Last week, our own Paul Tamburro wrote a story about Saints Row IV being banned from Australia for the presence of an alien anal probe. While this story might touch on the same silliness, the banning of this game isn’t my focus.
Instead, I’d like to point towards the gamers upset with Volition’s decision to go as absurd as possible with Saints Row IV.
Check any official Saints Row IV video on YouTube right now, and you’ll find a ton of comments essentially stating that the silly direction is the downfall of this franchise. Want a sample? Sure.
Here’s a nearly 10 minute long walkthrough of the E3 demo Deep Silver and Volition showed off a few weeks back
The comments? Here are a few:
”Looks so bad. Wow, I mean. It's not this gangster game anymore. It's some shitty alien game? God!”
”saints row 1 and 2 are great.this saints row is shit.too unrealistic.it would be great if sr 1 and 2 are on sr 3 and 4's engine”
”FROM A BEAUTIFULL GANG SIMULATOR TO A ALIENS INVASION? DONT FUCK ME”
Atrocious spelling and grammar aside, there are a load of these people. I won’t suggest that their opinions are invalid because, hey, they are opinions.
I will say, though, that it would be much, much easier to just embrace this new direction in all its insanity.
There are tons of Grand Theft Auto wannabes releasing almost every year in the gaming market. Developers might change the aesthetic of the games, perhaps shift the time period and stray away from Rockstar’s method of storytelling, but the fact remains that we have enough open world crime simulators.
Saints Row has sort of become the extreme of that model. We still get our open world, we still get our loosely based crime roots and we absolutely get a silly method of storytelling. We also get absurdities. A lot of absurdities.
And, sure, it might be a departure from the series’ aging roots, but I guarantee this silly stuff makes Saints an infinitely more recognizable and loved series than when it was just a gang simulator.
I say it’s time to embrace the absurdity of Saints Row IV. It might not be the exact game you want, but, based on what we saw at E3, we know it’s going to be insanely fun. Insane fun sounds better to me than GTA clone.
