Final Thoughts on “Saint’s Row IV”

So I did manage to finish “Saint’s Row IV”. And it continued to be much more enjoyable than “Saint’s Row the Third”.

While I was a bit disappointed with the clothing selections in the game (and the fact that you couldn’t customize the avatar outside the game world, meaning that the character I had that always wore glasses couldn’t outside the game world) — at least in part because I didn’t care for the superhero outfits — for the most part the game delivered on what it promised. The super abilities were a lot of fun to play around with and made the game entertaining, and what was nice about the game was that while it was often nasty and brutal it didn’t take itself or any of the violence seriously. The Saints were pretty much unrepentant psychopaths, and they rarely got chided for that because, well, the rest of the world was the same way (there is one sequence where that happens that chafed me, because it talked about me killing people by driving on the sidewalk when it was more convenient, but I never did that. I only did it due to bad driving skills, not a desire to get somewhere faster [grin]). The fact that the world wasn’t serious and was built around that sort of thing means that doing those things simply makes you a person in that world, not someone struggling to align the brutality of that world with a “good” personality. Yeah, everyone kills things all the time. Deal with it.

The game is also a bit of a love letter to the rest of the series, by bringing in things from the previous games and either referencing them, resolving them, or both. But what’s good about the game is that it doesn’t leave people who haven’t played most of the games — like myself — in the lurch, taking a little bit of time to explain what happened in the previous games and why the events are important, which means that while I’m sure some of the events have more meaning if you’ve played the previous games you can get at least some of the emotional connection from them anyway.

It also spends a lot of time parodying Bioware in general and it seems Mass Effect in particular, with Loyalty missions and ridiculous romances and a very similar aesthetic and even suit in the ending. This works quite well, especially since many of the things would be funny whether or not you know the Mass Effect games or not. If I have any complaint, it’s that the romance jokes are only one-offs and not a parody of the detailed romances in Bioware games, but that’s a minor complaint.

As usual, I also quite liked the music in it. The game lets you build a playlist that you can listen to as you jump around (what you need to do is get into a car, set the playlist to your mix tape, and then get out of the car), and it featured a number of songs that I remembered and liked. This made running around the city generally more enjoyable than the missions.

Gameplay-wise, I actually managed to complete all of the activities in this one, but that was mostly because the secondary and Loyalty missions required you to complete them as part of them. I had finished a lot of them before those missions, leaving only some of the Hard and Medium ones to complete, and the game was good about recognizing when you had finished something and not making you do it all over again. This did lead to a number of occasions where I would stop to talk to someone to get a quest and then realized that I had done anything in it and so the next step was … to immediately talk to them again, which was a little bizarre. My favourite activity was probably the tower-climbing, while I can’t really remember which was my least favourite because most of the others were all kinda “Meh”.

The biggest issue I had with it is that when it came to attacks by the aliens it was often very, very difficult to tell where the attacks were coming from, meaning that I was confused a lot of the time when fighting them. This was especially problematic in the Hotspots, which were more difficult versions of the regular flashpoints, which made them not very much fun. It, of course, was also an issue in the final battle for a bit.

Ultimately, it was a fun game and I enjoyed playing it … and I get to add another game to my list of finished games! I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again, though.

I don’t know yet what I’ll play next.