Category: Grand theft auto

We could be discussing how the son of his time is the humor of Tetralogía Saints Row, which began as a discreet but compliant who knew how to see the hole between Grand Theft Auto 2008: The first Saints Row, in 2006) and offering a resulton substitute but ended up evolving (or degenerating) in a delusional history, hyperbarroca and always on the edge of implosion. They are games that have always been attractive to me, to a large extent because of the often uncomfortable tension that ended up between the relative honesty or sensitivity that was noticeable, very occasionally, even in their most delusional moments and the self-imposed need of Being more and more pandilocos, an exponential death spiral that for my taste volition did not know how to finish in a satisfactory way. The extremely difficult thing that is to explain the path of Saints Row IV to Agents of Mayhem should be a reason for plenty, yes, to justify that the formula of the reboot has been chosen when reliving the series, although we could also Ask (and, again, we could be discussing it all day) if it was necessary to recover the brand Saints Row ; If it will not be a distraction or a ballast, more than anything else.

Starting from below, the new Saints Row begins with your character, the boss who decides to be (and that you can create with a powerful characters editor, first, and customize later buying clothes and accessories of all kinds: from shirts and pants to Rings, hats or fantasy helmets), living with notable narrows with a group of friends, Kev, Eli and Neenah, on a shared floor after losing your job for Marshall Defense Industries, a private security company that, for practical purposes, It is one of the criminal organizations that control saint unharmed, the place where the game takes place. During the introduction of the story you also know the other two: the panthers, the bodybuilders, and the idols, a group of watch dog raveros less interested in defending the interests of the common and current people of what they say to attract unsuccessful to its pyramidal scam. Malvivir is not enough for this grupete, which after a couple of high voltage incidents with local bands decide to use their talents to mount their own criminal organization, which end up baptizing how the Saints.

From the beginning this new Saints Row has trouble showing that he tries to say something different. The first missions is sufficiently disappointing so that the moment in which the group decides to create their own crime empire is received as an oasis in the desert. Revuélcate in your misery, reads the objective indicator; Pressing the × button narcotically, you make your character stain painfully on his bed, and then do the same-this time with the triangle-to try to heat a frozen gofre, the only food that you have left in the freezer, with a toaster Second hand that clearly touches to take to the clean point. It is a pathetically long situation that leads your character to have the revelation that triggers his new career in the promising world of organized crime; Surely it is not the brightest or most executed scene in the history of video games, but it reminded me of the type of tension that was sought in the best moments of the ancient Saints Row: a tension between the violence that surrounds the characters and that Define the world in which they live and their ambitions, frustrated despite being much more pedestrian and simple than those of the Kingpins that move the threads in Santo ileso. Your character just wants to get a gofre, and not even so; Why not try to make a place in the crime, for which they clearly have talent and in which they surely have more than winning than curre them and looking for life for the usual channels?

It is a promising starting point that little by little is knowing how to add the occasional point, although somewhat shy. When the Saints are taking shape, the table of the criminal empire allows you of martial artists or a radio with which to get into the media business. These businesses serve as a cover to carry out other less legal activities: Chalupacabra, one of the first companies that you can open, These businesses are giving you passive income that you can access through an app of your mobile, exchanging the money you get every hour. Keep your businesses-eliminating the competition, fulfilling the objectives that are unlocked when you open them, keeping at bay the presence of rival bands in their area-makes these income grow; The money you get can be used to buy weapons or improve your abilities, thus making you more capable of facing the rest of the bands and conquering territory.

And hopefully this system had greater presence and importance! In practice, Saints Row doesn’t have much to say; Just nothing, unfortunately. Its structure is the generic of its kind; Although it is a rather raw way to say it, I don’t really have much problem with the most standard presentation of these open action worlds, with their maps full of icons, activities and nonsense more or less light than going to your air, and I know which in general is a formula that works and likes. In that sense, Saints Row has no more blame than others: his nine districts are not very original or memorable but they are sufficiently functional to explore them to have that narcotic quality that occasionally, at least in my case, he wants. Perhaps going out there between mission and mission to stir between the garbage cubes, one of the collectibles of the game, is not the most stimulating in the world, but if you cross yourself with one of those icons going to some more specific place does not bother get out of the car and look for the happy Container. I can think of very worse, in short, that a great open world (or at least a large open world) in which to look for collectibles, make the goat and spend a few funny times; If this is not your case, Saints Row will not make you change your mind.

