Saint's Row 4: The Ideal Saint's Row Game

Welcome to the final Saints Row review until I tackle the original or Volition decided to make a proper SR5 game that isn’t Agents Of Mayhem. I remember getting hyped about this game back in 2014. I remember using Instagram to share my reactions to all the new stuff they have been revealed and how I lost my mind when they teased Gat’s return with the line “Gat Is Back”. I would later buy it in December right after I finish performing in a local Christmas parade where I represented my dance school. To say that Christmas was the best Christmas I ever had so far would be accurate. It is now nearly four years since its release and I finished this game fives times over by now so say I am experienced in the game is an understatement. I know everything about this game from where to get the hidden dildo bat, how to get the noisy cricket rip off and even how to farm cash easy which I made a steam guide for. I know this game as well as the back of my YuGiOh cards and I am more than ready to talk about this game so let’s get that plot summary done.

Totally not following the events of the true ending of SR3, the game leads us into a cold opening of a COD parody where we are introduced to Aisha, an MI6 agent and her handler, Matt "Cyberpunk Ass" Miller. After killing a bunch of terrorists and their leader, the now evil Cyrus from SR3, the player character disables a nuke while it’s flying in the air to that one good Aerosmith song. A couple months after the prologue, it’s revealed that the player character is PODUS now and he has recruited Keith David (the actor) and Benjamin “Motherfucking” King straight out of SR1 to be his chief adviser and yes, the Motherfucking part is required when saying his full name. After making a series of decisions where you either tell cancer to go kill itself or give everyone cake, punch a senate member either in the head or the “special area”and deciding high five Josh Birk or not (the answer is you always accept it), aliens called the Zin attack. After you run into the Oval Office and exercise your right according to the third amendment, you start killing aliens while you watch your crew get abducted. After utilising the world’s most American anti-air artillery array to take down alien ships, you confront the leader of the Zin, Zinyak where he continues to smack you around until you become unconscious. You wake up in a 50s styled nightmare world and after breaking that, it’s revealed you are in a simulation and Zinyak drops you into another simulation to where the Saints never existed. Kinze who helped you break the original simulation, tutorials you through some other stuff and helps you unlock super powers. After using the first set of super powers to escape to the real world, you wake up and escape from a matrix like pod and you find yourself on the alien mothership. After killing your way again through aliens, Kinze and Keith David saves you in an spaceship and you escape from the mothership to “Baby Don’t Hurt Me”, Zinyak blows up the earth, killing the rest of the people he didn’t abduct. The president actually having a morally right thought for once, decides to exact revenge on Zinyak for destroying the earth while rescuing the rest of his crew. Keep in mind, this is alone is only the first two-three hours of the game. There is still a lot more craziness to cover but that’s for later.

If SR3’s plot was a convoluted mess, SR4’s plot is a convoluted mess with parodies and references mixed in to make it it even more convoluted but this time, it’s the good kind of convoluted. You know, the kind of convoluted mess that Hellsing and the alike like to snort during their down time. What makes this better than SR3 is because it keeps one tone throughout the whole game and you know this because they set it up within the first hour of game play. You are the president fighting aliens in a simulated city where you have superpowers and you can use weird sci-fi guns to kill aliens. This isn’t SR3 where it wants be taken as a serious gangsta story while trying to cooky and wacky. This is straight up, balls to the wall, crazy fun from begin to end and I love it. It doesn’t want to be taken seriously because it wants you to be entertained and having fun instead. They filled this game with callbacks, references to other series and even straight up parodies of other pop culture icons. The missions where you rescue your homies are full of their worst nightmares which is either a segue to have more crazy fun or recall old elements. For example, Pierce’s rescue mission starts with you shooting mascots in the penthouse suite from SR3 and you end the mission controlling the giant statue from SR3 to beat up a giant can of Saints Flow called Paul. There is also Gat’s rescue mission where you play in a retro side scrolling beat em up which renacts the events of the Ronin storyline from SR2. Yes, it does have serious moments like when you renact the scene where you have to save Shaundi from Veteran Child again but that’s because you can’t renact these scenes in a non-serious manner but it’s necessary for plot progression so you can’t really fault it for doing this. I also think it doesn’t take away from the fun because I still think it’s a fun callback, tone issue otherwise but you only can view this as a fun callback if you are invested in the other games. The plot is very tied to the previous game due to all the references the game makes to the older games. There is a surprisingly a lot of SR1 callbacks which confused me as well when I first played it and still don’t know much about the characters who came from SR1. This also applies to the references like Keith David appearing in the game because he just seems really random without the context of him being the voice of Julius Little from SR1 and SR2 and it gets even worse if you never seen “They Live” to understand why he is friends with Roddy Piper. While the series has finally fixed its tone issue with this game, they just made another one in the form of alienating newbies and that can be a turn off. So that’s just another issue but remember last week, I said the plot is simply there to compliment the game play and unlike SR3, the plot and the game play go hand in hand.

