Saints Row is a knockabout driving/shooting/flying ragdoll-em-up in which you lead a misnamed gang of sociopaths. By the time I had fully leveled up my character I had access to everything from flaming punches to the ability to shoot through walls, but rarely did I feel the need to use them in favour of the more traditional skills like throwing grenades and activating temporary armour which made for a mostly conventional brand of firefights. In addition, there’s a recharging skills system that allows you to bind special abilities to four hotkeys. It doesn’t exactly create a propulsive ballet of ballistics to rival Doom Eternal, but it’s a neatly streamlined setup that allows you to recover from damage without having to scramble for dropped medkits or fumble with a consumables menu. The combat itself is snappy and serviceable, and in the absence of a proper cover system is heavy on circle-strafing and pulling off occasional execution moves in order to replenish your health mid-fight. It doesn’t exactly create a propulsive ballet of ballistics to rival Doom Eternal DLC’s and updates. The only ones that really stand out are the garish, neon-soaked Idols who appear to have grown restless waiting for Ubisoft to announce a new Watch Dogs. But in between these peaks is a relentless rinse-and-repeat cycle of wave-based shootouts against a handful of rival gangs that are uniformly bullet spongy and largely indistinguishable from one another. That’s not to say I wasn’t entertained for significant stretches at a time, and while the rags-to-riches story of the new Saints gang in the sandswept city of Santo Ileso is anything but original it at least facilitates a handful of B-grade action scenes that do an admirable impersonation of Uncharted, with a car-hopping convoy chase and an explosive train robbery among the more dazzling high points along the way to the campaign’s somewhat underwhelming end.

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