Uutiset
Saints Row PC Hands-On PC Preview
C
Craig Pearson
Meet the Boss. She’s a badass with a bob cut and smoky eyes. She comes straight from the in-game phone, a nexus for all sorts of things. We just dialed up her look on the phone and downloaded her. The Boss Factory, the Saints Row character customization suite available to download and play now for free, delivered the perfect goth murderess for $15k in-game--no need to shop for parts; they were automatically added to the wardrobe. You can even apply separate elements, so if you find a shared boss with the perfect outfit but want to keep your face and hairstyle, you can apply just the outfit. A good boss can also be a basis for your own additional tweaks. We added the ‘Cattleman Hat’ and cut glass English accent via the personality menu because hearing ‘manky git’ amidst all this Americana is a fun time.
Don’t worry about money too much. We found most of that in dumpsters and by shooting enemies.
The goal is to build your empire, but you start off small. Worse than that, you start off employed. A lowly grunt in a private military contractor called Marshall Defense Industries. Your time there will be short and explosive. The first few missions act as a tutorial to the game and the world.
That new world is Santo Ileso. It’s a dry and hot chunk of the American southwest, with gaudy Vegas-like strips and dead-looking towns dotted about the area. Three gangs are vying for power of this massive chunk of land: Los Panteros, a thuggish biker gang; The Idols, a tech cult with Daft Punk’s style; and your soon-to-be former employers, Marshall Defense Industries, a private military company with plenty of resources.
From the opening, your character’s attitude, and the game’s set-pieces, are all extremely volatile. When you’re still working with Marshall, and ordered to tail a convoy, but to absolutely not engage with it, that convoy is very much engaged with. You start at the back, wrecking the following biker guards (who at least fired first). Then, via turrets, fists, dangerous leaps onto moving vehicles, a Mad Max-style chase in a sandstorm, and a crash into a ravine (“I followed the convoy. It stopped.”), you’re given a promotion. The rent will be paid!
That’s important. You and your small friend group are struggling. Despite being members of opposite gangs, you live together, pull off small heists as a team, and have each other’s back. That means when the opposition gangs clash; you fight for your flatmates, not the organization. It's ultimately what sends you on the road to start your own gang. Well, that and being sacked.
Sacking is a result of your volatility, your boss's volatility, and a museum party for a priceless artifact. It’s an event that brings everyone together: Los Panteros and The Idols pay a visit, trying to grab an artifact while Marshall ‘protects’ it. Largely with explosions. It’s inevitable that so much violence, across multiple floors, involving bikers stunt-riding along the backs of dinosaur statues and cat-helmeted rave mini-bosses blasting out psychedelic death auras, requires someone to take the blame. And that’s you.
Which is when your little group of capable compadres decides to make something of themselves. Santo Ileso has enough space for another gang. The group moves into an abandoned church, getting the deeds by shaking down a realtor via some dangerous driving. With a name inspired by the religious HQ, now’s where the real game kicks in. Time to grow.
One of the tutorial missions has you up with a percentage of a garage, which is passive income, and an example of the sort of ways your gang can gain extra income or resources. You’ll eventually be live-streaming your own gun-running merchandise to show off its explosive capabilities. These Ventures will let you gain a foothold in the city and earn while you do it.
There’s no stopping you from doing what you want when you finally start the Saints. As soon as you’re out of the tutorial missions, you can wingsuit, ride cars, hunt bounties, buy guns, and just explore. Though, you might want to take some time to try some of those elements out individually before getting fancy. It’s perfectly possible to leap onto a car and deploy a wingsuit without knowing that you can crash headfirst into a lamp post. It is a mercifully swift death, though one that leaves you dangling from a lamp post like a deflated balloon.
If the opening hours are anything to go by, Saints Row will be a dense playground of violence. Santo Ileso has clearly inspired developers to design some bespoke action inside their sandbox. Missions might end up with body counts in the double-digits, but you’ll also have to hunt someone down by looking for a headbanger in a crowd. You’ll drag crates of resources behind your car back to a vendor as the loose, tethered box swipes chasing enemies off the road. Chaos is the default state for Saints Row, even if it’s just you and a few friends doing what you can to pay the bills.
Saints Row is out on August 23, 2022, exclusively on the Epic Games Store.