As expected, the game play is the same as SR3 but they have added more features this time, mainly superpowers. You start off with the basic super speed and super jump and progressing later into the game, you can unlock blast, telekinesis, stomp and aura which comes with optional unlockables and variations if you spend the time to do the side missions for them or collect giant blue orbs to upgrade the abilities. The fun thing is that if you just avoid collecting them and focus on getting missions and activities done, you will still find yourself progressing to these unlocks since the side missions are just a checklist which you can do between main missions which is a great game play design choice. They also added a little more customisation options and no, they didn’t re-added layers. What they did instead is add more clothing options at cost of getting rid of some of them but they also added weapon customisation. While upgrading used to be a simple levelling system, you can now choose what upgrades you want to get first and you can also change your weapon skins. You can have sci-fi looking skins like making the rapid fire SMG look like the Robocop gun or you could just be silly with them like making your burst rifle into a water soaker which can completely the absolutely fun alien weaponry they added. Ignoring the dubstep gun because it’s pretty much synonyms with the game and needs no attention since we already know it’s great fun, there is a black hole launcher, a bounce rifle which makes any fight into a game of pinball, an abduction gun for abducting idiots, a rifle that decodes everything with a single shot. If you have the DLC, you have stuff like the Plunger gun, the ‘Merica and there is even a gun that launches knives at your opponent. The weaponry options are crazy but they are the fun crazy so it’s acceptable just like the new activities. While some are very boring like the rift ones, you have the fight club coming back as Super Power Fight Club where you fight old villains with superpowers. If punching people isn’t your thing, there is the returning Professor Genki activity in the form of “Mind Over Murder” where you fling things with your telekinesis into floating hoops. There is also the returning assassinations and chop shop missions from SR2 but they have been jacked up to suit the nature of the game now so the targets are super powered and often references to other games like having another time to kill that bellend, Julius Little. What I am trying to get at here is the game is just a really fun romp to play through and I do find myself booting it up time to time just to run around the map and have fun but I still do have some problems with this game.

I’m going to start with my most petty complaints and that’s the enemies. Since the game has became more of superhero sandbox than a gangster one, it has had to update the enemies so they can possess some form of threat to you and while I don’t mind some of them, the late game ones are can be very annoying and in some cases, pace breakers. The first one I want to complain about is the murder bots which are just T-800 rip offs and while they are easy enough to deal with, they can be annoying due to the fact if you don’t blow up the head, they will crawl at you and blow up. On top of this, they take a lot of bullets to deal with and they are often equipped with mine launchers which are annoying if you haven’t unlocked the no rag doll upgrade. There is also these annoying rolling robots which are pretty much invisible except for this one weak spot behind their head and it’s really annoying to position yourself behind them so you can shoot them there but they don’t compared to the Wardens. These guys are supposed to be the main mini boss in the story line and you can absorb them matrix style to acquire new powers but these guys can spawn in after clearing out certain data points or if you hit the max level on the wanted bar which I hate. If you are like me, you probably want to start shit and just have fun in a constant gun fight between you and the enemy but these guys spawn in and despawn all the other enemies so you have to one v one these guys and after you defeat them, your wanted bar is empty and you have to start again. It just ruins the fun of having the police on you all the time and I just found myself turning on the no warden cheat just so it can’t ruin my fun. So wardens are a piece of crap but they are much better than the ironic hellhole I am going to briefly talk about which Gat Out Of Hell (And I will be getting into spoiler territory here for both Gat Out Of Hell and SR4’s ending).

I don’t usually talk about DLC unless they are really bad to the game or offer more necessary content to the base game and guess why I am bring up Gat Out Of Hell. I hate this game with a passion because it killed off any chance of us getting a SR5 since this is our SR5 considering this retcons most of the series with its multiple endings and considering Agents Of Mayhem, they ruin any chance of the Saints Row series coming back. I hate it because one of the endings is God giving Gat (who has just killed Satan after he kidnaps the president) a bunch of fun choices and one of them was recreating the earth. Now, if you have read the setting section of the wiki article for Agents Of Mayhem, you will notice it says it takes place after God recreated Earth which means, what was teased at the end of SR4 is now impossible to do. For context, the end of the SR4 has them implying that Zinyak was so smart, he had the access to time travel. Now, I will martyr myself to prove my point that any form of time travel ruins any media since you can retcon anything you want but in the context of the Saints Row series, I could made SR5 a really fun game which can be full of even more fun callbacks and interesting scenarios and weaponry but they murdered that chance with this game. If they did the one where Gat got Aisha back, it would of been completely on the clear to do SR5 but no, we have Agents Of Mayhem and I haven’t played Agents Of Mayhem but I am actively mad at Volition for shooting themselves in the foot because they just ruined their own set up and guessing by Agents Of Mayhem’s score, it wasn’t worth it. You may argue that it’s standalone DLC and therefore shouldn’t be tied to the main game but you are wrong. If it was like Blood Dragon where it’s own little universe without being connect to the main series, it would be fine but Gat Out Of Hell isn't that because it’s a continuation of the series so it’s a part of Saints Row 4 and I have to review wants presented to me. Gat Out Of Hell ruined the end of the game and to an extent, the whole series for me just because it wanted to set up Agents Of Mayhem and I am not happy with it. Plus gameplay wise, it’s just a reskin of SR4 except everything is now themed to be demonic themed and the only thing I like is the fact they added a proper flying mechanic that the main game doesn’t have. They also brought dead characters and a chance to shoot Dex multiple times over so I praise the game in that aspect of it means if I have to put up with Dan Vogel’s shit again. Overall, it’s a piece of shit in terms of plot but gameplay wise, it’s just some more Saints Row patented fun.

