Saints Row IV might be the best open world sandbox game ever made and part of the reason for this is because it feels weirdly lacking in the mindless violence department.
This is a game that was refused classification in Australia, features guns, car-jacking, super powered hand-to-hand combat, explosions and the ability to take hostages and use them as human shields, so how can anyone argue that this is anything other than horribly violent? It certainly appears to be trying to be controversial and outrageous.
Read on for 10 reasons as to why Saints Row IV is a pussy cat at heart, albeit a sweary pussy cat with a gun.
1. You are in the Matrix
After a brief tutorial in which you wipe out a group of terrorists and get elected as the president of the United States of America, aliens show up and imprison humanity in a series of pods that force the occupants to relive a their own worst nightmare for eternity.
Everyone gets their own personalised hell. Some people get off better than others.
Saints Row IV effectively pulls the game-within-a-game trick. Whilst video games themselves are already an abstraction of violence, that does not stop them from just occasionally making the player feel slightly squeamish and awkward at the atrocities they are virtually committing. By having a game set inside a simulation that is itself inside the game world, this simply further abstracts the violence out and puts an extra layer of it’s-just-a-game between yourself and your actions.
2. It is not even as harsh as the Matrix
The stakes of the virtual world in Saints Row IV are spectacularly low. The virtual environments are tailored to the specific imprisoned human so when an innocent bystander carelessly throws themselves into the path of one of your wayward bullets, all that has happened is that a figment of your digital imagination has been removed.
There isn’t even a hint of a suggestion that dying inside the simulation has any far reaching consequences in the real world for the player’s character either. If you as the player dies, you are simply respawned with some of your cash (obviously renamed as cache) being stripped from you.
3. When you do kill things in the real world they are aliens
In the rare cases that you are doing something in the real world and exacting violence on non-digital assailants, this is almost exclusively carried out against aliens. Whilst what I have effectively said is that violence doesn’t feel so bad when it’s carried out against foreigners, what I really mean is that these aliens are very obviously not real. Whilst humanoid, they have a distinctly monstrous appearance and are presented in a way that leaves you very little room for sympathising with them.
Obviously monstrous, incredibly powerful and hard to feel sympathy for.
4. Saints Row IV is ridiculous
In case my description of the tutorial had not clued you in to this, Saints Row IV is absurd.
Previous entries to the Saints Row series have explored levels of violence that have left players feeling a little bit on the uncomfortable side. Even in earlier entries that started to experiment with more cartoonish elements, plenty of things happened that left little room for debate over the actual morality of your character. As far as moral choices went, these tended to range from bad to psychotic and the level of revenge that was in turn exacted upon you at various stages through the course of the story did a good job of reinforcing the idea of actions and consequences. You play as a bad person who does bad things and bad things will happen to you as a result. SImple gritty crime drama stuff.
In Saints Row IV, you are given the ability to jump over buildings, powers to throw lorries around with your mind and a gun that shoots dubstep music.
That is indeed a gun that fires dubstep music and makes everyone get out of their cars and dance.
At this point, violence has taken a decided turn away from Clockwork Orange and full-on nose-dived towards Tom and Jerry. It is incredibly difficult to take any of it seriously and I would not have been surprised if one of the weapon unlocks was an anvil.
5. You are the president of the USA
It would be naive to state that because you’re the president of the US you are therefore obviously of the highest moral fiber and beyond reproach for your actions, but knowing that in this world you are the president certainly adds a certain feeling of legitimacy to what you’re doing. Your character in Saints Row IV is no longer the leader of a jumped up street gang, but is instead the elected representative of the free world.
The White House is portrayed exactly how I imagine it, right down to West Wing style walking-and-talking and the tigers.
Despite your entire cabinet consisting of buddies from your former life of crime, this automatically makes you question what is happening a little bit less. This could of course indicate a deep-seated tendency to overly trust authority figures on my part.
