I’m a huge SR fan, playing and replaying the original and the masterpiece that is SR2 all the way back on the Xbox 360 and man, when this reboot came out I couldn’t believe the fiasco that it was. No Shaundi, Pierce, Kinzie or Gat, no Stillwater or Steelport, badly rendered cartoonish graphics, plagued with glitches and well, it was also delayed several months and still came out terrible.

...so why is this a positive review? Because, my friends, the state of this game now in 2024 is genuinely good, decent even! I’m having so much fun with it and I felt the absolute need to write this review to maybe coerce convince people to give it a go!


I found myself caring about them and being invested in their loyalty stories, like Neenah with her project car, Kevin wanting to get the fast food toy he never had as a kid and Eli’s LARPing mission which is seriously fanfookingtastic, I highly recommend it if you’re vaguely familiar with DnD which, well, in today’s day and age how can you not at least have heard about it? Anyway, the main issue is that we had four games with the old crew and it is difficult to care for the new college kids especially now that we’re older than it is caring for Pierce and singing in the car with him 10+ years ago. I felt the same way about Mass Effect Andromeda and its new characters after an incredible trilogy; replacing what is familiar to us is already a very risky move and risky is what this game is to its core.

People claim that the new characters are obnoxious, cringeworthy and that they’re not what Saints Row ‘is’… well, remember the huge tone shift from SR2 to SR3? People said the exact same thing. The series hasn’t been ‘serious’ since then people, come on. Also, we were younger during the time of their release and I can safely say the humour is still very much same, just in the 2020s instead of the late 2000s/early 2010s. We’re older, it’s fine.

You can enable speech bubbles that make the city even more alive because the stuff the people say is legit ridiculous, like one guy desperate he’s gonna miss his stand-up session or some dude talking about a dog’s butt glands. It IS funny; maybe not for everyone my age but to me, I am having a blast with the humour and the new gang is completely fine.


Did they deliver with the writing this time? To me at least, ish. The writing isn’t jaw-dropping but it’s not your usual ironic angsty teenager jokes, just very influenced by… well, influencers but that isn’t terrible like people exaggerate when it comes to this game. To me, the Idols are just what Matt Miller’s gang, the Deckers are in today’s day and age consumed by social media instead of what was popular in 2011 and such but the dark comedy is still Saints Row, it is still has the same edge and more, for better or worse.

The main issue to me is how poorly paced the game is. It starts very well with an insane mission to get us familiar with the controls and guess what? We’re chasing a guy on top of a fighter jet! HOW IS THIS NOT A SAINTS ROW MISSION?
What comes next is a couple more grounded missions explaining how our roommates, which by the way, are already all criminals, turn into a gang. I think it felt a bit forced to shoehorn the creation of the Saints too early on but I didn’t feel it was out of place, just rushed to that point of the story, which what I think are all very similar to what the older games did – totally bonkers in every sense of the word.


The shooting is a bit hit and miss (heh) but overall satisfying, especially with that glorious handcannon just exploding people’s brains like it’s nothing and it is what you’ll be doing the most. I’ve seen people talking about how bulletspongy the enemies are and do I have the solution for you!

You can adjust the game’s difficulty to your liking in the options menu.

I don’t know if this was already an option on release but right now you can just make the enemies die in a couple shots, lower their damage and MORE! I made the game feel even more FUN with zero frustrations but with a dash of challenge; those dang Marshalls during the @TCHA missions are a pain.
Oh, you can even remove the timed missions so the insurance fraud goals don’t seem impossible to get! The accessibility is THAT good. I was impressed and I hope every game has the same accessibility from now on. If I want a high but fair challenge I can go play Fromsoftware games, not waste my entire ammo on a single armoured enemy here. lmao

The side-missions are cool for what they are. Again, this isn’t the exceptional Saints Row 2 (have you noticed how much I love SR2?) but decent enough to have fun with it. I personally like the Davey ones where you just shoot people while he drives. Look, man, I just sit on the top of a car and shoot bad guys without having to worry about anything; I’m a simple man, I just wanna shoot and explode cars.

The collectables are your run-of-the-mill stuff like taking pictures of places, collecting drugs some people left over unsupervised for some reason with some garbage hunting that Stelle/Caelus from HSR would be proud of. It’s hilarious seeing my character just dive in head first into a dumpster and find money, golden parts for a truck and more. What in the heck is this?? It’s Saints Row humour yet again delivering.

You have the good ole ‘go there and kill that guy’ missions but with some backstory that reminds me of the old GTA public telephone missions, remember those? Here there’s a WANTED app for you to pick and choose people to kill and some reasoning to it... as if you needed any, you monster.

Also the driving is fine, it felt very SR2 due to how heavy the cars feel but drifting is fantastic to do and the cars all look pretty nice! Talking about nice...


MAN OH MAN THE CUSTOMIZATION IS OFF THE CHAIN HOOK!!! You can tune cars, tune guns, tune yourself, tune your gang, change your appearance on the go and even place collectibles inside the base. The options are insane; just today I tuned a truck to look like (and drive like) Darkside from Twisted Metal and well, you can even put a gigantic spoiler on the truck, nitrous and an off-road upgrade.

I spent a good couple of hours tuning different cars because it’s just fun as hell. It’s so easy to lose track of time if you’re into this sort of thing. Also, there’s a LOT of shops around the city of Santo Ileso to get new clothes, tattoos and guns so make sure to visit all of them because they have different options! I feel I can pinpoint exactly where Volition were doing this with a purpose and when they knew the studio was going to close down because man, there is a soul in this game, as sappy as I am being right now but I am having so much fun with this.


I’m genuinely in love with this game and it is what I was expecting a new Saints Row to be like, especially after the pure insanity SR4 was! I can understand why people dislike it but treating it as the worst game of all time ain’t it. I haven’t played the DLCs yet but I’m super looking forward the DnD one because during the Eli mission to conquer a fort, there’s a treasure with a plaque pointing to it saying MIMIC and if you interact with, it goes “arghhh monster noises” and I love it. Oh yea, during the LARP mode you don’t ‘kill’ anyone, their ‘characters’ die instead like the Necromancer who you cannot shoot before you deal with her thralls and her mass revive spell. LMAO

Don’t go in expecting a AAA release, there’s still glitches like when I was stealing a car that didn’t load its textures or the overpowered fire hydrants that launch even trucks into the air. The ragdoll physics are hilarious and well, as you can already picture, I have very few bad things to say about it even with its Mixed reviews.

Grab it on sale!