Despite the cancer lump that is Gat Out Of Hell and the fact the series is alienating to new players from a plot stand view, I would still recommend this game hands down just for the game play alone. It’s a fun and weird sandbox game that you won’t see many AAA studios doing these days outside of Volition and I wouldn’t have it any other way so 7/10. It would be an 8 if they didn’t add the steam workshop and we all know how I feel about that from the L4D2 review. As for the remaining games I haven’t covered yet, Saints Row is right now a “break in case of emergency” game and Agents Of Mayhem is currently at a retail price of 30 USD so I might pick it up and review between all the manga reviews since I was hyped for this game because it seemed like they finely tuned the SR formula even more. As for everything else, refer to last week’s review for what the manga reviews will look like and link to my YouTube channel in the sidebar if you want to watch my own YuGiOh series and the occasional league replay.

Saints Row The Third: The Awkward Transition Game

I remember getting hyped about Saints Row The Third when it was announced. I was ten years old at the time and I was just so excited after seeing a dev video on it. I also remember making a sly remark about there being no difference in the graphics which got me schooled by my Aunty Sharon but that’s irrelevant. SR3 will probably remain my longest played game on my steam account (excluding any MOBAs) due to how replayable I find to be but that doesn’t mean I am blinded by nostalgia. If you were to ask ten year old me how I would feel about the game, I would say it’s an easy 9/10 and if you were to ask fifteen year old me the same question, he would probably say it has a different appeal compared to SR2 and give it an 8/10. The point is, I’m not going to be so easy on the game because if you were to ask me now, I think the game is just a streamlined SR2 which you might think is a good thing but it isn’t. I think the game losing some of its unique features and putting bit more of a “stupid fun” vibe then what the original had but we will get there soon enough. Let’s talk about the plot.

Following the events when you pretty much make the Ultor corporation your slave, the “Third Street Saints” gang has became a brand. Shaundi has cleaned up her act and is now a reality TV star, Pierce is selling Saints Flow and the player character is still being the boss. Following a promo heist which was supposed to train this guy called Josh Birk, they get in trouble due to Birk’s stupidity (he live up to his name at least), they get caught by the police who then releases them to the “Morningstar”. After revealing that the bank they tried to rob belong to them, their boss, the french bellend Philip offers them to work under him. Naturally, the boss rejects them and after killing all their gang members on the plane where the meeting is being held, Gat gets killed (and ready to be undone by SR4) and you crashed a plane and find yourself in Steelport. Philip, somehow surviving the whole ordeal then strips all control and money the Saints ever had inside the city so you have to climb back to the top and become top dog again. If that sounds interesting, don’t worry because most of that is undone two missions later and you kill off Philip four missions after that. This game’s plot is a lot less complicated and is more of a one way street with no freedom of choice. There is an illusion of choice from story tied unlockables with different cutscenes but it’s nothing game changing. I do think the plot does get better around the halfway act when they introduce STAG and their futuristic weaponry and we get a proper antagonist in the form of Killbane, masked luchador extraordinaire. I also think it becomes more of its own thing after the death of Philip since it feels less of a rerun of SR2 and tries to be its own thing with a somewhat “wacky fun” attitude but I think that’s a downside. While it is better, it feels like it’s trying to have the best of both serious gangster action and wacky stupid fun and it’s just makes this weird tone. Like, you can be doing one mission where you are hijacking this STAG plane and it’s all serious but then two minutes later, you are falling out of the sky in a tank and shooting at other tanks because you just blew up the plane’s cockpit and that somehow makes zombies. It’s stuff like that which stops the plot from being any form of engaging and just ultimately makes the plot feel like it’s been written by someone who doesn’t understand tone.

Character wise, this is also a weird gray area for me. Since they (temporary) killed off Gat, we now have Shaundi filling in his serious badass role which is a weird choice considering this is the same person who was doing drugs 24/7 in the previous game. I do kind of like new Shaundi but I still think old Shaundi was ultimately the more fun character. Pierce is still being Pierce so he gets the pass plus he also now does car karaoke with you so he is automatically best homie. Josh Birk is well, a berk and serves as nothing but plot device but he is kind of likeable as a character. There’s Oleg who serves as a reason why we have giant tanks called “Brutes” running around is fun to call in for a fight but that’s it. I think the best characters to come out of this are the two of three new lieutenants which help you take down the three gangs that make up the “Syndicate”. There is Zimos who is the sweet talking, autotune pimp who I find to be quite funny as a character with all his sex metaphors making the boss feel uncomfortable which is a fun combination. There is also Kinze who is just hard to explain as a character but I think she is best summed up as an awkward talking hacker and is so popular, she is one the few who got carried over to SR4 and I don’t blame them. The third one and only unlikable one of the lot is Angel who was Killbane’s former partner and is just the stereotypical grumpy old man who wants revenge type and therefore, isn’t interesting and that also applies to our antagonists. Like, Philip is just there as a figurehead for whole organisation who gets squished by a ball later so he gets no fleshing out. The DeWynter Sisters who pretty much run the Morningstar are there to have one killed off and the other to join the Saints later. Matt Miller was a cool character as a cyberpunk hacker who is in charge of the Deckers but he runs off like a pussy after you beat him up a bit. Killbane and the STAG commander, Cyrus, are pretty much the same. They are both bald twats of psychopaths with the only real difference being one is fighting for the good side and the other on the other side. So character wise, Volition kind of dropped the ball on it but the gameplay does make up for it but not very well.

