Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell Reviews
The Saints Row IV Re-Elected + Gat out of Hell combo pack is well-suited for anyone who missed out on Saints Row IV when it released 18 months ago on last-gen platforms. If you've already played through that game, unless you're dying to play through a slightly enhanced edition, your best option is to pick-up the standalone version of Gat out of Hell, also available now.
So, if Saints Row's meta humor can get you through collecting your hundredth orb or doing the same type of mission on repeat, you may want to check out GOH. But, if not, I'd recommend staying away from this one, as it burns itself out a bit too quick.
Where Saints Row IV earned a promotion from expansion to sequel through an explosion of fun and interesting ideas, Gat Out of Hell feels more like leftovers than a brand new experience. The action can be entertaining and the fun infectious, but there's a lot of familiar content here, and Hell itself is a drab place to explore. If you love Saints Row and want more of the same, this expansion delivers, but most gamers will find more than enough Saints Row goodness in Saints Row IV.
By tying humor and outrageous context to its moving parts, Saints Row The Third and Saints Row IV became viable systems in the modern open-world paradigm. Gat out of Hell (mostly) forgets all of this, sheds (mostly) all of its psychotic humor, and bolts on (mostly) dated mechanics. Its intended function may be a stop-gap between major iterations, but its execution feels like a failed audition against its recent past.
Outside of the flying woes, Gat Out of Hell is content to let you be an all-powerful demigod or goddess. The game is just plain, hammy entertainment. It doesn't aspire to teach you a great moral lesson—outside of "don't fuck with Ouija boards," which is pretty sage advice—and it's not trying to wow you with 60 FPS photorealism. Gat out of Hell, like its predecessors, is that essential reminder we need from time to time that, yes, sometimes it's okay for videogames to be dumb fun and little else.
Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell is the Big Mac of games. You know what you're getting, it's a bit cheap, you enjoy eating it, you don't have to chew and an hour later you've forgotten all about it. Utterly unchallenging and lacking in fresh ideas, Gat Out of Hell is still capable of making you smile.
Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell captures the madness and destruction that made the series so fun, but even as an expansion pack, there's not much new here. So much of it is cut from the same cloth of Saints Row IV that the nuances end up meaning much less than they should.
The key problem with the expansion is that Saints Row has now become impossible to one up, even by its makers, due in no small part to the fact that it went off the scale bonkers in the main Saints Row IV adventure. Mix this in with the fact that the port is poor, bordering on shoddy, and you are left with a game that looks last gen, plays last gen and offers very little in the way of new content.
Repetitive but hellishly enjoyable
Gat out of Hell is a fun way to kill time while we all eagerly await the release of a more-complete Saints Row 5. That's coming, right?
There is no concept too ridiculous for Volition to exploit and for people with a love of the deranged and silly, Saints Row is one of the funniest games on the market.
Gat Out of Hell is a hell of a lot of fun. The flight mechanics are fantastic, the new arsenal of weapons is as creative as any other Saints Row title's, and the game basically fixes all the problems I had with Saints Row IV as an open-world game. It's a bite-sized portion to hold you over until the inevitable (and larger) Saints Row V.
Make no mistake this isn't a full blown adventure but a 'just go with it' adrenaline rollercoaster ride; it has its ups and downs, with plenty of big drops for the rush, but it'll be over soon enough. Gat out of Hell is a great round off to the Saints Row adventure as it gets wackier and wackier, with it standing as a defiant parody of how the Saints ended up in this mess.
In the end, should you pick the latest Saints Row chapter? Why the Hell not? The Saints games have continued to walk their own path and if you've been enjoying the recent experiences they've been throwing at us, then there is simply no reason to not get this one. Tons of gameplay, awesome new abilities, and probably the most enjoyable time anyone would really spend in Hell. Yeah I'm sold and you will be too.
Anyone who enjoys the series will find things to enjoy in Saints Row: Gat out of Hell, but as long as you don't go in expecting a long story backed by great mission design, you should get on just fine with this uninspired bite size, but familiar, addition to the Saints Row family.
Gat Out of Hell is a small slice of Saints Row IV in a different setting. It lacks content and variety but is fun to mess around in for a couple of hours.
Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell is an entertaining distraction for those starving for more Saints action, but there's nothing inherently new attempted here. Your mileage is going to vary, so if you were tired after Saints Row IV then you'd do well to stay clear, but open-world fans who love clearing up all that side content will find a fairly meaty package here for a bargain of a price. The problem with such an absurd title though is where Volition can take this next. Saints Row feels like a series that has begun to run out of ideas, and without a complete do-over it's really backed itself into a corner.
A Saints Row game with no ambition, no plot, no variety, and no way of raising the bar. Solid and good for a chuckle or two, but ultimately an empty experience.
As a standalone title, Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell is fun enough, but it feels like a stripped down version of what it should have been. It's a real shame; there are moments where the game really shines.This game is a fun distraction, but sadly a forgettable one. It feels like it could have been so much more...
As such, Gat Out of Hell is strictly for fans of Saints Row IV, those who have been wanting to play more of exactly that.