Saints Row IV Preview of PS3

Gang Leader, U.S. President, Same Difference
by Robert VerBruggen

How do you follow a title like Saints Row: The Third? When you have a massive hit with a game that lets players run around naked hitting people with sex toys, where exactly do you go from there?

Volition decided to go everywhere at once: Due in August, Saints Row IV will feature superheroes, aliens, and politics. It will probably not make any sense. But it will also probably be a ton of fun, giving Grand Theft Auto V -- due the following month -- a run for its money.

As you may recall, Saints Row started as a fairly straightforward GTA knockoff. But as GTA became more serious, satiric, and cinematic, Saints Row became intentionally absurd and over-the-top, giving itself a distinct identity -- and this fourth installment promises to be the most slapstick to date. Watching the two open-world giants square off this year will be a treat, though I have a feeling a lot of people will just buy both.

This time around, you're the president of America -- your criminal actions in the previous games paid off in political power, I guess -- and to top things off you have a variety of superpowers. Trailers show our entirely customizable hero jumping to the top of huge buildings, gliding through the air, slamming into the ground to cause an earthquake, and throwing enemies around with superhero strength and telekinesis.

If the previous games' shooter mechanics started to bore you, you should have plenty of new options this time around. These options include freezing enemies and breaking them into a million pieces, dashing through bad guys, groin punching, and taking control of mechs. Interestingly, you can always choose to use your superpowers instead of your guns if you want to.

If the prison-break plot of the previous game wasn't crazy enough for you, you'll be glad to know that aliens have invaded America, kidnapped the president and his gang, and placed everyone in a digital re-creation of Steelport. Why the aliens would allow their captives to roam freely in a city they know very well is not quite clear. I'm also not quite sure why the captors would enter digital Steelport to try to kill the Saints’ leader, rather than just disconnecting the whole thing. I bet there's a good explanation.

All the alien stuff doesn't quite fit with the rest of the Saints Row universe. Aside from some DLC from the last game, most of the action has been decidedly Earth based. But then again, super hero powers don’t fit either. The powers are, in fact, just ways of twisting the code that creates the digital Steelport. The blend of science fiction and the franchise's completely nutty storytelling style should be plenty to keep Saints Row IV from turning into your typical boring alien shooter.

Location wise, it might seem lame that we're returning to Steelport, because the best thing about any new open-world game is the chance to explore a new place. But don't worry, this isn't the Steelport you conquered before. Instead, it happens to be a comic-book-style dystopia, a warped blend of Gotham and the Steelport we know and love.

New activities will include “Mech Suit Mayhem": A mini-game complete with miniguns, rockets, and "jump jets." And each time you complete an activity you'll be given a bronze, silver, or gold ranking.

Of course, no Saints Row game is complete without some utterly ridiculous weapons. Enter the Dubstep Gun, a firearm that makes enemies dance by blasting them with, well, dubstep, as well as a weapon that inflates people's heads like balloons until they pop. Weapon customization is dramatically expanded as well; you can even make a gun look like a guitar case; if for some reason that's what you want. Vehicles will, naturally, include monster trucks.

DLC is in the works too, and I'm especially curious to see how the "Enter the Dominatrix" episode will turn out. Volition originally worked on this episode as an expansion to Saints Row: The Third, but it later rolled the project into the fourth game

By the end of the year, the current generation of consoles will be obsolete. But before getting sent to the trash heap, the Xbox 360 and PS3 will get some of the most promising titles of their lifetimes. The GTAV/Saints Row IV smackdown should be an amazing farewell to the current state of open-world games. Saints Row may or may not emerge the winner, but it will definitely emerge the more bizarre, by a mile.