The gameplay is still the same as we expected from Saints Row 2 but with some changes. To begin with, they have streamlined the character customisation options so there is no options to change your permanent facial expression or your walk cycle but they added a option to change the size of your junk. Yeah, that’s what I wanted, an option to change my junk, not all this other stuff you cut out. Thanks Volition for streamlining the player experience for no reason at all. I mean, they also got rid of layers so you can’t layer your clothing so I hope you like all these presets. This needless streamlining just seems a very stupid decision that only a executive would think was a good idea and talking about streamlining, they also streamlined the whole map. Steelport overall feels a lot smaller than Stillwater and top of that, they got rid of all the secret spots hidden around the map so there is no longer a mall to explore or hidden pathways to use as shortcuts. It just feels like they took out the fun out of exploring the map and talking about taking the fun out of things, they also cut out most of the activities. While story progression is no longer tied to the respect bar which is a god send, activities only serve to give you money and territory and think because the activities take a back seat now, they decided to cut out all the fun ones. There is no more Septic Avenger, no more Fuzz and what do we have in its place? Well we have Professor Genki's Super Ethical Murder Fun Time which is just you shooting mascots in a very linear obstacle course and that’s not a good replacement. I want to spray shit all over buildings, not shoot mascots because I wanted to do that, I would just walk out into the streets and shoot someone with my laser rifle. They did add more fun weapons like a giant dildo bat called “The Penetrator” and a gun that can call down an air strike but compared to SR4, it just seems mediocre. While the DLC adds a Chumgun that summons a giant shark to kill people and a bazooka that launches octopuses that can mind control enemies and explode at the touch of a button, it just doesn’t compare to SR4 and that’s the problem here.

As good as SR3 is, it just feels like a prototype for SR4 which does what SR3 want to do much better. I am going to say this again but SR3 is seriously tone deaf because it’s trying to have two different cakes and eating it at the same time. They want to be serious but also have silly, wacky fun times and it’s just horrible. I still think the game is fun but I don’t enjoy it for the plot because it’s just a mess. The plot does introducing interesting scenarios like fighting in a cyberspace which gives you the equivalent of the mega man mega buster but it just adds to the initial problem of tone deafness. This is the final formal complaint I have against the game since I still think the gameplay is solid and that’s the most important aspect of a game like this. The plot is simply there to complement the gameplay but the plot does still need to stand on its own two legs and that’s the stumbling point. The game just ultimately feels like a transitional point of the series as it streamlines the SR2 gameplay and acts as a base for SR4 which will achieve what SR3 wanted to do in a much better way. Is it the runt of the litter? No, because Gat Out Of Hell exists but that’s for next week. Still, SR3 was a sacrifice that had to be made for SR4 to exist as the whole plot kind of acts like it wants to cut off all the old ties the game had while setting up elements for new direction they want to take the series in. It is ultimately up to you to decide if the game did the last two games justice or not but I think this was a very messy transition due to the mixing of the two themes.

6/10. That’s all I am willing to give this. It’s a game that had to happen but there was definitely a much better way of doing it and if they took the time to do that, this would of been a 8/10 easily but they didn’t so here's their 6/10. I would still recommend picking it up on steam if you want to experience the Saints Row series but just be wary if the plot gets too stupid for you. Next week will mark the end of this trilogy of reviews with Saints Row 4 and I can tell you, I am both excited and very sad because I get to talk about SR4 but I also have to talk about Gat Out Of Hell. That’s not going to be a fun paragraph to write but let’s talk about the plans coming after this. So after another round “The Undiscussables”, I have two mangas lined up for proper reviews in the form of “Bleach” and “World Trigger” so that’s fun for non manga readers. If that seems daunting, I am planning to review “Black Panther” and the new Mama Mia movie coming up so I will pad it in there for you lot who don’t care about manga reviews. For those looking for games, don’t expect that for a while since I am already feeling burned out doing SR2 and SR3 back to back for these reviews but if I was to do a game review, it might be on a real life game or on another MOBA depending on how I feel. Also for those who want to see some of my video content, there is a link to my YouTube channel in the sidebar where you can watch my own YuGiOh series and the occasional League replay.

Saints Row 2: GTA V Before GTA V

If anyone is wondering why I’m reviewing Saints Row Two instead of the original one first, well it’s because I didn’t have a copy of the game since it’s the only Saints Row game to date to not be ported to PC which is how I am going to be reviewing all of these games but that would be a lie. I did find a copy of the original game on Xbox 360 so I do own a copy now and after playing it ten minutes, I gave up because I found the controls very frustrating. I might review it at a later date but not very soon. I did want to talk about this game first anyway because this game is one of the games that got me properly into games during my younger years. I was playing GTA: San Andres as well whenever I went to my auntie’s house as well as other games but Saints Row Two would always be my favourite game to play when I’m there but we don’t want to hear about my childhood, we want to see me talk about a decade old video game and try to justify that it still holds up in this generation of consoles.

Saints Row Two is a 2008 video game made by Volition who are known for their series such as “Red Faction” and nothing else which is interesting. They might as well only be known for making the wonderful Saints Row series and the equally good Red Faction series because they do have other games but I bet no one has heard heard of “Freespace” or “Summoner” but I digress. The game play is simply like any other GTA game which means it’s a third person, open world sandbox where you play as a gangster and do gangster stuff which means lots of shooting and driving. What makes it interesting and not a simple GTA clone is in fact, a couple of things so let’s start with the plot (minor spoilers contained for both SR and SR2).

