Saints Row’s Red Faction Easter egg reads like a condemnation of crunch
The developers at Volition haven’t forgotten Red Faction
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Not to paint them as particularly fierce open-world rivals, but jumping into Saints Row after a week spent with Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered felt like being hurled backward in time. While Deep Silver Volition’s “what if millennials, but crime” reboot is colourful and often quite pretty, you can tell it’s not nearly as interested in cutting edge visuals or contemporary PC tech trappings as the Spidey remaster is. Ray tracing? Yes but only for ambient occlusion. Upscaling? Never heard of it, officer.
The upside – besides Santo Ileso being a generally nice place to visit, as Alice Bee found in her Saints Row review – is that it’s playable on low-end and luxury hardware alike. And, to its credit, there’s a healthy list of customisable graphics options too. I’ve therefore embraced the past, and spent hours in testing to find out how you can tweak Saints Row’s settings for the best possible performance.
The corporate military is muscling in on my turf.
I’ve got a nice little racket going where I hurl myself in front of traffic, get fired 50 feet up in the air and rake it in from multiple bogus insurance claims, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them steal my innovative idea.
So as I gun it over to where they’re set up in my pearlescent lambo, I need to select the perfect piece of equipment to show them who’s boss. The uzi will do nicely.
The Saints Row series started off as a sort of rival to Grand Theft Auto, an action-adventure crime sim about working your way up the ranks of a street gang to become the boss. It quickly diverged to become less realistic and more impossibly bombastic, and niched down into giant dildo bats, aliens, reincarnation, and so on. The series has gone to outer space and to hell, so if you’re rebooting the series that doesn’t leave you many places to go except… backwards.
Saints Row (2022 edition) is back to being a sort of Saints Row again, but also still trying to appeal to people who loved the characters and dick jokes and cartoon carnage of the Saints Row of 2013. If I was being reductive, I’d say it’s Saints Row by way of Watch Dogs 2. It isn’t bad. It’s fun, in fact, but it isn’t really doing anything new, either, and I think that’s a shame.
Check out this rather interesting story trailer for Saints Row.
The video gives you a taste of the Saints’ formation, rivals, and rise to power. It also features all sorts of explosions.
Set in Santo Ileso, a brand new location located in the American Southwest, the reboot stars a group of friends who embark on a criminal venture in a bid to become Self Made.
Saints Row is out in less than two weeks, so Volition and Deep Silver have dropped a new gameplay overview trailer diving into what you can expect from the game.
For a gameplay overview trailer, there isn’t much in the way of actual in-game gameplay, but it did dive into the various factions you’ll meet in the game. First up is Los Panteros, who’s run by certified beefcake Sergio. They’re all about smuggling, and “have no hesitations about getting up on your business,” making them one to watch out for.
Then there’s the more tech oriented, club culture donned Idols, who don’t have any particular leader, only a faceless group known as The Collective, but do have a penchant for masks that Daft Punk would potentially approve of.
Volition and Deep Silver are gearing up for August’s launch with a new Saints Row characters trailer, highlighting a bit about what to expect from your quirky, lawless friends in the crime game. You arrive in Santo Ileso intent on taking over the city with your brand-new business, one that happens to be highly illegal and volatile. But you won’t do this alone. The gameplay trailer is light on actual gameplay, but goes into a fair bit of detail on who you’ll build your criminal empire with – and who’s revving up to stop you in your tracks.
RELATED LINKS: Saints Row release date, Best action-adventure games, Upcoming PC games