A few words on Saints Row IV
I mentioned last week that I played, beat and thoroughly enjoyed the nearly decade old game Saints Row IV over the last month. While open world crime simulation isn’t really my cup of tea when it comes to video games, this game drew my attention for two other reasons.
The first was a writer. The three-member team responsible for creating the narrative and dialogue were two veteran designers and a newcomer to game design but not writing, Tony Bedard. Before transitioning to video games, Bedard worked for nearly two decades in the comic field. Starting in Valiant, he wrote several issues of Shi and freelanced a bit before signing on with Crossgen, where he wrote one of the most criminally forgotten comics of all time: Negation. For most of the aughts, he wrote for both Marvel and DC, most notably with critically acclaimed but never high selling runs on Exiles and Rebels. He excelled at large cast narratives with a variety of characters and a mix of gravitas and humor. A game about a gang boss turned President and their team of weirdos fit the bill as a perfect use of his talents.
The second reason — and perhaps also why they hired an ex-comic writer for the game — is the superpowers. After the “Playa” becomes the President of the United States, they end up in the middle of an alien invasion by the Zin and their overly Shakespearean leader Zinyak. The story ramps up with most of the action placed inside a computer simulation of Steelport, where your character can unlock an array of powers starting with superspeed and super-jumping and expanding from there.
The game doles out powers as you progress through missions. You gain the ability to fire multiple energy blasts, do diving sky strikes, and strike the ground with massive force. But the game does have some limits as those abilities are only available in the main portions of the Steelport simulation. Depend on them too much as you play and you will find the various missions to free your friends and expand the storylines a lot more difficult when you suddenly don’t have access to them.
While those missions often add a bunch of parody into what could otherwise be a very dark story, their need to go back to what worked in past games of the Saints Row series frequently makes them the parts of the game I like least. I understand this is a game taking an old formula in a new direction, but it’s in the new direction the game ultimately shines brightest.
Well, in that and in the fact that your Vice President is straight-up just actor Keith David. After playing a major villain in a previous game, Keith David serves as a support character throughout much of the game. The game drops references to his time on Gargoyles, but really leans heavily on his co-starring role in They Live with Rowdy Roddy Piper — who makes his own appearance in the game.
Ultimately at its best, Saints Row is an incredibly solid sandbox superhero simulator free of the flaws of earlier games like Infamous or Prototype. With a fun, often irreverent story, the game could have been used to build a masterful superhero engine. Alas, it was instead used to build a few subpar sequels that never quite live up to the peak of Saints Row IV.
Later this year, the franchise will return with a full-on reboot that looks to remove so much of what made this game of interest to me. It remains truly odd to me that no franchise has really mastered the superhero sandbox gameplay without a specific licensed character at the forefront. Instead, Saints Row IV remains an exciting oddity in a sea of games that often feel cookie cutter from one to the next.