Set in the fictional city of Stilwater, following the events of SR where you were put into a coma by a failed assassination attempt by undercover cop, Troy and the former boss of the “Third Street Saints”, Julius, the player wakes up five years later in Stilwater’s maximum security prison and then continues to escape from the prison with Calos, a man who is only there to serve as a way to continue the plot but still has character. After you escape by boat with Calos (and killed many people during the process), Calos explains that the city was levelled by a earthquake during the five year period which let the Ultor Corporation come in and pretty much take control of the city. Calos also tells the player that Troy is now the police commissioner, Julius disappeared off the map and the saints have pretty much disappeared as a gang which let three other gangs to roll in again. After getting some clothes, saving Johnny Gat from a trail and recruiting three new lieutenants (including Calos), the player then becomes “The Boss” and continue to take out the new gangs and then Ultor to take control of the city as you rebuild the Saints legacy. A simple plot by all means but I still find it as a fun little romp to play through since the actual storylines is what makes the story one of the best aspects and yes, I did say storylines. In this game, you can jump between which gang related mission you want to do which comes with their own little storyline where we see the wonderful main characters develop in their own way but don’t worry, it doesn’t get in the way of shooting plus each story seems to have its own little theme behind it.

We have “The Brotherhood” which is a gang of tattooed freaks who is lead by Lieutenant Warf - I mean Munroe and who’s storyline is just one of rivalry and closest the game gets to proper street gang fighting but still depressing in its own right. We then have “The Sons Of Samundi” who are just a bunch of drug dealers who is lead by a guy who calls himself “The General” but I would say this storyline to be the weakest of the three available (excluding the main one) since it’s less gang fights and more disabling the trade of drugs but they did give us the seemingly immortal “Mr Sunshine” so I’ll give them that. The final gang is “The Ronin” which just a yakuza gang which is a bit out of place but they do offer some tear jerking moments and are traditionally the final gang you need to defeat. While you do have freedom to do whatever gang you want to do in any order, it feels like the game would rather have you do the gangs in order of “Brotherhood, Sons, Ronin” so it goes “depression, funny romp and then depression” but if you are like me, you do the Brotherhood because they are bellends and therefore deserve to die, the Ronin because they have the good vehicles and then the Sons because they are just boring. The plot does have some callbacks to the original game with old characters making their reappearances in each of the storylines so it can be confusing if you haven’t played the first game but in the end, it’s still a well written series of storylines and although it does go off the wall near to the end (which will soon become the norm for this series as you will see), it’s still a quirky gangsta plot which I still find enjoyable to play through, even if I know all the twists but enough of that. I think I should move onto some gameplay before I lose more readers with this massive wall of text so let’s talk characters because they are interesting enough for a paragraph.

The main ones I want to touch on here is the two of the three lieutenants and Gat since I want to talk about the player character when we reach SR4 . I only going to talk about the mainstays Calos only appears in this game for plot reasons and his character is prett pay standard so let’s talk about Gat. Gat is pretty much the badass of the series and is your right hand man and residential murder enthusiast so just think Trevor from GTA V but with more hair but unlike Trevor, Gat is far more relatable. While Trevor pretty much embodies every single GTA V Online player, Gat is relatable because he is grounded as a character and he isn’t depicted as an insane homicidal maniac. He is just a gangbanger who lives this life because it’s the only thing he knows and when the “dramatic moment” happens in the Ronin story line (I’m not spoiling it), he becomes even more relatable as a human being and that’s why I think he is well thought out and is why he brought back for SR4 despite the events of SR3. There is also Pierce Washington who is the most cocky of the lot and he is brilliant because of it. This guy has style and he is possibly the most sensible thinking person in this game which makes him a great comedical counter to the Player/Gat, even if most of the jokes is the Player dismissing Pierce’s plans for a full frontal assault. There is also Shaundi who is just a drug addict and while she can easily be the damsel in distress type due to her easy going nature, she pulls her weight around and can act as a foil to Player’s sometimes serious nature. There isn’t much to say about Shaundi since she doesn’t get more interesting in SR3 but this version of Shaundi is memorable enough that she gets brought back yet again for SR4. I think that’s enough plot/character analysis so let’s just get stuck into the game play.

The game play is like any other sandbox gangster game and I already described it two paragraphs before but what makes it different in this aspect is mainly two things: Customisation and Side Activities. You may think “Well, what makes customisation so good?” and the answer to that is quite simply, it’s best one around. In fact, I’m ready to martyr myself for the sake of this system being added to all games with customisation options for now on and it’s all because the clothing system has layers. You heard it right, layers. Now, this may not sound exciting since most games do this already but what SR2 do is let you have more layers than usual. Let’s compare it to this game’s predecessor who lost so much of what made this game good but we will get there next week. In SR3, you have two layers which is your underwear (if you want to have one) and then your shirt/pants with very minimal customisation of the clothing which is just colour alteration. In SR2, if we are just to look at the torso area, you have your underwear, you have your undershirt, you have your over shirt and then you have your jacket which all come with various customisable patterns, colours and logos if you desire them. The clothing system is so detailed, you can change the angle of a hat on your head if you want and there is even more to look at in the cosmetic surgery section.

You got the standard stuff like hair, eye colour and facial/body alteration but then you have options to change your walk cycle, what permanent facial expression is on your face and you can even change your melee fighting style. While you have to unlock the new fighting styles by doing story missions, it’s still something you rarely see in our more modern games and here is a decade old game, being more innovative with less processing power from a older console generation doing things better than games of our current generation are trying to attempt. The customisation system displayed here is arguably the best of its kind until someone in the game industry pull their head out of their ass and actually try to be innovative again and improve on this system but the likelihood of that happening is about as high as getting catgirls as pets (and maybe as wives) in the next year. There is of course some limitations like not being able to precisely decide what angles or what colours you want since this is an old game but this system is still the best of its kind which is just like the side activities available.

