Saints Row IV

Completely and utterly bat-cocking mental in the best, most entertaining way possible.

I've still not played the first two, but it seems clear from reviews I've read and discussions I've had that if there's an overarching critical narrative linking of the games in the Saints Row series, it's the quest to find a voice that's totally distinct from Grand Theft Auto. The first, I'm told, was basically a straight rip-off. The second (which I have seen others play) added its own brand of humor, a necessary step in cementing itself as an entity in its own right, but didn't seem to move too far forwards beyond that. The third is where it really clicked, with the comedy bursting forwards into gameplay mechanics that dismissed the realism that GTA had been striving towards and put priority on fun and on keeping up the pace of the game at all times. And now we've arrived here, having somehow managed to come completely full-circle at the same time as it's really asserted its own ridiculous personality and fully realized its own potential.

To call Saints Row IV derivative is totally unfair, not just because it neglects the fact that no other series around right now could even get away with this, but because it's a huge understatement. Enjoy your pop culture references? Boy, you don't even know the half of it.

The funny thing is that I've seen a few reviewers complain that, because a big chunk of the story is given over to returning Johnny Gat to the fold, that you need to have experience of the other Saints Row games to really understand what's going on. This is not only wrong (see paragraph 2, sentence 1 of this review), but misses the point totally - you'd need to be a walking Wikipedia to actually understand every reference in this game, and they come so thick and fast that on a few occasions I've only found myself understanding the joke five minutes later. I can only imagine - with great amusement - how somebody who's never played a computer game in their life before would react to this. There is a Metal Gear Solid [メタルギアソリッド] mission that rips on some of that game's tropes with glee (and, in the case of one overheard phonecall I won't spoil, enough comedy to genuinely make me shoot lemonade out of my nose). There's a side-scrolling beat-em-up mission called Saints of Rage. There's a gratuitous QTE stripping scene that comes out of nowhere for all the Heavy Rain [HEAVY RAIN 心の軋むとき] fans in the house. There's a text adventure that shocked me by not letting me catch dysentery. You can romance the members of your crew when you're on your spaceship, and the only one you can't boasts a voice actor playing basically the same role as he did in Mass Effect 3, the game the whole mechanic is riffing on. (Speaking of romance - Kinzie's scene, holy shit. It was the first one I saw, still innocently wondering how exactly they'd plays this joke out, and I nearly shat myself with laughter.) Nolan North has an optional voice track for the main character where he just plays himself and regularly drops references to the other games he's been in. Specific moves from Street Fighter get namedropped. One early '50s themed mission, which struck me as one of the moments when the game got too wacky, is apparently a reference to Fallout 3 that sailed right over my head.

And that's just the other games it references. We haven't even touched on how the whole setting is basically The Matrix without the self-importance, or the imaginatively named Murderbots that are clearly T-1000s ripped right out of The Terminator, or the little shout-outs to Hawaii Five-0 and Armageddon and Independence Day and whatever the hell else. "Rowdy" Roddy Piper turns up. You end your notoriety by chasing something that looks and acts suspiciously like the Golden Snitch from Harry Potter; that's a debatable literary reference, but the big reveal of the series narrator at the end certainly isn't.

I can't think of anything, in any medium, that has ever made me shake my head in disbelief at what I'm seeing so often. It's a good job there isn't really an awful lot to the plot, because I'm not sure I'd be able to keep up. This is a cousin of The Rutles aimed not just at the history of one band, but at the history of an entire medium - and like The Rutles, it never allows its humor to descend into cynicism or pettiness, because everything is underpinned by love for the source material. Saints Row IV is a conversation between a bunch of gamers in a room reminiscing about their favourite gaming moments, only it's been expanded to a preposterous scale.

And that's not even the most preposterous thing about a game where the gameplay is a neon-lit cornucopia of childhood superhero fantasies. You can shoot ice from your hands, stomp the floor so hard that everybody around you shrinks, lift people up with your mind and use them to bounce lightning off other people like you're cosplaying as Raiden, run into cars so hard and fast that they go flying off the road, turn yourself into the Human Torch, run up the sides of buildings, jump hundreds of feet in the air and then slam into the floor so hard that it sets off a nuclear explosion....and if you get bored of all that, you can choose from an array of guns that inflate peoples heads until they explode, that vaporize them, that create black holes right over their heads and suck them in, that summon UFOs to abduct them, or that kill them with the power of, erm, dubstep. (I know, I know....) The explanation in-game for all this is that the whole thing takes place inside a computer simulation, the laws of physics don't apply any more, and your allies can hack the program to give you these powers. The real world explanation, of course, is 'we want our players to have fun and fuck everything else'.

And that really is the story of Saints Row IV from a player's perspective - it is fun. I can't think of any other game that is so psychotically dedicated to the player having a good time, and that scales back or totally strips away everything that would get in the way of it in the way this one does. Name a boring bit of any similar open-world game and it doesn't exist here - escort missions usually give you an escort that has superpowers themselves, any character development or plot escalation is over and done with in seconds, and just getting from one mission to another can either be done in seconds by running and flying at lightning pace, or can be taken slowly by stopping off at any of the side-missions that appear absolutely everywhere on the map and never need more than a couple of seconds to explain. You'll only get time for a break if you put the controller down.

It's silly, it's overblown, it's got absolutely no pretense about being any kind of milestone or landmark moment in gaming history (which actually seems fairly unusual for a title of its size), and it will be totally and utterly bewildering to anybody that doesn't spent a lot of time gaming, but Saints Row IV is a game that knows exactly what it wants to do and what experience it wants its players to have, and that absolutely smashes those ambitions out of the park. Its very nature means that it will probably look a bit silly in a list of the PS3's greatest games alongside the heavy and arty likes of The Last of Us, BioShock Infinite, Heavy Rain [HEAVY RAIN 心の軋むとき], and The Walking Dead: Season One, but I've got no doubt that this is one of the high watermarks of its era.