Game Thoughts: Saints Row 2022 (Patreon)

Some thoughts about… Saints Row (2022)

Despite being a big big fan of Saints Row the Third and 4 (and finding Gat Out of Hell… tolerable, since you could play as Kinzie), the previews for the new Saints Row series did not grab me. The trailers lacked style, substance, or humor and the new cast felt like they were rejected from a Ubisoft game. But the sales are here now, so I gave SR a chance!

To get the big complaint out in the open from the beginning, the new Saints Row doesn’t try to really do anything exciting. No interesting story, characters, or game mechanics. It’s a very tried and true open world crime game that won’t rock the boat or surprise you. And that’s not inherently an awful thing. However, because it isn’t daring and sticks to the basics so heavily, all the broken and bad things in it really stand out. I tried to not make my write-up just pages of every bug, bad decision, poor balancing, or janky bit I came across, but I think that because the game is so by-the-numbers, calling all that out is really important. If the game had been daring, really tried for something new, or gone all out, I’d have been so much more forgiving of its problems. But because it’s so plain AND they couldn’t execute on that without so many problems, I’m fine calling out its many faults.

Boss creation is less cartoony and more limited, despite having tons of options but mostly for stuff that doesn’t lend itself for a character I want to be. The inclusion of prosthetics is great, but I don’t need fantastical skin textures or materials. Having a thousand options doesn’t matter if only 2 of them are good. And despite all the work, the Boss still comes out wrinkly and veiny or their face looks distorted in some cutscenes. My boss got stuck with a permanently angry face after completing a mission and it only went away after reloading the game.

I made my character in the Boss Factory app, started playing the game, unlocked a new clothing item by completing a challenge, for some reason this removed all the custom colors on my outfit (a bug that occurs EVERY time you buy a clothing item), I remade my outfit but didn’t have the clothing options from the app so it’s a worse outfit, saved it so I didn’t have to do that again, and it wrote over the Boss I made in the app so I lost it and that clothing. The clothing options feel a lot less varied and interesting than before and you don’t have access to certain shops until the final third of the game, so all the time spent customizing things and having them constantly be deleted just feels so much more wasteful because at the end of the day, your boss isn’t going to have any cool styles anyway.

While it does get better, SR suffers from a really weak opening. Your first few missions have too much combat with really weak and uninteresting weapons so the opening sections drag on. It takes so long to get to anything interesting, that you’re given some strong vibes that maybe, there just won’t be anything that is new and interesting to come. The new characters stink. I hated 2/3s of the crew from the start and Neenah only got a pass because the game doesn’t really do much with her beyond “she’s good with cars and like art”. I’m not sure who the writers were trying to appeal to, but Eli and Kev are extremely unappealing people, your Boss is a severely watered down version of Bosses past, and the supporting cast are lots of one-note characters that mainly exist for gameplay reasons so missions have somebody for you to fight. The game treats all of it as fluff, repeating the same one-note jokes for each crew member, but then there are a few moments where the game tries to pull out a sad backstory and it… just does not earn any of it. The scenes fall so flat and the game almost acknowledges that because it gives you the “sad” moment and then never brings it up again and dangles the next action mission at you. Neenah had a sad reason for coming to Santo Ileso, right? Aaanyway, you just completed a challenge and earned a perk, and go check your phone for a new mission! Kev had a sad childhood, eh? Hey, here’s a trophy and go check your phone for a new mission!

The events that kick off the formation of the Saints don't make sense if they're played straight. I spent most of the game thinking we’d be uncovering a setup and trying to figure out who was running the double-cross, and then getting annoyed that none of the characters were investigating it. But then... nope. Played straight. It's just bad writing.

That’s not to say there isn’t funny content in the game, it’s just few and far between and when it does get a genuine laugh, it makes you sad that there are writers here that clearly understand actual comedy and so much of the game is… less than that. There are little snippits like seeing the horrible board game the crew plays and they are exactly the kind of insufferable people that would play board games like that. Then your crew’s reaction to watching footage of your Boss doing her thing and “being good at murder”. Or the lady on the bounty hunter app that you help shoot her husband. Or when the bounty hunter app is turned against you and NPCs in the city start trying to murder you. There’s funny material buried in all the bland stuff, but the funny bits are still outnumbered by, ugh, just the lamest reference-based humor and awful characters. There’s a veeery extended Portal/Still Alive joke in the game if you need an idea how outdated the writing is.