While some activities are somewhat standard like drug trafficking where you just protect a dealer while you keep enemy gangs and police off your back and there is different kind of races but we aren’t here to talk about that. You are probably more interested in the activities like Septic Avenger where you drive around in a septic truck and spray literal shit all over houses and people in order to rack enough property damage to complete the mission. If spraying sewage on people isn’t your thing, what about pretending you are a cop and continue to bring “peace” to the streets with some very violent methods for a TV show in “Fuzz”, or what about being a bodyguard for some celebrity and just spend time throwing fans into scenery. For every race and equally uninteresting activities, there is a Septic Avenger or a Destruction Derby and I really like these sort of things. Sure GTA V has golfing and skydiving but that’s boring and don’t give me the realism excuse. I play video games to escape reality, not to be constantly reminded of it and that’s what the Saints Row series does best and SR2 is the peak of that within the series. It's also a good thing that these activities are fun because they not only tied to other unlockables but also story progress and oh no, I just passively aggressively started the criticism. Time to unpack the rest of the criticism because despite how good this game is, it has its downsides so let’s start by talking about the respect system.

The respect system is a double edge sword on this game. While the next two entries will tie the respect system to a leveling up mechanic, the respect system here is tied to story progression and depending on how you feel about the activities, you will either not mind this system or want to shred it to pieces. Since I love most of these activities, you would think I wouldn’t mind but I do because I think it’s a bit of a pace breaker. You see, you gain respect from doing all sorts of things like killing people and all that jazz but you get the most by doing the activities and story missions require at least one bar of respect to start them. While this mechanic forces the player to try out everything else in the game, I think it’s a poorly thought out idea which will be better done in the upcoming game. This forces players to either spend the start of the game going around and doing activities in the hopes they get enough respect to get through the whole game without having to stop and grind again or just do activities between missions which breaks the flow of the game. You can increase your respect gain rate by spending cash on getting cars, clothes and cribs but that requires cash and the missions have the highest payout rate and they are locked behind the respect system so it becomes an endless loop. The respect system in this game is just bad in general despite being an interesting idea and if we are going to talk about bad things, let’s talk the graphics because they are dated.

This game is a PS3/Xbox 360 title so it’s just baffling that this game looks and plays like a PS2/Xbox game. This game looks like crap and it plays like crap. The game just seems horribly dated and it doesn’t help that it’s sequel, SR3, would be released on the same hardware a few years later and actually look and play like a proper PS3/Xbox 360 game. The controls are awfully stiff and the graphics are just horribly done and if we are talking about horribly done things, let’s talk about the PC port. Yes, I am smooshing in the PC port section here because I’m not making a separate paragraph for it plus it’s about as buggy as any early bootleg PS1 game is. The PC port is a buggy pile of ass and it makes you wonder if they actually hired people to port it or got some chimps from the local zoo to wipe their arses on the keyboards to make it. It’s full of crash zones, it has out of sync cut scenes, there is speed up bugs everywhere and it was so bad, Volition and Deep Silver didn’t even try to fix it and left it to modders to make pretty much an unofficial patch to fix the whole thing for them. Because of this, I would not recommend the PC port to anyone unless they have some basic knowledge of modding but I will say, the PC port with the mod might as well be the definitive version of the game due to it adding even more content on top of the bug fixes and that’s just black mark on Volition’s record.

Even if the game is dated piece of crap, I still think to this day that this is the best Saints Row game in the series by far and has the most appeal to a general audience. It went from being a GTA clone to trying to do its own thing which is crazy gangster shenanigans so here is an 8/10 for the game. If you want to play the game, track down a copy for the consoles for maximum consumer friendliness but if you want the best experience, get a copy for the PC from Steam or Good Old Games and learn how to install the Gentlemen Of The Row mod since it fixes a lot and overhauls the whole game with a load of new stuff as well as adds replayability. I'm sorry that I didn’t upload last week but I had a lot of assignments due during that week so I didn’t have enough time to write this up. I already have some plans for the reviews after this series of reviews so get your body ready for the manga double feature coming up after this. I will also be covering the Black Panther in the future and the new Mama Mia sequel because I can’t resist ABBA and you might get lucky, I might rant about Infinity Wars because I think it’s a good enough excuse to murder a fandom. Also for those looking for video content, I have started editing and uploading my own videos on my YouTube channel so link down below (and on the side bar if I sort it out) but anyway, see you next week for Saints Row 3.

