![]() ![]() 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. They then murder a couple thousand people in pursuit of these lofty goals.Īnd, 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. Survival of the fittest: Hollywood's 10 wildest man vs. What's the most outrageous Targaryen moment from Game Of Thrones?
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