‘Saints Row’ (2022) Review: Ain’t Woke, Needs Fixing

‘Saints Row’ won’t set your world on fire, but it’s nothing to do with perceived “wokeness”.

Volition / Plaion

In recent memory, it’s impossible to think of a game that people have wanted to fail as much as the 2022 Saints Row reboot. It’s actually pretty impressive, given it’s a cross-platform title at a time when console fanboys are making social media even worse than it already is. However, Saints Row isn’t about hardware allegiances; it’s part of that wider, insidious, exhausting “wokeness” culture war.

Saints Woke, as it’s apparently been designated by a certain crowd on Facebook ads, Twitter replies and dozens of forums, eventually spawned a retaliatory “Shitty Saints Row Takes” Twitter account highlighting the kind of pre-feedback that led Metacritic and Microsoft to stop users review-bombing games ahead of, or immediately upon, their release.

Still, everything is created for a reason–this account is obviously run by someone defending Saints Row. As a huge fan of the series–warts and all–and despite hoping for the best, it’s a tough pill to swallow to now know not all these criticisms are shitty or unfounded. Frankly, some are just accurate–at least, those referring to the problems it genuinely has, rather than the near-non-existent “woke” issues many hope it’ll showcase.

It’s not a fabricated culture war that dooms Saints Row 2022 to relative anonymity. Ultimately, Saints Row 2022 is just painfully Saints Row–an experience that’s often exactly the same as it was over ten years ago with Saints Row the Third. It still has its fun moments, niche appeal, third-person anarchy, and plenty to keep you distracted between missions, but this isn’t a reboot–it’s a reskin of a now-tired formula.

Brass tacks: Saints Row 2022 is not a cultural revamp. You’re still The Boss, you still have a very diverse gang of allies, and you’re still trying to take over your city. Sure, there’s more character customization courtesy of more stores than ever, and you can change your look or gender at any time through your phone–no costly visit to Image as Designed required–but you can still be as cisgender and white and straight as you want to be, if you’re feeling threatened by the reality of multiculturalism.

Back to the start

You start proceedings in medias res, Fallout New Vegas style: you’re doing very well for yourself, partying like it’s 2019, but then you’re randomly attacked and kicked into a shallow grave. From here, you jump back to the beginnings of the Saints’ origin story, living with a group of randomers in a shared apartment on next-to-no income.

Admittedly, you’re referred to with they/them pronouns throughout the game–hardly surprising given how voice acting works–but if this fact of life doesn’t trigger you enough to defenestrate your console, you soon go on to learn about the friends you flatshare with. Two are members of Santo Ileso’s main gangs, plus there’s Eli, your classic poindexter who loves New Yorker-style podcasts and has an underlying desire to become a business kingpin. In your clique, friendship transcends partisan allegiance–imagine that.

Your four-strong gang of misfits have strong acting talent, but very little character depth.

Volition / Plaion

You’re personally contracted to security company Marshall, completing the game’s initial, bombastic missions with style. You never actually find out how you became such a badass, or why Neenah or Kev is so awesome (or how they’re active) in their Panteros or Icons crews, or how you all met, or why they forgive you for mass-murdering their friends on a day-to-day basis. Instead, this trio is only respectively known for gunslinging, a love for their car, and the ability to cook good food. This poor early storytelling continues to be a running theme throughout the game.

Despite wonderfully weird back stories and characters from past groups like the Luchadores, Ronin, Deckers, and Sons of Samedi, Saints Row’s gangs overwhelmingly lack identity. The Icons, led by their TV helmet-wearing, six-strong “Collective”, stand for anti-capitalism, but it’s not really clear how. Marshall is a glorified, tech-driven security company–standard fare. Los Panteros is Hispanic. That’s about it.

Oh, and there’s also the police. Aside from utterly unthreatening car chases during repetitive business venture missions, you’ll see them approximately four times during your 25-hour story playthrough.

Those hoping to get something truly revolutionary from the storyline will struggle to find anything genuinely surprising. If anything, it’s just a bit dull. In those first couple of hours, you start your job, do well, then get fired, and decide to do your own thing. This is the crux of the 2022 Saints Row “origin story”: a tale that barely scratches the surface, and instead insists on doing things slightly differently, with the odd new mechanic that barely papers over its gaping, aging cracks.

The Icons are one of Saints Row’s three main factions, none of which have any real personality.