Atlas Reactor: MOBAised X-Com

Atlas Reactor. I remember seeing ads for this on YouTube back when it was first released as free to play game although Wikipedia said it was a “trail until you buy” game which I think is just a more complex way of saying free to play except comes with a few changes and it apparently went properly free to play at the start of season two. I didn’t get into the game until the start of season four when one of league friends was like “Mate, we should try playing Atlas Reactor” and I was like “Oh, is that the one with the robo dog?”. So we started playing it and after like a month, I was the only one who was still playing it on the side and it over took Smite as my “break MOBA”. At time of writing, it’s nearly the end of season five and the player base is pretty god damn small. I mean, check the steam charts for this and at its peak in 24 hours at time of writing, it had 228 players online and that’s just bad for a MOBA to have such a low player count and this is why I am writing this review. I mean, I hope can generate some form of interest for the game but yet again, I am just a wannabe reviewer with zero readers so I’m just banking on the fact someone is going to read this and consider playing the game. I care a lot about this game and I been sitting on the concept for this review for a while now so I think it’s worth talking about it plus I thought I would get it out of the way now rather than later so let’s get stuck in or should I say get stuck like a pig? (Sounded a lot better in my head)

Atlas Reactor is a turn based MOBA where four players on each team take control of a freelancer where the goal of the game is to either hit five kills before the enemy team does or have the most kills by twenty turns and the phrase “turn based MOBA” sounds pretty weird, right? I checked and I don’t think there is any other turn based MOBAs in existence at time of writing but you are welcome to correct me, non existent comment section. I do like the turn based approach because unlike other MOBAs, you actually have time to think and communicate with your team during combat situations but it doesn’t stop it from being as stressful. For each turn, you have fifteen seconds to dictate what you are going to do and the game allows an extra five seconds two times per a match if you really need it but it’s something I personally rarely have to dip into it but it’s nice it’s there. Each turn is split into five phrases. You have your decision phrase which is where you decide what to do, prep phrase which is mainly just applying stat changes like might, healing or just shields. You then have your dash phrase which is where you can move out of danger or as a repositioning tool and then you have your blast phrase which is pretty much the combat section of the turn which is then leads into the move phrase where you move to where you decided to go during decision phrase. The only time you can do something in these matches is in your decision phrase of each turn. So that’s just the base mechanics of the game and we haven’t touched the freelancers but I’ll save that for next paragraph. I am a fan of the turn based tactics mainly because I can’t think in the moment so having that time to think is nice but yet again, fifteen to twenty seconds isn’t enough for me. I’m the sort of guy plays Civ VI and continues to take one to two minutes per a turn to even consider something and you are asking me to condense that thinking process into a small time frame but that’s something inherently wrong with me and I can’t fault the game for that. It’s just a slight turn off for me or anyone who is like me but it ultimately doesn’t subtract from the game so let’s just go and talk about the other main selling point which obviously the characters.

So the playable characters in this game are known as “Freelancers” and I honestly don’t know why they are called that. There is an actual ongoing plot about different trusts and necrolancers but if you are like me, you won’t give it a second thought because this is a MOBA, not a narrative driven story but it’s there if you want to read something during the long queue timers. All the freelancers are divided into three groups for ease of understanding. We have the firepower lancers who are the main form of DPS (or DPT in this case) and are mainly ranged but there is some melee ones and then you have frontlines who are pretty much more tanky firepower lancers with a focus on just harassing the enemy team or protecting the team, depending on the lancer and finally, you have supports who’s job is to keep everyone on the team alive with a combination of shields and heals. Now this sounds like a very basic line up for any MOBA set up so like any good MOBA, each lancer has a gimmick and a unique personality but I think that would only apply to half of the lancers. There is some real bores of characters that are just really standard like Asana who can be described as a chick that has a reflective shield and can fly across the map and Kaigen if you like teleporting ninjas and then you have Tol-Ren who is just a samurai who sliced people up (although, he has one of the best taunts in the game) and then you have Blackburn who is just like every sci fi soldier. I do find them boring because they don’t bring anything unique or fun to the gameplay formula but they are still solid picks for any newbie but for every Blackburn, there is a Nev-3 so let’s talk about the interesting ones starting with Nev-3. Nev is a cat girl that throws rings and that’s all you need know and she is only my second favourite character because the one I enjoy the most is Grey who’s main gimmick is she is pretty much a hunter with a drone called Rio and although that does sound standard on paper, in practice is arguably more fun than playing someone like Asana since you can just have fun using Rio to scout the map and get low health enemies. There is a lot of interesting characters but if they were to be grouped by their Trusts, I would say the Evos trust is the best trust in terms of interesting characters. Each trust has its own little gimmick and Evos gimmick is animal themed champions since they gave us Nev, Dr Finn who is pretty much a talking fish and every line out of his mouth is a sea pun, Gremolition Inc. which is pretty much two gremlins flying around in an hovering artillery unit and launching mines everywhere, Isadora who is pretty much a evil squirrel who shoots people with twin laser cannons and their boss is a cyborg dinosaur who is pretty much The Godfather and I love it. There is other trusts like Hyperbiotics who is pretty much robots as their gimmick and their only notable lancers are Oz and Rampart but that’s only because they are robots with attitude. There is Helio Corps which just seems like a way to dump “unique” characters that can’t fit into any other group and the only notable ones who work here is Lockwood who’s only gimmick is “I bounce bullets off walls and I’m the puckish rogue type” and PuP who is a robo doggo. And finally, we have the Omni Corporation who have nothing notable about them. Like, I looked through the list of Omni freelancers and none of them were interesting since their main gimmick seems to be martial arts but I don’t know anymore. If anything, they gave us Asana and Kaigen but they are classified as wildcards so they technically don’t belong to them. There is other stuff to mention like there is mods that allow you change the different abilities of your lancers to have different effects and the fact that they have abilities but one of them is a given for any MOBA and the other is just too boring to discuss so let’s just move onto the rest of the criticism I have.

