Saints Row: Gat of out Hell

A while ago, I committed to doing the only online achievement in this game with my friend who did Saints Row II with me. It’s taken a while for us both to be available at the same time but we finally managed it at the back end of my Bean Dive so I added another game to my backlog. Not to be fully bogged down by a host of unfinished games, I cracked straight on with the rest of the game as soon as I finished 6 out of my 8 Bean Dive titles.

Gat out of Hell picks up where Saints Row IV left off. The earth is destroyed, and the Saints are sailing through space just chilling. The next thing you know, the leader of the Saints gets kidnapped by the devil and it’s up to Johnny Gat (and Kinsey) to bust in to hell, murder a bunch of demons and bust him out of there.

The storyline is almost pointless in terms of how stupid it is but what the Saints Row series offers now is just hours of wacky fun… for the most part. More on that later. The gameplay is the same as Saints Row IV. You gain some super powers, grab some guns and go around completing challenges and taking over sections of the map, called New Hades. Along the way, you meet notorious characters from history such as Blackbeard, Vlad the Impaler and Shakespeare?! Yes, apparently Shakespeare was inherently evil and hell-worthy according to the Saints. Once you’ve taken over most of the map, you annoy the devil enough to face him in battle and once you beat him, you complete the game.

There’s not much to it really – there’s the standard faire of activities and take-over set pieces, the most notable changes being the challenges that involve flying with your new-found demon-slash-angel wings.

Graphically it’s the same as Saints Row IV and doesn’t really need any more. I had a couple of crashes and got stuck on scenery a few times but all in all it’s a fairly solid build. Musically, it does have a soundtrack but like Saints IV you won’t hear any of it because it’s infinitely easier to travel using powers. The background music becomes very repetitive towards the end though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

For the most part it’s a fairly straightforward achievement list. There are only two missables, one for collecting five orb thingys without touching the ground and another for completing an Extraction Facility on a motorcycle. The hardest part of this last one is knowing it’s an achievement (it’s not a secret but you need to read the list) and getting a motorcycle. Vehicles in the game are a bit weird in that there’s only about 5 or 6 different ones and if you need a specific one, it will never show up.

The in-game unlockable abilities are great because you can unlock a collectible indicator which shows you where all the collectibles are. I love it when games do this as it’s then about you collecting all the shit rather than having to search the entire map for the one you missed (I’m looking at you Crackdown).

The rest of the achievements are easy to get but the biggest issue with it is that it’s grindy and repetitive. It would have been nice if the game rounded itself up nicely, but the fact is after you have done everything that Gat has to offer, you will mostly likely have another 10 hours of grinding weapon and power kills on enemies to do. And even this wasn’t enough to get me to the 20-hour mark required for what was my final achievement - for playing for 20 hours. I unlocked this last while asleep as I left it rack up gameplay hours over night.

So the biggest problem with Gat is that it doesn’t have enough content to match it’s achievements and Saints Row IV had double the play time requirement too. It’s just a bit disappointing.

Multiplayer

The only multiplayer requirement is to play co-op online for 3 hours. It doesn’t have to be in on go but that’s what we did and we also used the time to get all of the missable achievements. And it’s always fun to play with friends. I’m just glad I had one rather than having to find a random to play with.

Gat out of Hell was an enjoyable game for around 8 hours or so and this time flies by. After that though, to get the rest of the achievements, it’s a grindy slogfest that will bore you half to death.

Saints Row

That’s right the first one. After my completion of Saint’s Row The Third, I felt compelled to go back in time and round up the remaining achievements in the original. I only had the multiplayer left as with a lot of games, so it was a major drag but I got there in end and with it, one of my statistically toughest completions to date.

Saint’s Row follows the story of some dude who joins the Third Street Saints and works his way up the ladder to become one of the more important members of the gang. Gang activities include wearing purple, listening to horrible music and generally being obnoxious to members of the public.

The one bright side of playing as your created character is that he doesn’t actually say anything when you are free roaming which beats the hell of the shit that comes out of the Saints Row the Third’s character’s mouths.