Volition / Plaion Saints Flow

First things first: the most obvious change to the established formula is a suite of unlockable special moves, courtesy of the Flow system. By holding RB/R1 with a button of your choice, you can throw grenades, call for backup, give yourself a health boost, and more. It’s paired with a passive bonus system split into three tiers, and you can comfortably customize this to your play style. It’s not overcomplicated; it genuinely works, except when it doesn’t, as you jump or dodge because Saints Row doesn’t consistently register repeated inputs.

Meanwhile, health bars can be recovered with takedowns–delightfully brutish animations which, more often than not, see nearby enemies just stand and watch while you carry them out. It’s a bit weird, but whatever, it’s the only way they’ll work. It’s just a shame you can’t do them to random people like in Saints Row the Third.

Combat itself hasn’t really been revamped, aside from a greater number of heavy units, whose armor needs breaking before you can hit their fleshy bits with inevitable headshot volleys from one of the four guns you pick at the start and stick with. Gun shops have a limited selection of alternatives, but aside from the weapons you can unlock in missions and side quests, they generally lack the silliness of Saints Row’s past arsenals.

Missions are, generally, pretty linear. Character exposition is limited–early on, it’s a rinse and repeat of “shoot everything that moves” and “watch this video.” Key players are introduced, withdrawn, then reintroduced. Some are good, some are bad. Some shift between the two. That’s usually as deep as it gets; you rarely, if ever, get any actual back story for any of them.

Speaking of underdeveloped, Santo Ileso lacks life and, let’s be frank, character. Okay, it’s got a lion-shaped rock and a pretty bridge, and it’s maybe a step forward from Stilwater and Steelport by having land borders, but there’s too much filler, specifically from its desert areas. The Badlands would be interesting if story missions made more of them, but they don’t. It’s a telltale sign that they’re filled with a comparably huge number of collectibles you’d only happen on by chance when driving around–and you will, inevitably, find yourself behind the wheel a lot.

The Badlands are beautiful, and criminally underused.

Volition / Plaion Driving you crazy

One of the biggest improvements to the Saints Row experience is with the driving. Putting a firmer focus on drifting and sharp cornering, the game gives you a lot more control during long and occasionally tasty commutes, giving you a sideswipe function that adds a whole new dimension to car combat. These additions are satisfying when compared to what came before, and every vehicle comes with its own unlockable ability with vehicle-specific challenges.

It’s just as well, really–you’ll be driving all the time, and usually in a stolen car, which you hijack with the exact same animations as previous games. To make matters worse, you never feel like you’re doing more than 60mph, even with a nitrous boost, which only seems to pan the camera further out, and anyone chasing you maintains the exact same distance.

Fast travel points in Saints Row are unlocked by photographing landmarks, but they’re way too sparsely placed, meaning you’ll regularly teleport there and still need to run another 800 metres. What’s more, even when you get round to owning businesses, you can’t fast travel to them. In missions that ask you to visit the HQ for the briefing, you can’t jump straight there. Weather monitoring masts and high-rises–launch points for your wingsuit–are as rare as hen’s teeth. You can’t even call for your chosen vehicle unless you complete the JimRob side mission, and even then, you can only pick one favorite car in your garage and summon that. It’s a genuine step back.

I was a huge fan of the garage customization in Saints Row past, but I barely bothered with it in the 2022 reboot because of delivery problems–even if I did enjoy creating a Galahad monstrosity. Also, god forbid you’re driving a standard car offroad. Steering turns to mush, and a “handy” on-screen message instantly, and consistently, reminds you that you need to fit offroad tires.

If you don’t make the gaudiest car possible, are you even Saints Rowing?

Volition / Plaion Business acumen

Empire building is at the center of Saints Row, and it’s an interesting alternative take on the previous formula. Instead of carrying out series-staple missions like Insurance Fraud, Mayhem, or just clearing pockets of gangs on your turf, you need to unlock these tasks with cold, hard cash with related business fronts. While this has clearly been done to freshen things up in line with Saints Row’s gang genesis theme–and while lots of new challenges are on offer–it doesn’t work well.

While each front offers a different type of mission, the combination of a large cost to unlock them, and the further requirement to complete them to unlock story missions, essentially forces you to set one up and do every single repetitive mission back to back. Some, like the Laundromat, only need half a dozen outings. Others, like toxic waste disposal, go into double digits. None of them feel particularly satisfying–more a box-ticking exercise, and they’re carried out at a slow and uncharacteristically dull pace.

You’ll be repeatedly transporting nuclear waste, disposing of crime-scene cars, collecting targeted vehicles, or destroying property, based on your partners’ instructions. What’s more, none of them feel particularly tough, especially Mayhem and Insurance Fraud, which were often quite testing–and thrilling–in past games.

