Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell Review

And then, at least in Gat Out Of Hell's case, it just kind of stops. That's its ace in the hole, gone. Sure, it's an exceptional ace, gracefully presented and backed up with a couple of genuinely fun minigames, but it's still trying to carry a game that's considerably less imaginative than Saints Row 4 while being equally messy. You'd be hard-pressed to find a sandbox where missions don't just trundle back and forth between variations on “kill/steal/destroy/protect whatever the objective marker is hovering over”, but the Saints Row games have usually made the effort to at least dress things up a bit. What Saints Row 4 lacked in cohesive mechanics it made up for with goofy, varied spectacles; at any given time you could be climbing up the side of an ICBM mid-flight, fighting Not-Agent-Smith in 1950s small-town America, firing rockets at a giant energy drink mascot or piloting a robot suit while a slimy nerd scurries around your ankles in his birthday suit. You'd think that the freedom of having a supernatural setting like this would lend itself well to exactly the same brand of shenanigans – honestly, we could have been literally trapped in somebody's personal hell – but all you get is the same note being hit over and over: “Here is a thing that matters to Satan. You know what to do."

Lack of variety is the order of the day, I'm afraid. Without AI companions to ride shotgun – or Kinzie chattering in your earpiece, even – there's no witty banter to be had, and since somebody left the cutscene budget in their other pants we have to make do with still images overlaid with bored narration for most of them. Each district of the city has a figure jostling for Satan's throne – Blackbeard, Vlad the Impaler, William Shakespeare, the DeWynter sisters, that business guy from Saints Row 2 – who you're supposed to do tasks for in order to help unseat the big smug tosser, but their quests are just excuses to play the same minigames again with flimsy excuses pencilled-in on the menu. The last time somebody stood outside their establishment and gave me a list of arbitrary tasks to do with only a couple of lines of text for justification, they had a yellow exclamation mark hovering above their head and were asking for twelve Raptor Heads. The writing is still silly enough to bring a smile to your face, but what little of it there is gets drip-fed to you with painful frugality.

Then there's the uncomfortable problem of the whole game being kind of a pushover. It's not as if sandboxes have ever been exactly renowned for being challenging – though if we're going down that route, some of the earlier GTAs could be quite cruel here and there – but Gat Out Of Hell leaps so eagerly into the power fantasy zone that it's hard to feel there's any adversity whatsoever. Merely stepping outside and doing what sandbox protagonists do best – that is to say, causing untold grief to the lives of daily commuters – is enough to bury you under an embarrassingly large snowdrift of money and experience points. By the time I had blasted through the 'campaign' – two hours at the most – I had fully upgraded every weapon and power I could ever have possibly wanted; as of writing this, I've upgraded most of the ones I didn't want, too. Saints Row 4 had a similar problem, admittedly, but the Zin at least posed some threat in their ability to gun you down from halfway across the island; the minions of darkness, by comparison, might as well stumble out of their monster trucks and collapse in a Three-Stooges-esque heap for all the danger they seem to pose.

Gat Out Of Hell saddens me. It feels like a game that recognised the inevitability of trying to one-up Saints Row 4 and just tried to see just how many ancillary elements it could toss out the window and still get away with it, presumably on the assumption that all players really want to do is run around an urban setting taking out their stress on squishy punching bags with progressively more improbable weapons. I mean, you can still do that if you really want, and there's no denying the extremely silly allure of riding around in the world's most heavily-armed armchair, but how long does that gratification last with combat mechanics as deep as a summer puddle? Thirty seconds? Five minutes? What are you left when that's gone? Flying around aimlessly, that's all. You can't even just cruise around the city while listening to Mix 107.77 because it's not there. Seriously, there isn't any licensed music any more. Maybe it doesn't make much sense to be picking up FM radio while dive-bombing the deceased masses in Hell, but that never stopped Saints Row 4. Come on, guys, I know tussling with all those record labels can't be cheap, but there isn't even any Meat Loaf to go out on. I'll let that sink in for just a moment: Gat Out Of Hell does not, in fact, contain 'Bat Out Of Hell'. That's like making a game about heavy metal and not being able to get any Iron Mai– oh.

Does that sound like an unnecessary detail to dwell on? Perhaps it does, but it's the kind of detail that Saints Row, in its complete reliance on wackiness, can't afford to do without. It can no longer go back, it can't go forward; the only thing sustaining it is a constant stream of novelty, spectacle, and eighties pop hits. Gat Out Of Hell, then, is what happens when that stream dries up. Saints Row 4 was the horseradish sandwich; Gat Out Of Hell is two slices of stale bread, and it's every bit as dry as it sounds.