The Saints Row reboot sees its first major update next month, but don’t expect any new stuff in Santo Ileso to play around with. Devs Volition insist this one’s just concentrating on hunting down and squashing the game’s many bugs. As we noted when it was released in August, Saints Row has rather a few technical issues. While Volition say this means they’re not at the stage where they can be “talking about roadmaps and expansions”, they are at least releasing a free cosmetic pack this week that includes some boots that look like bananas.
]]>I feel a bit deceived by Saints Row at the moment. Although I spent the latter half of last week playing and performance testing it, the worst I saw in terms of bugs, glitches and unintentional chicanery was one temporarily floating pedestrian and a few de-synced execution animations. Only after I committed this clean(ish) bill of health to writing did the game’s wider playerbase discover that it is, in fact, riddled with issues: some benign and hilarious, others irritating and game-breaking. Well fine then, game.
Some of these bug reports have come from inside the house, namely Liam and Rebecca, whose respective characters have a) involuntarily shot out their own windscreen immediately upon entering every single car and b) fallen through the world when attempting to mount a motorcycle. Then there’s former vid bud Colm (RPS in peace), who has found his feet pinned to a car roof before fading away like Marty McFly if his parents split up.
]]>Not to paint them as particularly fierce open-world rivals, but jumping into Saints Row after a week spent with Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered felt like being hurled backward in time. While Deep Silver Volition’s “what if millennials, but crime” reboot is colourful and often quite pretty, you can tell it’s not nearly as interested in cutting edge visuals or contemporary PC tech trappings as the Spidey remaster is. Ray tracing? Yes but only for ambient occlusion. Upscaling? Never heard of it, officer.
The upside - besides Santo Ileso being a generally nice place to visit, as Alice Bee found in her Saints Row review - is that it's playable on low-end and luxury hardware alike. And, to its credit, there's a healthy list of customisable graphics options too. I’ve therefore embraced the past, and spent hours in testing to find out how you can tweak Saints Row’s settings for the best possible performance.
]]>After four hours with Saints Row, it's funny being back in the present. I have a gaming PC! Bills to pay! A smartphone that recognises my face! Grey hairs! I say all this because Saints Row - not to be confused with Saints Row yet also to be confused with Saints Row - whisked me back to the early 2000s, when I was but a naïve teenager whose life largely pivoted around their Xbox 360. A time when Saints Row and Saints Row 2 were lighthearted Grand Theft Auto alternatives, then Saints Row: The Third came along and cranked up the silliness, and then Saints Row 4 grabbed the lever and cranked it so hard it snapped. So, yes, this year's Saints Row reboot is technically Saints Row 5, except it’s more of a careful reboot. Where does it really sit on the timeline? At both ends, I reckon.
]]>It's been about eight months since I first had a hands-off sneak peek at the new and about-to-be-rebooted Saints Row, and six since we've heard it was being delayed to August this year. With its late summer release fast approaching, Volition recently showed off a larger chunk of some actual gameplay to press in another remote preview session. It looks almost exactly like what you'd expect it to look like: a fun open world game where you shoot people and smash cars into other cars.
Barring any catastrophic eventualities where this game actually ends up being just a load of bugs propping up other bugs in a fluorescent trenchcoat, I feel almost 100% confident in saying to you that this will be an enjoyable product when it comes out. But I also should be honest and say that the gameplay I saw has congealed into the same kind of sticky morass and blurred whirling lights in my memory as my first all-night benders. It's a big collage of colours and explosions, and words like "cops", "switch car" and "plan", leaving a general impression of fun but, so far, few specifics in its wake. And to be even more frank about it all, I can't think of a nailed on reason why any of it has to be a Saints Row game.
]]>2022 is finally here and that can only mean one thing. We've got another year of hip new video games to look forward to, and we've been busy rustling up the ones we're most excited about. In truth, there are tons of games on the horizon that could easily sit on this list, and some of them are so close to release we can practically already see the pixels on our screens morphing into their lush, polygonal landscapes. Games like Monster Hunter Rise, God Of War and Rainbow Six Extraction. You won't find them here, but trust us, you'll be seeing a lot of them over the coming weeks.
There are always more games coming out than we have fingers to write about them, but the 2022 games we've listed below are the ones the RPS team are personally most looking forward to playing. We've got games big and small here, and they're all listed in alphabetical order. After all, release dates are increasingly slippery beasts these days. Think we've missed something? Why not take to the comments below and tell us all about it. You might just convince us to put it on our radars. But enough from me. Here are our 43 most anticipated games of 2022.
]]>Remember Saints Row? It's back, in trailer form. After Volition's reboot of their wacky crime RPG series was revealed in August, then delayed in November, we were treated to a new gameplay trailer at last night's Game Awards.
The trailer is a series of clips, each averaging about 3 seconds long, of different people shooting different guns and rockets and so on. So it's technically a gameplay trailer in the way that loads of different corpses stitched together is a person (no comments from Frankenstein fans). Still, aside from confirming the new release date of August 23rd next year, I think this trailer also confirms that the new city of Santo Ileso is going to be the star of this game. Check out the trailer below to agree with me.
