Initial impressions of Saint's Row 2022:
-Most of the characters seem to be just as terrible as videos pointed them out to be. The opening scene with the dance party going on was straight cringe. I liked that the big bodyguard dude appears to be a roided up Ben Affleck, though.
-The boss' voices are kind of "tame." Just not as over the top as previous games. This is a let down. I had to change the English accent to one of the American ones because it just wasn't working.
-Character creation is still good although I didn't see a way to import Boss Factory characters- they never released the app for the Steam version either, lol. I think you can get around this by changing appearances and entering codes via the phone?
-Forced (radio) music plays during the opening missions. This has happened before but there's just something kinda lame about it this time around. I mean, I like
"I left my wallet in El Segundo" and all, but did we really need to just drive to the hideout for five minutes while this played?
-The first mission where you're part of a mercenary group is pretty bad. Just waves of dumb enemies that you shoot up with weapons with unlimited ammo. Felt like a snoozefest.
-The second mission is a robbery but all you do is just drive and then run from the cops. At one point, the game put me on a bike and after going over a hill and doing a big "cinematic" jump, my character hit the ground, slammed into a wall, and fell off the bike, which was right in front of me. A timer popped up saying that I had like 15 seconds to get back on the bike, only I couldn't get the character to get on, time ran out,
and the mission failed. Clearly they did not fix all the bugs in this game. The checkpoint was pretty close to this area, so restarting wasn't a big deal, but after making the jump and not crashing this time, I found that I was at the end of the mission and just needed to go a few more feet to complete it. Why couldn't this be finished on foot?
-Not sure if this needs to be unlocked or if they removed it, but I couldn't find a way to run at someone and then take them down. I really miss this from the older games.
That aside, the game play seems OK and it still feels like a Saints Row game, but a lot of the dialogue and story are just bad. The easiest way to sum it up is with this gif:
They tried way, way too hard to appeal to a younger crowd and they really missed the mark. And now they're shuttered. The game doesn't really scream "woke" like some people made it out to be (at least so far), it's more like they just toned down a lot of the dumb, crude humor and replaced it with bland, boring story and characters instead.
I think I'm gonna keep it and play through the game, but I'm not expecting too much here. $20 or less is definitely the right price for this.
EDIT: Forgot to mention performance on PC. It's all right- I turned the settings up to maximum (but turned off motion blur) and got around 60-70 FPS average at 1600P. There are some things in the game that look pretty good, but overall this doesn't really feel like a game that should be running at that low of a frame rate given what's going on most of the time. I would have expected well over 100 FPS.
