The new Saints Row reboot is bland, boring, and broken

I shoot a man in the face with my rifle. I shoot a man in the face with my rifle. I shoot a woman in the face with my rifle. I shoot a man in the face with my rifle. I shoot a woman in the face with my rifle. A cutscene plays, in which I am told of the incredible power of friendship. I shoot 20 more people in the face with my rifle. Later, I will drive a car.

Phew! It wasn’t easy, encapsulating the entire 40 hours I spent playing Saints Row, the shiny new reboot of the long-running open-world crime franchise, in a single paragraph. But I think I got pretty much everything in there—the only things missing being some sporadic bouts of meme-based humor, and the regular-as-clockwork bit where I had to restart a mission because some aspect of its scripting had managed to bug itself out into oblivion. (To be fair, the latter, at least, might end up addressed with a patch at some point; the former is probably here to stay.)

There’s an interesting question raised by this latest effort from original Saints Row developer Volition: Has an effort to “go back to our roots” ever put its focus on roots this manifestly bland? The original Saints Row was, after all, the most blatant and milquetoast of all the Grand Theft Auto clones that cropped up in the mid-2000s, a blank-eyed retread that tried to sell itself with one tiny extra dollop of “attitude” to lure players in. It was only with the games’ sequels that the series started to stake out an actual identity for itself, growing sillier and stranger with each installment, even as Grand Theft Auto got more serious and dour. And while you could certainly argue that there’s a point where, say, Saints Row IV’s blend of superpowers, alien invasions, Jane Austen cameos, and sex toy jokes aplenty crossed a line from “dumb fun” into just plain dumb, it’s hard to imagine that the best response to that problem was to do what Volition has done here, tossing the baby out with the proverbial dildo bat bathwater, and stripping out all the fun bits that gave this series any sense of what it actually was.

We open in Santo Ileso (think Vegas, but scuzzier), a city currently being torn apart in the grip of three rival armies: The Panteros (bodybuilding car dorks), The Idols (murder-ravers), and the Marshall mercenary company (space cowboys, but not in a fun Tommy Lee Jones sort of way). Our central characters are a crew of roommates who roughly map onto the low-level rungs of each of these factions, with your own player-crafted avatar a new recruit to Marshall who regularly describes themselves as “being good at murder.” After a series of setbacks that sees them ostracized from all of these various power brokers, the group decides to form their own dang gang, founded not on a drive for power, fame, or wealth, but on a shared dedication to each other, and to the idea of the little guy rising up and seizing their destinies for themselves.

They then murder a couple thousand people in pursuit of these lofty goals.

And, look: I didn’t just fall off the back of the games discourse turnip truck here; I can rattle off my thoughts on ludonarrative dissonance—i.e., the gap between what a game says it’s about versus what you actually spend your time doing while playing it—with the best of them. But it’s rare for a game to put quite this much energy into trying to get you to like and root for characters who are extremely glib about all the murders they intend on doing. Where previous Saints games embraced a sort of gleeful amorality as a shield against any serious critique, Saints Row 2022 doesn’t hide the fact that you’re expected to sympathize with and grow to love roommates Kev, Neenah, and Eli; listen to their emotional backstories; connect with them over shared bonding rituals. Your character’s friendship with these three people has been placed, quite successfully, at the very heart of this game. It’s just that the game they’ve been placed at the heart of is also all about stabbing people in the face. To pull a TV metaphor, it’s kind of like if the main characters of How I Met Your Mother were all also in the Mafia together—conceptually interesting, admittedly, but also pretty disorienting in practice.

As to what you’re actually doing while all this heartwarming banter/heart-stabbing action is going on, well: See that first paragraph up top. Having removed large swathes of the sillier gameplay actions that have dominated Saints Row across its last few installments, Volition has replaced it with, honestly, not all that much. Sure, activities will be described as though something fun is about to happen, but nine times out of ten, what the game really means is “Drive to this place and shoot someone.” (Sometimes, to break things up, you’ll shoot someone, then drive somewhere else to shoot some people again.) There are a few glimmers of innovation here and there—generally attached to the “Empire” system that makes up much of the game’s side content, tasking you with building various criminal fronts that provide passive upgrades and income in exchange for completing certain tasks. But you’d be shocked how often “seize control of drug-dealing food trucks” or “clean up a crime scene for cash” translates to “drive somewhere and shoot a guy in the face.”

As to those two key verbs, they’re a somewhat mixed bag. The driving is actually pretty fun, once you adjust to its quirks: There’s a bouncy cartoonishness to the way most of the cars handle that puts an emphasis on drifting, catching air, and generally having fun with the physics. (Also, every car that isn’t yours is basically made of tissue paper, turning even the most cautious commute into a series of extended explosions.) Tearing across Santo Ileso in a souped-up supercar can be a genuine blast, especially if you stick a tow cable on your favorite sportscar so that you can drag some hapless sap behind you as a makeshift wrecking ball. (The worst thing you can say about the driving, really, is that the game’s mission mode is perversely averse to letting you use your own cars, sticking you in a bunch of virtual lemons instead of your hard-earned speed machine.)

The shooting is less satisfying. Although there’s a decent number of weapons available, few of them go beyond the basic “pistol, SMG, rifle, shotgun” model, and enemy variety isn’t much more varied. In an interesting touch, healing is handled through a melee-based “takedown” system that encourages you, along with fairly hard limits on how much ammo you can carry, to constantly push forward towards threats, which break down between basic mooks and slightly tougher enemies with a few special tricks. All of which is fine, except for the fact that almost every firefight has been padded like the participants are trying to make a good show for their boss; never expect Saints Row to throw three enemies at you when it could fill the screen with a dozen, instead. For a game so interested in making murder seem fun and frivolous, it’s perversely okay with translating it into tedium, instead.

The most irritating thing about Saints Row, though…Well, I was going to say something about “the wasted potential,” or the ways it occasionally slips up and lets itself get genuinely goofy and fun for a minute before getting back to the death grind. (If you play the game, do yourself a favor and push toward the “Eurekabator!” criminal front early; it’s the one place where the game lets itself get truly wild.) But that would be a lie: The most irritating things about Saints Row are the bugs, which, in our pre-release review version, were abundant, and which varied from silly to immersion-ruining to mission-aborting. There’s nothing quite like loading up a mission in a game like this—which sometimes run to 20 minutes in length, at least—and feeling that pit of anxiety in your stomach because you just don’t know if the damn thing will actually work. Publisher Deep Silver has promised a Day One patch that will hopefully address some of this, but I can honestly say that it’s the most frustrated I’ve been by the technical side of a game since the release of Cyberpunk 2077 back in late 2020.

Saints Row is a confusing game, on multiple levels. I can’t say I didn’t have fun with it—there’s a compulsive pleasure in open-world gaming that’s hard to tamp down, no matter how intent the game seems to be on keeping its players from enjoying themselves too much. (If you need a big map of stuff to checklist your way down, the game will absolutely scratch that itch.) Its tonal issues are, weirdly, a function of making its characters too likable, instead of not enough. And it desperately wants you to think you’re having fun, without ever providing concrete steps towards giving players more to do than function in a very rote loop. In hindsight, it reminds me a bit of the whiteboard that your business-buzzword-obsessed buddy Eli busts out early on, when the Saints are first figuring out how to turn themselves into a functional gang: Some big, flashy concepts; very few ideas on how to execute.