6. You face a legitimate threat to the human race
From the outset, you play from the side of the underdog facing off against a highly aggressive, technologically advanced and hostile alien force that has the upper hand and motives that are not immediately obvious. Pitting the player against this sort of adversity is a stark contrast to the rival street gangs and law enforcement agencies that act as antagonists in previous games.
This automatically paints your actions in a different light and lessens the severity of your actions even further. You aren’t out for personal revenge, wealth or power, you are the resistance, the freedom fighters and rebel alliance fighting against oppression.
It’s not even possible to consider your actions as crimes any more. You are in a state of war with an aggressor that has basically already won. Anything you do at this point can be considered fair.
7. The spectacle is the world, not an edgy life of crime
The focus of Saints Row IV is much more about the uncanny nature of this digital version of Steelport where you can break the rules of reality and sprint several times faster than the fastest and most expertly driven of cars, shoot ice blasts and powerglide through the air.
Instead of holding up the shooting, the car stealing, the gang warfare and the embarrassingly adolescent representation of the sex trade like previous games have, the game pulls back to give you a stark red-and-blue-rendered cityscape with structures and elements that are deliberately out of place and textures that shift around and purposefully glitch out to emphasise your surroundings.
At first the constant red and blue theme really irritated me, but it does give you a tremendous sense of place.
The developers have done an excellent job of making Saints Row IV feel like a virtual world and as well as this reinforcing the first point, it really does pull focus from the more violent aspects of your garden variety open-world crime sandbox.
8. Destruction has context and is part of the story
A lot of open world sandbox games feel a bit weird when you let loose and go on a bit of a rampage, especially if they have done anything to establish certain character traits with the player’s avatar. Saints Row IV gets round this by quickly establishing that in order to destabilise the simulation and thus weaken the aliens’ power over humanity, the quickest method is to cause chaos and havoc.
This, along with the knowledge that all the people in your digital world don’t actually exist as real people means that the cathartic satisfaction gained from going on a rampage through the city is added with the sense that you are making progress and helping within the context of the world.
The story is perpetually giving you reasons to have fun and let loose and at no point is there that little voice inside your head asking awkward questions concerning how much you seem to be enjoying all of this violence and feeling a little internally embarrassed.
9. The game keeps telling you that you are not a psychopath
Whilst previous Saints Row titles have constantly reminded you that you are a bad person who does bad things, Saints Row IV goes out of its way to persuade the player that they are in fact more of a puckish rogue as opposed to a psychopath. At first, this recurring line of dialogue feels forced and irritating, but after a while you start believing it and within the confines of this game, you aren’t really shown that much that contradicts you. The characters sometimes talk about horrible things you have done in the past, but always in a slightly jokey reminiscing way, which weirdly makes it ok.
10. You keep being reminded that you are playing a video game
Just in case the further abstraction of the simulation within a simulation was not enough to convince your brain that no actual violence is taking place, several of the missions also parody, or sometimes simply reference, other famous video games.
Strongly recognisable references to Streets of Rage, Metal Gear Solid and even text-based adventures go a long way to just keeping reminding you that on all levels, you are playing a videogame and everything is a simulation until you step away from the controller. Some people will find this sort of immersion breaking reminder irritating and in some games it will be, but others will find it helps them to enjoy playing with the world that little bit more.
Why did you just write all this about a game that came out in 2013?
That, hypothetical question asker, is a very good question. The answer is simple: I only tried it out a few weeks ago. This was part of one of the previous Humble Bundles (which I highly recommend keeping an eye on – as I’m writing this there’s a rather good one running for Star Wars games) and whilst I have played previous Saints Row titles and reviewed Saints Row: The Third here, I gave this one a miss for some reason.
I could argue that it’s relevant because it has just been re-released on the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, or I could argue that it’s relevant because they released expand-alone title Gat Out Of Hell, but those are more happy accidents than actual reasons.
The truth is, a game being a couple of years old is absolutely no reason to ignore it. I did something simillar with Batman: Arkham Asylum a while back, it’s a stance I’m unashamed of, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
I picked up Saints Row IV on Steam but it is also available on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Remastered versions with an expansion have recently been released on the Xbox One