There’s good story potential about gig economy gangsters, franchising, and the corporatization of crime, but the game doesn’t go for it. There’s a late game deconstruction of your Boss having to deal with somebody that acts the same way she does, but it comes very late in the game. The funnier/most Saints way to handle a reboot would have been to make this new crew franchising the Saints name to expand to a new area and just never mention the time travel, aliens, and spaceships. The new crew even goes from a gang of nobodies to invincible empire that nobody even bothers to try to bring down over the course of one mission. A big part of the middle of the story is that “the Saints” are essentially a corporate entity that can be legally owned, so the game treats the new gang the same way the old Saints worked. The original Saints built up to the empire and only achieved corporate status after taking over an actual corporation at the end of the second game, but this reboot wants to have it both ways and reach the same status as the original crew in just half a game. The “origin story” part of the new game is weak, so you could keep all their existing motivations to form a gang but use the franchise route rather than them just stumbling on the name and logo. This would help speed things up, have the business side of the story make sense, and inject a bit more energy into the game early on. There’s a section where you do a battle royale and it seems like it’s going to be the game’s version of Prof. Genki, but it’s a pretty staid and no frills combat arena. It could have been so much more. But “could have been so much more” is practically this game’s motto. The story feels like it was written by multiple people at the same time and they never shared notes. Characters and events are set up to be significant and then never amount to anything. By the time the game ends, it feels like everybody had run out of time and it was pencils down no matter what.

You also hit the level cap less than 50% of the way through the game. It feels like the company decided the game was too short and inflated the costs and task counts to pad out the game, but then forgot to adjust how much experience it takes to level up. And all the bonus tasks in Side Hustles pay out experience rather than money, so they really don’t feel worth doing. They’re not fun, they slow things down or risk failing the mission, and their rewards are useless, so just skip them and try to finish things as quick as possible.

The evil gangs don’t really stand out. They’re antagonists but it just feels like they’re there for the sake of being there. Outside of a few missions, your main interactions with them are that they populate an area and you have to kill everybody in that area to complete your task. If you’re expecting anything like the gangs from SR3, you’re not going to get that. The hypocritical anarchists are the best of the three and they’re… dumb Instagram versions of Miller’s gang. The car thief gang is pretty generic. And the dirtbag private military corp is just a lesser private version of STAG from SR3.

For the city, the desert is a pretty boring environment. Large parts of the map are empty and you’re going to be doing a lot of aimless driving around the outskirts trying to uncover the missions. It’s just a pain to drive around too due to hills and rocks. Your car is constantly either coming to a full stop because it bumped into a hill or it will flip because you glanced at a rock. The game’s version of the STAG hover bikes can’t fly anymore so your only option for getting up cliffs is to fly everywhere in a helicopter. I’m all for doing something other than a normal city, but a plain desert isn’t fun or interesting. The city parts need some cartoon Vegas. Even in the most Vegas-y area, it’s still fairly generic. Steelport, with its skyscraper ads and glowing neon in the main district, had more of a Vegas feel than Santo Ileso.

