It can’t be easy being in charge of a game series that’s built its reputation on extreme absurdity. After you’ve done missions on mars, excrement-spraying, gigantic purple dildo-bats, Professor Genki’s Super Ethical Reality Climax and all the many, many other ridiculous things that Saints Row 2 and 3 delighted in, and you’ve elevated the player to the most (in)famous person on Earth, where else is there left to go?
The answer for Saints Row 4 is to make you President of the United States, give you superpowers, and introduce a huge-scale alien invasion of Earth. Transporting you to a bizarre version of Steelport in a huge alien-technology-powered simulation, Saints Row 4 wants you to save the world – or just screw with it for fun. Visually, it looks extremely similar to Saints Row the Third, the primary difference being that you’re shooting at aliens rather than rival gang members and cops. And that you can fly, and run at super-speeds, and lift up cars with your mind.
Design director Scott Phillips wants us to think of Saints Row 4’s powers like another set of weapons: there are a lot of them, you can switch them in and out when you like, and they’re primarily designed to f*** sh** up. “If you think about a lot of superpower games, there’s very few in which the superhero actually has fun with their powers,” he points out. “Mostly it’s like ‘uhhh, so much responsibilities with these powers, ughhhh,’ and for us it’s like f*** no, it’s fun. Freeze people, smash ‘em, pick them up and throw them around…”\
There are very few superhero games in which the superhero actually has fun with their powers.
In the miniscule sliver of gameplay I was shown (Saints Row 4 is evidently nearly complete, but Volition didn’t show more than a few minutes of it), I saw that Bioshock-esque freeze-and-smash, Superman-esque flying, telekinesis and ultra-speed sprinting. But alien technology opens up new possibility for weapons, too – like an Inflate-O-Ray that comically distends enemy heads before they pop, and the weapon that’s almost certain to become the three-foot purple dildo-bat signature weapon of Saints Row 4, the Dubstep Gun.
The dubstep gun shoots pulsing purple rays of deadly wub-wub, causing surrounding passers-by to immediately stop in their tracks and start losing their sh** to the music in juddering stop-motion whilst cars randomly blow up. The aliens have also given Earth the gift of mechs, enabling a stompy arcade sub-game where you cause as much carnage as possible with your jump-jet-enabled explosion machine, after which it cheerfully does the robot in celebration. It’s classic Saints Row irreverence, then – although you do wonder whether the team’s lewd imaginations are getting uncomfortably stretched by now.
Naturally, these new additions make the player absurdly over-powered, so the SWAT teams and rival gangs of previous games have been replaced with equally powerful aliens, the Zin. “If it was just another street gang, how are they going to compete with this guy who’s practically like a god running around the streets?” asks senior producer Jim Boon, quite reasonably. “We only showed a few of them, but we’ve got a lot of different aliens with amazing abilities of their own, so it feels like you can really dig into fighting them.
“In Saints Row 1, 2 and 3 we always had three other gangs that you were up against, and in this one it’s just the Zin. But the variety not just in their looks but also more significantly their AI and abilities is significantly more than in any of our other games.”
In this reveal presentation, the Zin looked disappointingly generic – grey brutes with ray-guns, and one beserker super-alien called the Warden. Considering the scope for particularly disgusting and ridiculous aliens that a series like Saints Row offers, it would be a massive let-down if there weren’t more imaginative species in the works.
The dubstep gun shoots pulsing purple rays of deadly wub-wub.
There’s an elephant in the room during the Saints Row 4 reveal: this game was originally going to ship as an expansion pack for Saints Row the Third called Enter the Dominatrix, in which the Saints were to be trapped in an alien simulation by an invading force. But Boon claims that Saints Row 4 has actually been in production since shortly before the completion of Saints Row the Third. “Enter the Dominatrix started after SR3, so both of those things came together and ultimately formed SR4,” he said.
That said, there’s no denying that Saints Row 4 looks and very probably plays very similarly to its predecessor – though superpowers and alien technology certainly put a new twist on things. “As you start seeing more of the powers, you’ll see that we’ve really taken them in our direction, in our tone,” says Scott.
“We’re not trying to make Spiderman or Infamous or Prototype. Those are all cool games, but our combat is primarily third-person shooting… for us superpowers were a modifier that combines and mixes with what we do very well.”
The more conventional arsenal of Saints Row the Third returns alongside these new extreme technologies, in a much more customisable form: if you want to your sniper rifle to look like a Super Scope or your rocket launcher disguised as a violin case, there are skins for that now. Weapon skin packs are likely to be a DLC bonanza after the game releases at the end of August.
I'm wondering why we weren't just given a controller and left to go nuts.
Given that Saints Row 4 is so close to completion, I’m wondering why Volition and Deep Silver didn’t simply give us a controller and a nice suite of powers and let us go nuts, rather than showing just a few minutes of the game. It looks like a lot of fun – and Saints Row is really, really good at fun, so there’s no reason to suspect that it won’t be – but why show just a couple of your new ideas? We saw more in the trailer.
Still, a superhero game without an ounce of self-importance sounds like a riotous proposition. You wonder where Saints Row’s over-the-top inspiration can possibly keep coming from - but then a lot of us wondered that after Saints Row 2 as well.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
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