The single player game play elements essentially have you complete Grand Theft Auto style missions and bizarre activities like escorting prostitutes while they entertain clientele and everyone’s personal favourite, committing insurance fraud. More on that later.

As I only really played the multiplayer recently, I can’t remember much else about how good the graphics were but they look very dated now. The worst thing by far though is the music, especially in the menus and waiting for games to load. It’s like they got the collection of the most unsuccessful or failed rap artists that can only ‘sing’ about getting ‘hos’, taking drugs and committing murders in the most basic ways. It’s honestly horrible. I remember thinking it was shit at the time but as the series got bigger, it’s really noticeable that they invested more in the music in the sequels.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 43 Achievements

Having looked back over the single player achievements, there isn’t much that was easy other than completing the main storyline and taking over the enemy gang territory.  There are only 6 that relate to the main story.

Completing all the activities for the Racket Lord achievement is one of the toughest achievements simply because you have to complete all levels of insurance fraud. This is one of the most unforgiving activities ever. You have to throw yourself in front of cars and get hit but to achieve the scores necessary to complete it, you have to be really good or get insanely lucky. From memory, I was the latter.

After completing all the activities, I still had three single player achievements left to get. Taking 50 hostages was one of them and it is as frustrating in this as it was in Saints Row the Third. You have to steal a car with someone in it and then extort the hostage in a police chase fifty times. Fifty times is excessive to say the least, especially when it’s down to chance that passengers will even appear in the car.

You also have steal 30 boxes from shops. This can only be done at night so you are limited with time before you have to wait again to do it some more. The worst part about this is that I didn’t even know it was a thing until I had completed the game, meaning I had to sit around waiting for night time, several times to get this done.

The last one I got was for earning $1,000,000 which probably shows that I wasn’t the best at the game as I expect quite a few others would have got this with minimum after-game effort. I didn’t even have it after doing all that fucking around with the boxes.

Multiplayer

If ever a game type didn’t need multiplayer, open world sandbox Grand Theft Auto style games don’t. I’ve never understood why they feel the need to ham multiplayer into everything and Saints Row was one of first games to do it.

There are twelve achievements associated to the multiplayer element. Of these twelve, there are two individual co-op missions that each carry an achievement. I was lucky enough to find someone who was really good to carry me over the line with these.

The basic premise of the versus multiplayer is that you need to gain skill in one of the various game modes to achieve the rank of Kingpin. There are 6 different game modes to choose from and you have to play three of them for specific achievements.

They are all very onerous. I cannot fathom how much of the multiplayer you would have to play legitimately in order to get all the achievements but it took four of us a good 25 hours trading off wins and kills to get them all. You have to kill the pimp 50 times in Protect tha Pimp. You get two or three kill chances per game and when you factor in random people who actually still play the game joining and the fact the game won’t load with an odd number of people, setting up the matches itself is a painstaking process.

Once you’ve done that, you can move on to collecting and dropping off 500 chains. Again, this is excessive. You can score up to 30 chain drops per match with each match taking 10 minutes and with the same game-launch issues as with Protect tha Pimp, this becomes really fucking irritating after a short while.

Of the specific game mode achievements, that only leaves Xzibitionist for getting the car to level 4  50 times in Blinged Out Ride. This one takes the longest and I cannot see how one match legit could get a level four car with the shit you have to go through to boost it. It’s mental.

There is another for buying 100 items of clothing from the store but that’s easy coupled with how much money you get from the above matches and the fact there is a free DLC with loads of cheap items (still true at time of writing anyway). There’s also one for getting 100 headshots with the sniper rifle but that’s easy again with how many games you have to play and once you know the sniper locations.

There is also the Dominator achievement for winning 10 ranked matches in a row but that’s blah after all of the above.

The biggest pain in the ass though is the Kingpin achievement. You will get Thug, Killa and Gangsta along the way but these achievements are based on your position on the ranking boards which means you have to keep playing and winning your chosen game mode to progress and it takes forever. If you lose even one match, you lose more progress than reasonable.  You have to get to somewhere around the 1,100^th position on the leaderboard to trigger it and once you do, you will thank the stars that you don’t have to play Saints Row multiplayer again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Saints Row was actually a good single player experience and it’s a real shame that it took the developers 2 titles to realise that multiplayer is not the reason people buy their games. I wouldn’t expect to see a review for Saints Row II appearing here any time soon as the multiplayer for that appears all the more excessive.

