Saints Row
Saints Row is a fun game that, at times, brings back the heyday of the series in a crazy adventure filled with hilarious missions of all kinds. The game is versatile. It’s cool, but not all aspects of the game are equally strong or equally necessary to keep you busy. Plus, the core gameplay repeats quickly, causing Saints Row to lose its charm too quickly. What doesn’t help is that the game looks outdated in a number of ways. Lighting effects are an exception to this, but some textures and the slow speed at which shadows are loaded, or how buildings suddenly appear on the horizon, aren’t really possible anymore. Too bad, because Santo Ileso is a beautiful city to explore, even if the history is short. Just like its predecessors, Saints Row is excellent for hours of mindless entertainment and goofy humor. Don’t expect the game itself to be very good.
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When we started with Saints Row a month or two ago, we concluded that we had a lot of fun in the four hours of introducing these new Saints. Just before gamescom started, this reboot of the franchise came out, which put the game in our queue for a while, but now we’ve been able to explore Santo Ileso extensively and get our version of The Saints become one of the most powerful gangs in town. The road was as you’d expect from Saints Row: action-packed, colorful and surprising, but sadly a bit ugly too.
We played the preview on a PC and did the review on an Xbox Series X. Perhaps this is part of the explanation why two months ago we didn’t realize that Saints Row graphically looks like a game from another era. It’s a sore point we ran into recently at gamescom when we saw Ubisoft’s Skull & Bones. Since some games already make good use of the possibilities of the latest generation of consoles and video cards, games that don’t actually do so yet stand out negatively. Saints Row is one such game. It doesn’t have to mean that the game isn’t fun or good anymore, but it’s one of the first things you notice while playing.
Still, Saints Row does some nice things technically. For example, it gives Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 gamers a choice of five graphics modes, with two also having the option of ray-traced ambient occlusion turn on. This makes seven ways you can set up the game graphically. The options range from playing in 1080p with a full focus on the framerate to playing in 4k, where the framerate is not locked at 30fps, but in practice it doesn’t go much above it either. For the 1080p Ultra and 1440p High Quality settings, you can turn on ray tracing as an option. The other way of simulating light and shadow is paying off – shadows definitely come out much better with this feature, although we didn’t think the difference was so big that we couldn’t play Saints Row without ray tracing.
The lighting effects are fine with, but also without ray-tracing. The producers have also filled the game world with atmospheric light sources. Especially in the story missions you will encounter many amazingly lit environments and this gives the game a nice look. Saints Row is a game that stands out for offering a lot of action, accompanied by a lot of chaos. You can break a lot, explode and so on. It can be said that the game can handle all that chaos effortlessly. The frame rate certainly drops a bit in the desert environment from time to time, but even playing in 4k mode it always remains playable.
Pop-in
The reason could be related to the pain point we started with: the rest of the game feels out of date. So we mean how detailed the textures and characters are, how those characters move and how far you can look and how new shadow textures and effects are loaded. Shadows from trees or other elements sometimes only appear when you drive a few meters away. Driving in the car and certainly flying in a helicopter you see continuous pop-in effects. If you fly over Santo Ileso, the more distant parts of the city are sometimes not visible at all until you get close. These are things we shouldn’t see on this console generation.
It immediately gives Saints Row an Achilles heel, because while there are good things there too, the whole doesn’t look modern. Additionally, Saints Row suffers from some bugs and other rarities. You see characters in the game world doing weird things regularly and we have experienced no less than twice that we had to restart the game because our character stopped responding to all inputs, making the game unplayable. The active mission therefore had to be repeated from the beginning and this is disastrous for your gameplay. Saints Row doesn’t make a good impression on a technical level and that’s a shame.
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