Vehicle control is… weird. Your car is either indestructible or it flips over if you even look at a bump in the road. The big addition is being able to side swipe cars, but it’s not a “move”, you just hold a button and manually drive into their side. Most of the time, it just causes you to spin out so it’s not exactly helpful. The way the game talks up its importance, I was expecting the side swipe to be something like shunting your car side to side like in The Wheelman and I was all excited for that, but it turns out to be little more than a different kind of braking.  The move doesn’t even work well. There are times you can be going full speed and you swipe into the side of an enemy aaand they take 0 damage. Other times, you can be going slower and slightly bump into a car and it will explode and fly into the sky. I failed a chase mission because a cop car (on its own) bumped into a bus, this caused the cop car to explode, which then caused the bus to explode, and since I was pulling up next to the bus, my car exploded. All of this happened in less than a second so there wasn’t much I could do about it. There’s also no reason to try to drive evasively, or even well, because cops in this game can just straight up teleport. I was doing a mission with a chase in it, drifted onto a side street to lose the cop car behind me, it failed to make the turn, and I felt really good watching their dot on the minimap go past my street. ...Until the red dot on the map disappeared and then reappeared on my street traveling at normal speed. In a car with nitro? Well it doesn’t matter because enemies keep up with you no matter what you’re driving and even if you’re in a sports car going full blast with nitro. All this means that using the side swipes is the only way to stop enemies from bumping into your car and causing it to spin out.

So far, Saints Row 2022 has really watered down what was in previous games, so what does it add?

The best things are the game customization/accessibility options. They give you a lot of control over different aspects of difficulty like how the aiming snap works, how much health things have, how much ammo enemies drop, and timers (which sadly only works for some mission types but not others).

The wingsuit. It… exists? The game never puts it to good use so it just seems like a worse and less useful version of floating in SR4 because you don’t have the super jump to go with it. It takes a while to deploy too so it’s not something you use at will. Outside of missions or challenges that require it, I didn’t once use the wingsuit while playing normally.

They’ve added takedowns, where you earn meter over time and for killing enemies and then you press a button next to an enemy to do a takedown. It’s an instant kill on normal enemies, but you can just kill them with a few headshots anyway. For “Tough” enemies, you have to hurt them enough to drain their armor before you can do a takedown on them, and you’re probably trying to fight them at a distance anyway, so that’s not great either. The only thing it’s good for is that it gives you some health back. The animations are also pretty long, so I found myself not wanting to do them because it’s faster to just shoot everybody not hiding behind a shield.

Instead of permanent upgrades, you now equip up to five perks. You can swap them out at any time, but there are only a handful that are useful or do anything unique, so I stuck with the same perks for most of the game. You also have super moves that also refill as you do damage, but I constantly forgot they existed and almost never used them outside of some very specific instances. They’re not as interesting as the super powers from SR4. It’s mainly basic things like “throw a grenade” or “do a quick draw” or “do extra damage for X seconds” or “summon two helpers”.

Criminal Ventures make up most of the focus of the game and it’s neat, in theory, to set up evil businesses around town, but the execution is more tedious than fun. They’re suuuper expensive to create to the point that multiple times I considered leaving the game running over night to generate idle income for them, and it saps your ability to do much else. I passed up buying clothes for my character, unlocking perks, and upgrading weapons because creating the next business cost so much so there was a constant pressure to save money. For the actual content, their repetition is the main problem. So many are just “steal a thing and drive it back with a wanted rating”. The ones that are kind of unique are super short, like two or three steps short, but the ones that are repetitive seem like they go on forever. The waste disposal one makes you slowly drive a dozen trucks back to the business, but it could have been like four and that would have been plenty. And then the Planet Saints Venture is to… steal a dozen of a different kind of truck and drive them back to the business. There isn’t enough repetition in the simple tasks for the business and then multiple businesses use the same task so it’s just tedious. Between the unlock cost and inflated task counts, it really feels like the company used these to artificially pad out the length of the game, and the product suffers for it. And they ruined Insurance Fraud. Getting hit knocks you away from traffic and doesn’t pop you in the air as much. The camera is also awful and your characters shadow isn’t easily visible so it’s difficult to line up bounces and you have less air control. Then sometimes your character just gets stuck and won’t get up or run, so your entire Adrenaline boost is wasted because the character won’t move. It’s just a really bad version of something you’ve done a lot in the series so you know what it’s like when it’s fun versus what you get here.

