Saints Row Hands-on Preview: Hot Like Vegas

Saints Row is nearly upon us, after a seven-year absence since 2015’s Gat out of Hell (and five years since the Agents of Mayhem spinoff). Publisher Deep Silver/Koch Media invited us to the scorching-hot city of sin, Las Vegas, last week to get our grubby mitts on the latest entry in this long-running franchise. We beat the heat (and a freakish, monsoon-like storm on the way in) and managed to not die IRL despite the sun’s best attempts, and have our fresh impressions ready for you below.

Saints Row Preview: Viva Las Vegas

This event took place in a suitably seedy hotel off the famous “Strip” Vegas is known for. At a mere three stories tall, it was really not a big step up from a motel. However, the hotel was adorned with a complete makeover, with the front of it stating proudly “Welcome to Santo Ileso,” the new city in which the game takes place. There were muscle cars parked outside, some famous streamer in a bikini, sex toys dropped into the pool…yeah, I could see a criminal empire getting its start here, as the motel across the street stated it featured daily and even weekly rates. After a night of debauchery which included themed drinks in a saloon, a live Blackjack table (no real bets allowed), a DJ dropping beats to a mostly empty crowd (lots of delayed flights!), and some surprisingly great quesadillas and street tacos from a food truck dressed up as the Chalupacabra as seen in the new Saints Row, the actual hands-on portion of our event took place the next afternoon.

After a very short presentation, we were given free reign over the city for four hours. Co-op was enabled at some stations, and I played with GameRevolution’s Nick Tan for the duration. We played from the very beginning of the campaign, beginning with making a character. As the Boss Factory has been out for over a month, nothing here was too surprising, though in co-op whoever is done first with running through a sequence of screens must simply wait for the other player to finish. In fact, if one player pauses the game, the other is notified and can either sit and wait or access their own pause menu.

Co-op Shenanigans

Naturally, only your created character shows up in the cutscenes, but once the action gets going both characters appear. Strangely, there are no screen name or health indicators on the other player, and although an indicator does show up when someone’s health runs out, communication is key to ensure your teammate revives you within a certain amount of time. Furthermore, while waypoints show up whenever either player sets them, once one player reaches the spot, it disappears from both maps. Thus, you then have to head in the general direction of where you last saw the blip and pay attention to the minimap to find your way to the objective. Overall, co-op feels perhaps a little tacked-on, but it does generally run smoothly and is drop-in/drop-out. After all, it’s better to have co-op as an option at all as opposed to Saints Row being a strictly solo affair. Co-op will be cross-gen compatible, though not crossplay as of launch.

Saints Row is coming back down (or is it up, ya know, from hell) to Earth this time around, and is mostly grounded in reality. There’s still outlandish shit going on, to be sure – we saw a car wall-running, for example – but this is serving as a origins story of the Saints gang. You take on the role of “The Boss,” whom we join just as they are getting started working for a private military corporation (PMC). Long story short, things don’t go so well and before you know it, you and your three best friends are setting off to create a bangin’ criminal organization.

We managed to play through all eleven missions on offer during our demo, with each taking perhaps 10-15 minutes. All characters are excellently voiced, and there are witty one-liners and innuendos aplenty. Once a headquarters is established, Saints Row really opens up, as the gang is now free to start illegitimate businesses with legitimate storefronts. While we didn’t get to check out many of these side hustles and jobs, it did remind me of Saints Row: The Third when the money started to roll in. Sure, at the start $250,000 seems like a huge amount to drop on a character perk, but eventually it’ll feel like a drop in the bucket.

Roll Your Own

Customization has been a big part of Saints Row in the past, and here things are no different. The aforementioned Boss Factory allows you to create anyone you might like to, whether it looks like yourself, someone you know, or someone with ridiculous proportions running naked in the street with glistening golden skin. Meanwhile, every car can be have its parts customized in some way, and most also even allow you to mess with the way they sound. So, you could have a small, European subcompact car (think Mini Cooper) that sounds and honks like a big rig, which is as hilarious as you think. Weapons can also be customized, with skins, colors, upgrades, and more to ensure your arsenal is the baddest around.

Saints Row certainly feels like it’s coming back in a big way. Johnny Gat and crew may no longer be in the picture, but that just means what we have here is an open canvas with which Volition hopes to paint the Saints in a new light. The four hours flew by, and I laughed along with my co-op partner as we painted the town red, hauling ass with a nearly-indestructible meth lab on wheels through the desert, with gang members not far behind. The co-op may occasionally be glitchy or unintuitive, but you’ll hardly notice while you’re having fun.

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