I know I said that I want to do this review because I care about this game but since I care about the game, I need to give it criticism in order to make it better plus if I didn’t do it, this review would be extremely bias and I’m not a IGN reviewer so let’s move onto the first bit of criticism which is the content or rather lack of content. For a game that has been through five seasons and approaching its sixth season at time of writing, it really lacks a lot of content and it almost feels like the game is pretty much abandoned at times. Unlike other MOBAs like League who get patched every two weeks, we are lucky to get one every month and when that patch drops, it’s not much in terms of content. It’s usually just some changes to stats and bug fixes and actual new content is rare. Barring skins which shows up in most patches, we are lucky to get a new freelancer or even a new map in these patches. Within its current lifetime, it has dropped only dropped 6 maps and one of them isn’t even complete yet and that’s just poor and the same applies to new freelancers. The latest lancer called Vonn was dropped at the start of season five and it seems like new lancers only drop during the start of new seasons and with seasons only lasting half a year, we are pretty much getting two new freelancers per a year. I mean, there has been cases like Isadora who got dropped during the middle of the season but that was long ago. The devs has been trying to improve their release rate on terms of maps as they recently held a suggestion thread on the Atlas Reactor subreddit for new maps which is progress but it’s not enough in my opinion. If they were to aim for the league standard of a new champion every two-three months, that would be nice but there is still other issues so let’s tackle the grind.

Atlas Reactor is very much like Smite which is a game that I like to call “Thirty To Actually Play” since in both games, they feature grinding to get new characters or you could just drop thirty to unlock all current and future characters but unlike Smite where the grind isn’t that bad, Atlas is just horrible and it got so bad, I actually forked over money to get the character pack because the grind section of the game is just really badly implemented like the micro transactions (we will get there soon). There is two factors to this problem and the first one is the drop rate of the standard currency known as Flux. The drop rate of Flux is really poor since you get an average of three hundred flux per a match and in a game where the mods cost five hundred, it’s really not that bad but the factor is the main issue and that’s the pricing of flux related items. There is some items that cost ridiculous amounts of flux but they don’t really do anything in terms of gameplay so they are just there for bragging rights and the mods are pretty cheap which is good but the main problem stems from the pricing of Freelancers because seriously, it gets expensive. The pricing tiers start around ten thousand flux which is a bit of a grind but isn’t too bad but then they jump up to twenty-five thousands which is a bit of demand in grind but then it doubles to fifty thousand and finally, seventy-five thousand for only the newest of the newest champions and reaching that point is ridiculous. Granted, when starting the game as a newbie, you can get a free freelancer of your choice after filling the requirements and after that, you can get other bonuses on top of that and there is somewhat generous flux drops from just leveling up your account during each season and playing champions and yes, there is a weekly free freelancer rotation but it’s still a grind and even if you are enjoying the game, it’s still not a fun experience. You can point at Smite and say “Well what makes Smite different?” and the answer to that is quite simply “Because Smite fixed both factors to not make it feel like a grind.” The drop rate of favour (Smite’s standard currency) is higher without too many bonuses needed and the pricing isn’t too high unless it’s a newly released god with the normal price at five thousand five hundred so if we were to compare them to an average play time of someone like me (five hours during weekdays and ten during weekends and yes, I did time myself for this), you can get a new god in Smite per a week (two if you are lucky) while in Atlas, it would take you one to four weeks, depending on the price of the desired freelancer. Keep in mind, this was compared to my own stats over two months so if you are skeptical of my data, I don’t blame you and encourage that you do your own research as well but in the end, my point still stands. Atlas Reactor can be a grindy slog for those who aren’t willing to at least pay thirty bucks and I do feel like this puts people at a disadvantage for ranked games with a limited pool of freelancers and can serve as a turn off for anyone who wants to play ranked (other turn offs includes massive gap in skill and long queue times).

I could also just waste the rest of this paragraph talking about the microtransactions but it’s just the standard Overwatch model. You have your loot crates which give you cosmetic stuff and you can get by doing quests and leveling up and if you really want to, you can buy batches of them for real money and they do have the standard system of dupes giving you a special currency which is used to buy the cosmetics you want and blah blah blah, I am bored of this sentence. The only real difference is the fact new release skins can only be brought with real life money for a very long time and I am completely unsure about the fact they even available in loot boxes since I haven’t seen one yet but I can’t find any data for it so I can’t really comment on this but as per usual, when a game features microtransactions, I am going to be deducting points based on how intrusive they feel and what they offer in exchange for your money so just keep that in mind when it comes to scoring.

Despite the flaws I pointed out, I still stand by the fact that Atlas Reactor is a underrated MOBA and it does deserve some attention and unlike Smite, I think Atlas Reactor is a game that can be enjoyed not only by newbies but also by veterans of the genre. I am giving Atlas Reactor a 7/10 with no score deduction because unlike Smite, the microtransactions aren’t over the top expensive or excessive and unlike Overwatch, it’s not a pointless system for publishers to grub more money out of their player base. Atlas Reactor is like any good MOBA: it’s unique in it’s own way and can be enjoyable by yourself or with friends so why not try out Atlas Reactor, it is free to play after all and if you are already a player of the game and need a way to convincing others to try it, why not show them this review if you found it convincing.

So next week, I am going to be starting that Saints Row series of reviews as promised and afterwards, I do have a new instalment of “The Undiscussables” for those who want more manga reviews, I got your back and maybe after that, I might be talking about a Japanese comedy or I might actually tackle some good marvel movies and for those who think it’s going to be Infinity War, it’s not and for those who want me to talk about Infinity War, my response is simply “HA HA HA HA HA, AS IF! Here’s your 6/10.”