The big problem here is in the poor execution of the whole set. It is not a game that looks for high precision shootings, of course, but the approach to the design of the huge arsenal seems questionable to me: almost all weapons are similar enough to give more or less the same as you use at all times, beyond Choose the subcategory that best suits the distance you want to cover. To compensate for this, Saints Row is strongly betting on a system of skills that sometimes gives rise to funny situations, although it does not always fit equally with the tone of the game. Although there is a bit of everything (from smoke pumps to fire fists), the best skill is the first one that you unlock: approaching an enemy, you put a grenade in the pants and throw it in the direction in which the camera, making it an explosive ragdoll that can make a porridge to large groups of putty. This, together with the fact that to recover life you have to make an execution (a movement that can only be done when a bar is recharged, and not all enemies), it causes a greater emphasis on movement and distances short. However, most fighting end too soon or are too confused to result in many cases even legible; A few missions and you have already explored all the mechanical possibilities of the combat system. It gives the feeling that the game gets into a dead end when you fail to design interesting confrontations around the execution system: from a certain moment, the form that Saints Row has to upload the difficulty is to make the moment at the time in the That it is possible to do the execution, when the first yellow life bar (something like the shield) lowers the red one, is increasingly difficult and tedious. There are no more complex enemies or that require more advanced strategies; There are only larger bullet sponges.

This same philosophy extends to the design of missions, outdated and ramplón. Beyond the most prepared missions and with specific moments that come out of what can be done in the minute by minute of the open world, the vast majority of what you do in Saints Row is tragically soft and bland, both for argument and by gameplay. Go here, steal this car, kill these people; It escapes such, talk to which, leads to this site in a specific time. Neither combat nor driving have the necessary touch to endure a whole game like this; In these cases, as in many of its kind (there will be those who say that it is the case of GTA, even), the need to be apprentice to everything and teacher of nothing with arguments, dialogues, settings is compensated. There is some moment in this new Saints Row (the live role missions are immediately head They move the widest history of the criminal empire to anywhere. No character dares to be nothing very concrete or do anything that breaks the weak balance of the game until it is about to end.

It is not difficult to imagine that the ambition of volition is very different from that of other open worlds, and possibly also its budget is different; I want to say much less. But I think it is not necessary to focus much on the quantitative to see Saints Row’s seams, and that there is a purely quantitative part that makes waters everywhere. From a certain moment, Saints Row became something, as they say at the beginning of the south Park chapters, rude and unreal; This reboot tries to adapt the tone of the game to our times, and does not do it at all evil. The idea of developing a criminal empire as if it were a startup (in the end, the Saints are not so different from the grupete of kids of the series silicon Valley) gives rise to some interesting scene, and in general I think it is valuable. But the tone of the game is unbearable: he wants, at the same time, to be irreverent and macarra and not disturb anyone; We want us to believe that Saints Row’s DNA retains as us with some of the softer jokes with which I have crossed in my life. The posters of the walls, the marques of the bus, the phrases that the pedestrians release when you cross with them; Everywhere there are things that seem, jokes, but they don’t really have any bite.«Skateboarding is cool» _, reads in a poster in your headquarters;Just not in This Property,finishes. Something died in me when I read this. The same with most dialogues among the characters, even among the main ones: if there were an AI that could produce Marvel film dialogues, the result would be something very similar to this.

I do not believe that a giant dildo with an handle is the top of humor, on the other hand, but I think I see in this new Saint Row an uncomfortable paradox: that of wanting to be an integrated outsider, a criminal who follows the rules, a humorist who does not He wants, as they say now-and very reason-hit down,but either up_. He doesn’t want to hit in any direction. There are two and nobody falls. His own past and the extreme prudence with which he touches all the issues means that sometimes his commitment to some of the gardens in which he decides to get into, or his sincerity: it is not clear if it does for conviction or by crossing out points is not clear In a hypothetical list of buzzwords that align it better with the sensibilities of our present, or, worse, that align less with the sensibilities of its predecessors.

All this would care less if I thought about all these things while playing something better executed, without so many bugs, with better physics, with a more interesting fight; something that started from a base that worked for itself to shape its stories. It is not the case. The only thing that manages to be Saints Row is an outdated open world and with hardly any ideas that remind us of why this format won the animosity of so many people when, two generations behind, its popularity began to become an excuse for justify Gameplay Poor and narratives ramplonas trying to compensate it with gigantic maps and full of secondary mission so that is unlikely that they ended up confusing each other. His best ideas could have worked better if he had not had to adhere to a formula, that of the originals, which was already at the time-because he did not want to be more than that-much less sophisticated than that of GTA or almost any assassin’s creed; As reboot, you have to live with the mental cocoa of wanting to be and not to be what it is or what it is supposed to be, whatever that is: a tongue tweep that confuses anyone, and that unfortunately it does not reach any port, not good not bad.

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