Saints Row Reviews
The new Saints Row features enjoyable open-world gameplay but bland characters and an overall timid story make it the weakest entry in the series.
Volition's reboot mixes its shameless action with witty social commentary to nice effect, but fails to construct a compelling open world
You can spend many happy hours in the new Saints Row game, without it leaving a lasting impression. The story is rushed, and for all the slick shooting and driving this game doesn't feel fresh.
We do need to take a beat and talk about the bugs in Saints Row, and there’s plenty of them to go around. My gun flipped around and wouldn’t fire while facing the wrong direction. The car physics are more springy than a Super Bouncy Ball. Running over a fire hydrant will shoot a tank-sized vehicle upwards and onto a nearby roof with little effort. Vehicles disappear and reappear. I even had a moment during a mini-boss where Eli went down, and once resurrected stood there doing nothing repeating his lines for being downed. That and the boss wouldn’t get to his cooldown for me to damage him, and for whatever reason I wasn’t taking any damage. And none of that addresses the current state of cooperative play.
Saints Row has its moments, but the game is weighed down by ugly graphics, bad shooting, and a story full of obnoxious characters.
Saints Row (2022) succeeds at returning to the roots of its predecessors by paring back the outlandish absurdity without losing an ounce of chaos, but sometimes feels as if it's holding on too tightly to a past best left forgotten. Plus, it has a distinct lack of polish.
With its wonky sets, dodgy cameras and bizarre plotlines, this reboot of the gangster adventure series is haphazard but joyful.
Despite all its flaws (and there are more than a few), Saints Row is undoubtedly fun and explosive in its over-the-top presentation. While its punctuated with memorable moments, they are often diminished by the repetitive nature of its side content, which makes up a significant portion of what Saints Row has to offer. If you’ve been a longtime fan of the series’s previous entries, you will find plenty to enjoy with this latest installment – just don’t expect much in the way of innovation.
Like a little train going up a mountain: At least it's fun. at least it's fun, at least it's fun. The further I got through the game, the less I felt that was true.
Saints Row is ultimately an underwhelming missed opportunity. It's a shame, as this was a chance to do something big, bold and different – showing us where the franchise could be heading in the years to come. But instead, the end product is a basic and fairly tedious experience that is stuck in an era of gaming long past. There are a handful of fun moments, but these are fleeting and it's difficult to suggest anyone picking the game up.
After nine years of hibernation, the Saints Row series is making a comeback. A comeback that is an outdated turkey and sanctimonious entertainment of high class at the same time. Although we too often growl in frustration, we also find it difficult to put down the controller – it's so much fun! Most of the time anyway.
Review in Swedish | Read full review
Saints Row had chance to be something much more, if only the team behind the game tried to take a more bold and careful approach.
Review in Russian | Read full review
I am extremely sad at this reboot of Saints Row, while I wasn’t a huge fan of the absolute bonkers nature of the 4th entry, even if I did love the 3rd. With this reboot I feel like Volition missed a huge opportunity evolve this series for a new generation, not just of consoles but for gamers. As it stands, this game comes off just feeling like its clinging to the tone and design choices from the 360; even the graphics in this reboot from 2022 feel dated and frankly Johnny Gat deserves better.
Will the frustrations continue to mount? Will the Saints Row reboot establish its identity? We’ll see. For now, I’ll continue to play more to see the campaign through to its conclusion. I might also try some co-op activities with our Review Editor, Andrew Farrell, and maybe some drop-in multiplayer, too. You can expect a finalized review score within the week.
Saints Row turned out to be a worthy reboot of the saga, a product capable of looking back to draw eagerly to the soul of the franchise, but also of looking forward to the future, creating a perfect starting point for everything that, potentially, will come. Volition has done its best both on the content and on the technical front, and the result is an open world that has nothing, or almost nothing, to envy to the competitors.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Saints Row is everything you’d expect from a new entry into the franchise: It’s full of larger-than-life story beats, a LARPing subplot, oodles of customization, and outlandish Skills to take down your enemies with. While it doesn’t reinvent the wheel by any means, your Boss and their three companions are where this reboot truly shines — and it’s a joy to experience Santo Ileso and all that it has to offer with them.
Saints Row doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, but it doesn't need to — it's a solid open-world adventure with loads going on, and one that is really only a good helping of polish away from sitting among the genre's better games.
Saints Row is a largely successful reboot, even if it sometimes feels dangerously outdated in terms of open world design. Its story and characters can be hit and miss, but the experience is carried by fun gameplay and an endearingly dumb sense of humour. Despite the new faces, Saints Row is definitely still Saints Row - just bigger and probably better.