Side missions, such as Insurance Fraud, are individually unlocked with business fronts.

Volition / Plaion Collectible central

One thing Saints Row really ramps up is its suite of collectibles. Photographing various points of interest earns you money and XP, while you can also snap glowing statues or signs to hang in your HQ. Not that you will; I placed two identical windmills in front of my base and, after realizing each decoration area corresponded to a specific size limit, I couldn’t be bothered. It’s just not that type of game, especially because there’s nothing to make you spend real time at your HQ.

Through smaller discoveries, you raid bins, open metal letterboxes in the desert, destroy multiple targets in shooting galleries, and pick up air-dropped palettes of drugs. Each one of these random tasks feels like filler, but some do grant bonuses–a buildable vehicle, or much-needed XP. Special resentment is reserved for Hidden History missions: banal, collect-five search-a-thons that were clearly designed to parody boring school trips, but completely drain your lifeforce. As with a lot of the Saints Row experience, there’s next-to-no exposition from the stories told, and little pay-off from completing them.

Ain’t that a glitch

It wouldn’t be Saints Row without a bunch of glitches, but this latest outing–in pre-release, at least–often felt like a bit of a joke. It’s okay when it’s being hilariously stupid, but when it actively gets in the way of simple tasks, it’s a problem–for a game that seems to use the exact same engine as SR3 Remastered, albeit with prettier lighting, it shouldn’t be this way.

Before two hard resets, Insurance Fraud missions actively removed all traffic as soon as they started, forcing me to run into parked cars to complete the first three challenges. In Mayhem, the camera went into a super-zoom mode in vehicles, making flying impossible (and forcing yet another hard reset). Success in Riding Shotgun missions hinges on the AI not being moronic, repeatedly getting into blind spots you’re not able to shoot.

Meanwhile, many smaller challenges threw up the wrong completion requirement on screen, so you didn’t know what you were doing. Two special moves just didn’t work. Friendly characters stood motionless when they were meant to be fighting. One time, Saints Row respawned me as dead. I couldn’t even open my phone to move because I was, ostensibly, not in the land of the living. Another hard reset.

All nice and dead.

Volition / Plaion

For Saints Row diehards and newcomers alike, one of the biggest disappointments comes with its playlist. Being able to curate your track selection in SR3 was a delight because there were at least 15 songs worthy of a mixtape, but aside from rap station KJMMZ–which mercifully includes bangers from DMX (“Party Up”), M.O.P. (“Ante Up”) and Onyx (“Slam”)–Saints Row comes up very short with licensed tracks. Sure, there’s plenty to discover from its metal and Latinx stations–as well as your easy and cheap to source classical music–but it falls way short of expectations, especially when you’re driving more than ever.

End of the line?

Even though Saints Row IV was a purple-neon carbon copy of The Third, it still had heart, that trademark silliness, and a solid storyline. The 2022 reboot of Saints Row is the first game in the series where I’ve hurried along in order to get to the good bits of the story, only for it to end abruptly without any real closure or exposition, with little incentive to make me want to finish outstanding tasks after the credits roll. Despite completing six businesses and having loads of side missions left, I have no desire to finish them for anything other than achievements–and even a real achievement whore like me might give them a miss this time.

One of Saints Row’s saving graces is that it doesn’t go full Far Cry 6 and make the map four times bigger than it needs to be. It also doesn’t quite venture into Crackdown 3 territory, stripping everything out of a fun, third-person adventure. It does come a little close, though, as I can’t think of a genuinely iconic moment just two days after “finishing” it–there’s not a pony chase or Biz Markie singalong in sight. Toasting a lonely waffle early in the game was about as good as it got (though to its credit, it was pretty funny).

Saints Row (2022) can be funny, but not quite as frequently as its predecessors.

Volition / Plaion

In a weird way, I don’t regret completing Saints Row, but it’s because I’m a fan who knows what I was getting into; I just didn’t think it’d be such a blast from the past. I simply can’t think who’ll be genuinely delighted or impressed by this game–open-minded fans will be let down by its half-story and meagre evolution; critics could fairly name six or seven third-person shooters in the last three years that do it better.

None of it’s to do with wokeness, though; it’s just a tired format for 2022, with uninspiring dialogue from restricted characters, repetitive missions, lackluster combat, endless driving, and its most underdeveloped storyline yet. There’s fun to be had, but at this rate, it’s hard to see where the Saints Row franchise will go from here–if this doesn’t end up being its swansong.