]]>Less than three months after announcing the reboot Saints Row, the makers have announced they're delaying its launch by six months. Previously due on February 25th, 2022, it's now due on August 23rd. It's the usual sensible reason: the pandemic has messed with anyone attempting to do anything, and they want more time to make it good. Please do!
]]>The next big trailer bonanza hosted by everyone's pal Geoff Keighley has just come and gone. You can watch all of Gamescom Opening Night Live if you don't want to miss out on all the bants. If you just want to know who showed up with what, well we've got that list here for you.
]]>Yes folks, the Saints Row series has been rebooted, bringing us a brand spanking new game called, er, Saints Row. It's coming soon, too: February next year. You may be broadly unsurprised, due to a tease tweeted by Geoff the Patron Saint of Games, and put on the old Saints Row website, amounting to less a tease and more a statement in giant neon writing reading "WE ARE REBOOTING SAINTS ROW."
Nevertheless, I am able to give you some new and unteased Saints Row factoids, delivered via an earlier press briefing. It's set in Santo Ileso, a fictional city in the Southwest of the USA - cowboy land, basically - and SI, like all good cities in the SaintsRowniverse, is beset by exactly three (3) distinct gangs with their own colour schemes and vibes. You and your mates are about to set up the fourth. Quoting the press release: "Ultimately Saints Row is the story of a start-up company, it’s just that the business The Saints are in happens to be crime." Please enjoy the cinematic reveal trailer below.
]]>Double Fine did it: they made a sequel to Psychonauts that's great. And different, too. It's a follow-up with modern day sensibilities that plays much better than the original. Given that it was one of our most anticipated games of the year, it's fair to say we're quite pleased.
]]>What do you suppose is next for the 3rd Street Saints? Volition's unapologetically bombasic action series Saints Row is about to give us the lowdown. We've known for a while now that another proper Saints game was in the works, but the developers are now teasing a reveal of some kind for the next game alongside the not so cryptic message "rebooting". We're slated to find out more next Wednesday at the Gamescom kickoff, but here's what we know right now.
]]>June is here and the smell of E3 is in the air. Social media managers are making vague, cheeky posts about their games that don't yet have release dates. Fans are wondering if the 23rd entry in their favorite series will be announced. In among all that excitement is always bound to be a reality check or so. Deep Silver have helpfully popped up to name four things that you don't need to get your hopes up for during any of the upcoming summer showcases. Saint's Row, TimeSplitters, Metro, and Dead Island are going to be keeping their collective heads down, they say.
]]>Even before its recent public gameplay unveiling, Cyberpunk 2077 was the target of a very particular piece of criticism. Perhaps sparked by the transphobic joke made by the game's Twitter account, many online have been calling out 2077 for presenting yet another future that, despite its overt themes of transhumanism and body modification, falls strictly into the gender binary. Despite the gender diversity already prevalent in our own world and time, players in 2077 are asked to choose between a strictly male or female character. Many online have been saying that this is at odds with the very genre from which the game gets its name and ideas. “Cyberpunk shouldn't be cis!” is more or less the argument. This criticism has dogged the game for weeks now and will probably follow it all the way to release. Yet it doesn't quite ring true to me.
]]>The new Humble Saints Row Bundle is only about 50% Saints Row, puffed out with rusk and a little spice, but that's a legally acceptable ratio for sausages and I suppose will do for a pay-what-you-want bundle of video games. It's more like a Humble Deep Silver Bundle but shops don't go calling pork sausages 'pork, water, and rusk sausages' either. If you've somehow avoided picking up the splendid Saints Row open-world silly crimefests before: 1) welcome to the Internet! it's okay but watch your step; 2) you can now get them nice and cheap. They are fun video games.
]]>If you're some how bored of the massive collection of mostly ludicrous weapons in Saints Row 4, you've come to the right news post. Over on the Saints Row Mods forum, the first part of the SDK for the raddest of last year's open world games has been released. SR4 already had a modding scene, you see, mostly for skin creation and modifying existing assets to look a little nicer or tweaking the game in mechanical ways. This first release contains tutorials, templates and tools for weapon model modification, using stuff from the newly-announced Gat Out of Hell expandalone as an example.
]]>Volition have announced a new entry in the Saints Row franchise, the curiously in-joke entitled, expandalone, Gat Out Of Hell.
After the most ugly of starts, Saints Row has gone on to be one of the series most worthy of excitement in recent years. Saints Row: The Third saw the franchise free itself of its genuinely unpleasant origins, and realise itself as a joy-filled, if somewhat problematic, alternative to GTA, rather than a clumsy clone. Last year's Saints Row IV somehow survived both the collapse of THQ, and the conversion from add-on pack to complete sequel, to become one of the funniest, funnest games ever. So it's with justified happy expectation that we receive the news that there's to be a standalone expansion to part VI, Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell.
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