Volition bends over backwards not to inconvenience players, though there's one jarring holdover from older games - you'll regularly need to stop off at ammo shops to restock before each mission.
Former FBI agent Kinzie Kensington - an able and charmingly zesty presence throughout - hacks into the code of the simulation, giving you the powers you need to defeat the Zin threat and save your friends. It's an arresting opening, and if its narrative riffs on The Matrix are dated, it serves as a useful framework for the action that follows. Your protagonist doesn't have long to enjoy his presidency, though, because no sooner have you passed a bill to cure cancer or end world hunger (a jab at Fable 3's moral dilemmas, perhaps), a race of alien invaders beams down and kidnaps all your friends, imprisoning you in a simulation of Steelport, the fictional city we saw in the last game. Saints Row's pimps and gangsters just aren't going to cut it any more, not least because, at the outset, it turns out the Saints' influence has spread as far as the White House. It finds that balance partly in a fitting threat level. Happily, Volition has made it work, hitting that sweet spot between empowerment and vulnerability. Yes, we're in superhero territory, the ground occupied by the likes of Prototype and inFamous, and a potentially tricky area for a series as famously chaotic as Saints Row to attempt to conquer. Cars are no longer for stealing they're far better used for throwing. It's an unlikely kind of triumph: what began as little more than a poor man's GTA has evolved into a kind of anything-goes sandbox action game, but it's hard to pick out a defining characteristic beyond the fact that it lets you do stupid stuff.įour games in and it's reinventing itself again.
It feels strange to say it, but Saints Row has to be chalked up as one of the success stories of the current console generation.