The payouts for Ventures also don’t scale as you get deeper into the game. Unlocking the next tier of Venture is gated by your story progress, so it’s not like you can just do them all up front so the designers knew where you are in the game when you can complete each one. Completing a tier 1 Venture pays out $30K, which is exactly enough to buy another tier 1 Venture. Yay, that’s great. Completing a tier 3 Venture also pays out $30K but now another tier 4 Venture costs $400K, so you have 2-3 hours of killing time until your idle income generates enough money to continue. The small tasks around the map only pay out $5K so they really only feel like time wasters to give you something to do while you wait. Even at the very end of the game, story missions might pay out $200K when the final Ventures cost $1.4 million.

And, while considerably less important than the gameplay issues, music has been a big part of Saints Row as a series and 2022 disappoints again. Saints Row 3 and 4 made electronica and dubstep fun. There are songs fthat I discovered through Saints Row and now listen to on their own thanks to the fantastic soundtracks. In 2022, I mostly stuck to the synthwave station, but it’s all really generic stuff. At one point, the game bugged out and kept playing the same song on loop and it took me about ten minutes to realize what was happening. Even the DJs have no personality. They just read a message out about the song and play it. The newscaster is also so so dry. She comments on news stories related to the outcome of missions you’ve done, but the vast majority of them are little more than “this thing happened” and that’s all. There’s no extra follow-up or consequence and no jokes to build off the stupid thing you were involved in. Jane Valderamma she is not.

Even if you’re in the mood for a wholly generic and bland open world crime game, Saints Row 2022 is just a sloppy and buggy game. I had multiple crashes that took my system a good minute or more to even process that it had crashed and then recover from it. Save after EVERY task you complete! I also had a rare but reoccurring issue where my controller would just disconnect in the middle of gameplay. I’d be driving along and then my headphones would go quite and the game was still going, but then you quickly realize that even though the car is still driving forward, you can’t steer it. After about 30 seconds, it pops up a message that says the controller disconnected and you can just tap the home button and everything recovers. Outside of the dozen people you just ran over because your car was hurtling straight forward the whole time. Sorry, not really my fault! I’m a benevolent murderous crime boss.

Missions just break. You’ll be doing a drive-along mission and the AI gets the car in a place where it can’t just drive forward and it can’t back up, so you’re stuck and have to restart the whole mission and lose progress on your goals and there’s nothing you can do about it because the AI is the driver and you can’t influence how it drives. You’ll start a mission and it just won’t go and none of the buttons work, you can’t pause, and you have to force close the game. On almost every one of the getaway driver missions, the AI partners wouldn’t appear after the heist but the game acted like they were in the car and forced me to drive away. All of the in-car chatter would be silent but then halfway through the escape, dialogue would play about the partners still being at the crime scene. Without them there to play the dialogue about where to go, I’d fail the mission due to the strict time limits, but when I restarted the checkpoint, the partners would be in the car and the dialogue would play normally.

I also got into a state where I couldn’t pick up collectibles. The prompt was on them and the character animated when I pressed the button, but they stayed on the map and I couldn’t get them. I was able to go back and “re”-collect them eventually.

There are a number of missions where you have to hold down a position and you’ll fail if you leave the zone. The problem is that enemies spawn from outside the zone and FREQUENTLY get stuck trying to get close to you. They’ll get out of their vehicles far away from you but then never walk towards you so they’re well out of the range of normal guns. They’ll get stuck behind obstacles like rocks and not be able to path around it (so now you can’t kill them because there’s a rock between them and you). ALWAYS carry a sniper rifle just because of these missions. Or just fail the mission and be forced to redo the whole thing and hope it works a second time.

With so many of the missions being “drive to point X, get vehicle, drive it back to the start”, the game is really bad about putting markers on the map or showing the GPS. Some times it puts an icon at the final destination, most of the times it doesn’t. At the start of each mission, you have to open the map, slowly scroll to the destination, place your marker, and then after getting the vehicle, open the map back up, slowly scroll to the return point, and place another marker.

Oh man, why does the map scroll so slowly!?

It doesn’t show you bonus objectives for missions during the task, only if you return to the mission menu after starting a mission.

I had a lot of trouble getting my character to reload. Sometimes it takes three or four button presses to get them to do it. That’s pretty bad in a game with a lot of shooting.

