By Will Greenwald I have a lot of respect for the people at Volition. After steadily stepping up the amount of craziness in their Saints Row series, they found themselves in a creative quandary. Saint's Row 2 added wackiness to what was otherwise a competent Grand Theft Auto knock-off, and Saints Row 3 cranked it up by turning them into rock stars. This was a move many fans of Saints Row 2 didn't like because it took out the few but surprisingly powerful character moments the previous game had. A logical step from there would be to pull the series back, and bring the Saints back down to earth from the heights of cartoonish popularity and psychotic nihilism. The natural response would be to carefully look at different ideas and pick out the ones that would bring the series together thematically to make it all work.
Not the guys at Volition. Instead of searching for a few good concepts against a creeping wall of you-can't-make-it-any-crazier in the series and fighting a seemingly inevitable dearth of new ideas, they said "Let's use all the ideas! Yes, even the stupid ones! You! Over there! The guy high on Dimetapp who doesn't work here! Do you have an idea? Great! We'll use that idea, too!" The result is Saints Row IV, an Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 ($59.99 list), and PC ($49.99 list) game that comes across as a sick parody of Saints Row 1 and 2, a warped commentary on Saints Row: The Third, and an incredibly fun sequel to games like Crackdown and Infamous. It's juvenile, stupid, scattershot, self-aware, and incredibly fun because of the balance it manages to find with those first four things.
Yes, This Is The Story
The plot of Saints Row IV is… well, let me take a deep breath and believe me when I say this is not a spoiler, as it all happens in the first hour or two and it was revealed by the game's various trailers.
You play the leader of the Saints, working with MI6 to take down a crazed terrorist general and blow up a nuke in the air before it can hit Washington, and are elected the president of the United States with Keith David (yes, Goliath/Spawn/street fight with Rowdy Roddy Piper/Navy commercials Keith David) as your vice president until aliens invade and put you and your gang in a virtual simulation of your old city where you get super powers and have to fight the system while your space ship prepares to attack the evil emperor's fleet.
Like I said. All the ideas.
Most of the game takes place in the virtual city of Steelport, which itself is taken over by aliens who give it a thoroughly They Live makeover and add glowing neon spaceships menacing the skies to boot. The aliens have wiped out all evidence of the Saints' existence, so you have to build your gang up from nothing again. This time, however, you do that through disrupting the system to free your friends and unlock super powers instead of performing increasingly criminal acts. Instead of bank heists and drug deals, you're blowing up alien strongholds and causing havoc. The mechanics of the game aren't that different from previous Saints Row games or any other open-world crime game, but the missions are more gleefully violent.
No comments:
Post a Comment