices and lip sync and if you want to see my own description of what it's like the game's accessibility options are great here though with you having the ability to choose to turn off all the other audio when the cut scenes are playing or voices are playing or have a different mix you also can put text bubbles on characters talking and adjust the font size for subtitles which is a huge deal of people who leap onto a 4k screen and someone forgot to fiddle with it and now it's like one pixel tall for every letter jump into the last thing which is sound the sounds are not  terrible but the mixing is there are two

sections for music the mixing of the normal audio sections and the accessibility section make sure to  adjust it because the cars are almost impossible to hear the guns are around 70 percent where they probably should be and i tested this de facto setting on multiple different systems tvs 5.1 stereos and otherwise so lining this up to around 50 music volume 70 master 90 gunshots and 100 maxed car sounds usually works pretty well with you able to hear everything somewhat discreetly but every system is going to require a little bit more adjustment the various choosable samples for engine sounds when

in customization and the different gun sounds actually really liked explosions 3d effects and all the processing are good especially that huge tonal change

of gunshots inside a busy city versus somewhere else how does all this come together and do all of the issues impact the fun factor yeah

yeah a bunch the game has a lot of fun moments don't get me wrong i like the cosplay missions i loved setting up the first locations the gang owned locations was fun and all of the various different little activities were enjoyable but it's like a sampler disc from old magazines for xbox playstation dreamcast while it tries to hold itself together it does it because the spiderweb o these thin upgrades you get mechanically that somewhat connect between the mechanisms that might be used in various missions are cool a car here a weapon there a character upgrade there all of them useful throughout maybe the gun play and exploring was pretty fun but it begins to wear thin quite quickl  because the mission variety other than the ones that i mentioned and a couple

that i'm not going to say due to spoilers don't change very much even the cars and their upgrades to speed and ability start to feel strangely leveled

the difference between for example the fastest car and the slowest car if they're both upgraded doesn't feel nearly where it should be and it feels

like everything in the title has been leveled it's like showing up to a protest about something no one cares about and then deciding to stage a mute sit in when people did show up i do like the shooting i loved some of the chases i loved some of the shootouts i enjoyed collecting cars for sure and the motorbikes and customizing those but it was all very short-lived and it was all rife with technical details a very bland story and really really laid-back almost non-existent atmosphere what do you guys think about these things do they come together for you especially once you play this game if you do get it i want to know what you think in the comments i rate games on a buy wait for sale rent or never touch it again rating scale and on the pc rent is replaced with deep deep sale here it is definitely wait for a deep deep sale here's the thing we al  wanted to see how this was going to work out if we could all guess how everything was without experience it no one would have went to titanic it wouldn't have been a worldwide blockbuster movie guessing doesn't always mean being right experiencing this thing is different games are more difficult when it comes to interactivity for example it breeds chaotic examples that spread out into this tapestry slightly different for every single person but usually with some underlying atmosphere tone and experience we can all share we can all buy the same color sheets though but the thread counts gonna matter and here it just feels really coarse it feels like nothing is really done it feels like the story doesn't deliver the characters aren't interesting and the gun play well it's there and it's enjoyable but nothing pulls you forward and once you start to see that some of the customizations other than the special skills don't really pay off not a lot does i don't think it's a never touch i

just think that this is a title that if you're a saints row fan probably not going to be something that you're absolutely in love with if you're an open world fan probably the same it's a game that really doesn't deliver much however we are in an empty area of gaming so maybe people get it and you'll

have that time where people get it and they just enjoy the little bits of fun they have in it hopefully they don't experience even maybe a tenth of the

bugs graphical issues and so forth that i did anyway that's it for me i want to say thanks to everybody watching if you get a chance check out the patron it's the only way youtube is completely dead pretty much for me but the best way to help out the channel if you want reviews given to you that aren't two minutes long or filled with sponsored bullcrap check out that discord that patron you can jump in talk about games play d d with people we do board games people are getting together for all kinds of crazy stuff and some real actual physical meetups with masks of course i would love for you to join if you can't just give it a like subscribe peace out and i really do hope whatever game you're playing you're enjoying this cat desires waffles and snickerdoodles