One of the Venture mission lines forces a specific special move on you in a specific equipment slot, but it was a move I already had mapped to a different slot. Once I cleared the Venture, I went to put the move back in my preferred slot but the game had unequipped it and wouldn’t allow me to equip it to any slot. I could put other moves in the preferred slot and in the mission slot but I couldn’t interact with that move until I quit the game and relaunched it.

The game is bad about showing you perks or skills you unlock. It says you can hold the menu button to jump to it, but that rarely worked. So I had to manually enter the menu and hunt down the skill across multiple categories and try to find the new one because the new one isn’t marked until you enter the specific slot it goes in.

Challenges frequently just don’t count progress. One challenge is to steal three specific car types and the first two worked but it wouldn’t count the third. I had to steal it multiple times across sessions until one time it just marked off as complete. I have no idea how to progress one challenge to sideswipe cars with a specific truck. The pop-up appears that I’ve sideswiped the car and I get experience for it, but then when I check the challenge, I’m still at 0/50. On top of how weird getting them to register is, you also can’t make progress on challenges until the game specifically presents them to you. A lot of the challenges are tedious “do X thing Z times” and you may have fulfilled the conditions several times over, but once the challenge appears, it always starts at 0.

There’s a mission in the game, “Bad Cop”, where you have to tether a car and damage it to intimidate the person inside, and it’s one of the most frustrating and broken missions I’ve played in a while. Phase one is that you have to smash the car into shipping containers, but the game won’t register the hit but crates are already destroyed so you have to quit and restart the mission. Phase two is that you have to slam the car into smoke stacks, but the tether randomly breaks and then the car instantly explodes and you fail and have to restart the mission. Phase three is that you have to dangle the car in fire, but the game can fail to recognize the car is in the fire and for some reason this causes the mission to fail and you have to restart it. There are no checkpoints in this mission, it has a lot of unskippable dialogue, and it’s not fun to do any of these things. I was so, so mad by the sixth or seventh attempt when I finally got lucky enough for each step to work.

And maybe my favorite minor bug, the final boss’s death doesn’t work properly. When you shoot the final boss, instead of being hurt or reacting, the boss starts playing an idle animation where they look around bored and confused. I thought I did something wrong or the joke was that your character actually missed the shot and that was the funniest thing the game had done. But no, once the scene switches, the boss is suddenly on the ground bleeding out. You can really tell how much care went into this game.

Not to get all “and the portions are so small” but for as bland as the story is, they don’t even give you a reason to replay it. When I first played SR3, I beat it, and then immediately started a new game so I could go through the story again making different choices. SR2022 has a single choice, where the bad option is explicitly spelled out for you that it won’t work but then you can still choose it anyway. It doesn’t even end up affecting gameplay or the story. Choosing the bad choice just cuts the next part of the cutscene short and the game ignores everything it told you about the choice not working.

I could go on and on about minor stuff like guns on your weapon wheel turning invisible, the game constantly unequipping weapons from you, guns being invisible while you’re holding/shooting them, fast travel not working to get you to the start of a mission, and so forth but this write-up is too long and I think you get my points by now.

Yeah, so, my wrap-up is that Saints Row 2022 is not just a bad game or a poorly made game, but even if you fixed those issues and bugs, it’s still just a game with no ambition. What was the point of rebooting Saints Row so flat? What did they want to say or do? After finishing it, I still don’t know the answer. SR3 seemed to be about making a game where the decisions were made based on what was the more fun option. SR4 seemed to be a commentary on open world game where they just went right for the power fantasy and bypassed tropes, and gave you powers to get over conforming to the rules of the genre. But Saints Row 2022 doesn’t really DO anything. It has all the bits of an open world game, it has mechanics, and it has missions, but it also seems totally uninterested in sticking its neck out, trying something new, having something to say, or having an impact. It’s a game of checkboxes and at the end of development, somebody figured enough boxes were checked and the game was launched, bugs and all. If you’re in the mood for a “just another one of those kind of games” open world game, give it several months for updates to come and then play it in short doses because “turn it off and back on again” is an important rule in this one.