I am John Travolta, and I am the President of the United States.
Okay, technically I have altered my character to look like Vincent Vega, Travolta's character from Pulp Fiction. Strolling down the hall next to me is Samuel L. Jackson, who is also president of the United States because this is Saints Row IV, and it doesn't care about your rules.
This over-the-top, ridiculous spin on open-world city action games is the third sequel to a ripoff of Grand Theft Auto. The original game took itself very seriously. By the third, one of the most memorable games of 2012, the series had reinvented itself as total farce. It had weapons shaped like dildos. It had shootouts and naked getaway chases set in and around an S&M nightclub. It had Burt Reynolds playing himself as the mayor of the city. It went totally insane.
Saints Row IV is the sequel to Saints Row: The Third, but it feels more like a collection of B-sides. It's like techno remixes and broke-down acoustic versions of the most popular stuff from the last game. There's some new material, but it all sort of feels like it was cut out of the actual record.
But it's still wild fun, and that's because it avoids an affliction from which nearly every modern videogame suffers: The refrigerators don't open.
That is to say: No matter how much time and money developers throw at a game, they'll never be able to make their virtual worlds fully interactive. Every box in the aisle of the gas station in Heavy Rain may be beautifully rendered, but you can't individually take out and inspect each one. Players know when they explore a house in The Last of Us that no matter how great the lighting is or how much care and attention went into setting up the space, they can't open up the refrigerator, poke around inside, and make themselves a sandwich.
It's just not feasible for a game developer to dedicate that much time to replicating a small fraction of reality. Better to just create a surface-level facsimile of a believable world. But if players start to ask too many questions, like, "Why is it that I can only interact with things by shooting them?" the whole simulation falls apart. You realize that all the refrigerators are unopenable, and the sense of being in a real place is destroyed. The whole thing begins to feel like a big-budget puppet show.
Saints Row IV doesn't have this problem because it makes zero pretense at reality.
All the craziest stuff – super-speed sprinting, the ability to fly, magical spells – happens in a virtual reality game-within-a-game, so there's at least some story justification for it. But even outside of that simulation, ridiculous events are going down all the time.
You win the presidency by stopping a missile launch. The game literally pops up a notification informing you that you've unlocked "the respect of the American people," as if you had just earned an achievement for killing 20 rats. All surface-level, self-serious pretensions are abandoned the moment they seem like they would get in the way of this game being entertaining.
Of course, considering Saints Row: The Third already did all this, I can and will criticize Volition for not turning up the crazy just a little bit more, instead of just maintaining the (admittedly, hard to top) insanity of the last game.
But I'll hand it to Saints Row IV. Seeing a videogame tear open its shirt and bare its scars proudly to the world is vindicating. Like one guy in a group of professionals loudly telling fart jokes in a restaurant, it's self-satisfied in a way that makes everybody else at the table look more ridiculous for maintaining their composure.
Even the official trailers for the game, some of which declare IV to be the "most dramatic Saints Row game yet," are really saying "we made another game that doesn't take itself so damn seriously."
Is it easier to go low-brow than high-brow? Are ridiculous games like Saints Row IV discouraging to the artists trying to tell serious stories with their games? There is a method to the madness: By so totally abandoning any last vestige of reality, Saints Row feels more consistent than "realistic" games.
