Saints Row IV, home to quick thrills and cheap laughs

[wraggster]

Saints Row IV casts you as the US President, the leader of the free world. Oh, and you have superpowers. It’s at once audacious and strangely inevitable. Audacious because the sheer silliness of the concept is, even by this series’ standards, a step well beyond what’s come before. Inevitable because after Saints Row: The Third (http://www.edge-online.com/review/saints-row-third-review/) so thoroughly explored what was possible within the loosely defined boundaries of a ground- and vehicle-based open-world crime game, there really was nowhere left to turn.“Obviously, after Saints Row: The Third we spent a lot of time thinking about, ‘What do we next? What the heck is Saints Row IV going to be?’” admits Volition senior producer Jim Boone. “We talked a lot about what it is we think makes Saints Row: The Third work. Why people enjoyed the game. What it was we could do even more in Saints Row IV. And the areas that stood out to us the most was, well, number one was the over-the-top nature of The Third. There’s no other game out there like it.”If The Third was the game that saw Saints Row finally exorcise the ghost of its origins as a straight-faced, GTA-inspired gangsta rap video and embrace its new role as a mascot for the dispossessed seekers of cartoon craziness that Rockstar left behind, then Saints Row IV sees Volition confirming that new identity a thousand times over. The introduction of superpowers feels practically belated after everything else The Third managed to squeeze in across its runtime, and enables the series to upstage titles such asInfamous (http://www.edge-online.com/review/review-infamous/) and Crackdown (http://www.edge-online.com/features/time-extend-crackdown/), just as it did its original inspiration. It’s still clearly playing to the gallery, of course, joyfully sacrificing things like coherence, consistency, polish, and genuine meaning in pursuit of quick thrills and cheap laughs. And why not? Volition has found a formula that works.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/saints-row-iv-home-to-quick-thrills-and-cheap-laughs-and-why-not/