On the creation screen, your character takes shape. It took you several minutes to choose from dozens of haircuts, skin textures and templates that you then reworked. You polished the bridge of the nose, raised the angle of the eyebrows, determined the diameter of the nipples and the thickness of the crotch. Then you spent another twenty minutes dressing her. This maniacal modeling session, between plastic surgery and tuning automotive, is your gateway to Saints Row. In this paradise of customization, your avatar arises, undeniably unique. He is called “the Boss” and there is only one: you are.
A few minutes later, we find the Boss at the controls of a convertible, accompanied by three acolytes, their hair in the wind. Along the highway lanes of Santo Ileso, the car radio spits out the mantra of a personal development coach: “Become your own boss, be in charge!” » This is precisely the life chosen by the Boss after launching his gang as one launches a business. Seize the city to make it the empire of the gang of the Saints: here is the project.
The uninhibited double of “GTA”
Since its debut in 2006, the irreverent series Saints Row evolved in the shadow of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), going from the rank of outsider to that of a slightly crazy cousin. Appreciated by a considerable fringe of players, especially in the United States, Saints Row However, it has a much more limited influence than the behemoth of Rockstar Games and its 375 million sales (all episodes combined).
Cleverly, Volition’s series pursues less the meticulous simulation of its model than its cathartic sandbox pleasures. Less talkative and hysterical than GTAless tempted by a political discourse that often stumbles on a form of cynical ambiguity, the American satire of Saints Row takes advantage of an uninhibited coarseness, combined with the lightness of a cartoonish and explosive humor. When a car is stolen GTA, we force the door. In Saints Rowwe pass through the windshield, feet first.
If it has always featured various gangs fighting to take control of major American cities, the series has let itself slide down an increasingly delirious slope. In 2011, it reinvented itself with Saints Row : The Third, a cocktail of assumed cretinism where the Saints gang is now making a fortune in merchandising and beating up its enemies with dildos. As video games reach the age of reason, Volition wallows in the guilty pleasures that have long earned it its reputation as an unpopular subculture.
In the fall of 2013, as if to respond to GTA V which prides itself on its flowing script, Volition draws Saints Row IV, where the Saints find themselves trapped in a virtual simulation by aliens after the Boss is elected President of the United States. In the opinion of even the developers of Volition, it was high time to return to earth.
It is therefore in the form of a reboot what comes back to us today Saints Row. This time, Volition retraces the origins of the purple gang in a more subdued version than usual. The game is centered on a group of friends with humanized profiles but sufficiently atypical to embark on a great picaresque adventure, with flights in wingsuits against a background of explosions, middle fingers and gratuitous deaths by the hundreds.
Wild West in cardboard
Neither really dunce nor serious for all that, the new Saints Row not always convincing. From the sandbox, the game retains the essentials when it asks us to ransack a construction site or drag an enemy into chemical toilets for several kilometers. However, it seems to obscure that we have already done this, or even that all open world games have already done this before it. Following a disjointed progression, the player goes from pursuit to shootout, crossed by the unpleasant impression that the genre does not know how to get rid of endless missions consisting in firing without joy on waves of enemies.
After a laborious start, and without ever sacrificing anything to somewhat soothing mechanics, Saints Row ends up all the same by deploying in what it has best to offer. The game benefits from the cachet of Santo Ileso, a fictional city in the southwestern United States whose arid setting captures the artificiality of cities like Las Vegas in a remarkable way. Here, the industrial suburbs are gradually changing into commercial areas gravitating around a city center whose towers accentuate the emptiness of the desert. It’s no coincidence that the game’s first mission takes place in a cardboard Wild West setting: the boom town of Santo Ileso is just the modern evolution of western towns, the kind in which the best sequences of Saints Row (a prison escape, a train attack…) borrow so many clichés.
Moreover, by replaying the founding myth of the United States, the open world of Saints Row do not forget that this was above all a struggle for hegemony. This justifies the game’s obsession with making everything customizable: avatar of the Boss, weapons, vehicles, monuments… “It’s all yours, put your stamp on it”cries out to us this game where the egocentric protagonists praise participatory production and the myth of self made entrepreneur. In this post-Uber dystopia, the four friends embark on a massive reappropriation of neighborhoods, set up their shady businesses there (with so many mini-games of varying interest) and paint the city purple. The Saints have indeed become their own bosses, but if they have freed themselves, it is to better lock us into their own frankness.
The opinion of Pixels in brief
We liked:
- the city of Santo Ileso, a superb exploration site;
- the character of the Boss, with his panache and his sense of flawless repartee;
- some original and funny sequences that stand out.
We didn’t like:
- a slightly too wise reworking of Saints Row who never seeks to renew the archaisms of the game in the open world;
- shootings, and more shootings…;
- some blocking bugs in certain missions or game phases.
It’s more for you if:
- you wait desperately GTA 6 and you need a snack;
- you’re crazy about customization, you put your touch everywhere: on walls, sidewalks, cars and passers-by (bonus if purple is your favorite color);
- you spend your weekends on the side of the freeway throwing yourself under cars to collect millions in insurance (or you always dreamed of doing so in a video game).
It’s not for you if:
- the format of the open world in missions and sub-missions embellished with mountains of rather off-putting side activities seems obsolete to you;
- you can’t stand gratuitous immorality, violence and rudeness.
Pixels note:
3 rings out of 5