Saints Row: The Third

After the heavy shit that was Call of Duty 2 I fancied a bit of rest and relaxation or in other words a completely crazy gaming experience that couldn’t be further from reality. Saints Row: The Third delivers this with aplomb.

Now, I’m not one to play games out of order normally and this is no exception. I just simply haven’t finished the other Saints Rows because they have multiplayer elements that I have not done. Also, Saints Row: The Third was lucky to even make it into the console to start with. As you may have seen, companies that discontinue content that disable achievements are not getting on my Christmas list any time soon. However, Volition and Deep Silver have gone a ways to repairing some of the damage.

There in an achievement called Jumped In which became unobtainable when THQ when under back in 2013. Their website went offline and this was required to get the achievement. Deep Silver spent the best part of a year trying to apply a fix and they finally did it in September 2015. This was the catalyst that made me play the game.

On to the game itself, you play as the leader of the 3^rd Street Saints who looks...exactly how you want him or her to look. I spent the best part of my play time as a girl but more on that later. The story follows the standard story arch of ‘fall from grace.’ The Saints have everything. Then they lose it all because some other crime syndicate tries to take you out. Saint’s Row main stay, Johnny Gat (who looks completely different) gets taken out at the start and the rest of the game is basically about avenging him.

Lots of wacky shit happens along the way which is all in the name of fun... but after a while it starts to wear a little thin. Everything is over the top stupid to the point where the main character can be on TV talking about robbing and murdering like it’s cool and something to aspire to. I’m all for humour, and the first ten hours is pretty funny, but after that it goes too far in what it’s trying to do.

The same can be said of the soundtrack and unfortunately, Grand Theft Auto, has the edge here. There doesn’t appear to be very much in terms of variety either and it’s all very underwhelming and disappointing. It does have the edge over Sleeping Dogs though, as at least the Saints Row radio stations actually play different songs instead of glitching out and playing the same bit over and over.

The gameplay is the main area of excellence. It’s very fluid with combat and driving and they link together well. I don’t recall having any issues with navigation, however the game does suffer from the age old problem of sandboxes where lampposts are made of paper and trees will totally wreck your car.

As you play, you can improve your character with abilities and you can actually do this to the point where you can’t die or run out ammo. I’m not sure how I feel about this as it’s a reward for playing the game but it also removes any challenge from it. I was grateful for this towards the end though, especially when things got totally fucking ridiculous.

Achievements – 1,300 Points – 80 Achievements

There’s nothing I like more than a load of easy achievements that provide fun and variety to obtain. That’s what Saint’s Row the Third offers and it’s also very balanced. There is an achievement for playing for 30 hours and it’s possible to get all of the achievements in roughly this amount of time. No overplaying, no underplaying. This includes the DLC missions as well but more on that later.

The base game has the very standard 50 achievement haul. There are achievements for completing the main story, getting all the collectibles and completing all of the activities spread across the map. The activities are normally the hardest part of the Saints Row single player experience but these seem to have been dumbed down a bit. The hardest one I found was the trailblazing activity which involves racing through checkpoints while on fire (standard) but even the trickier course only took me three attempts once I got used to the direction I needed to go in.

A lot of the achievements rely on you having to get lots of money, for example upgrading all of your weapons, upgrading your stronghold, pimping out vehicles and the like.

Another one of the more bizarre achievements is for playing 2 hours as a male and 2 as a female. Obviously, when I started the game I created a male character and as soon as I realised there was an achievement for playing as both sexes, I went and got a sex change from the plastic surgeon and played the rest of the game as a woman. This also comes with its own issues because there is a limit to how many times I can hear the phrase, ‘I’m always on when it counts.’ Knowing exactly what this is referring to.

There is only really one missable achievement at the end of the first act as there is a multiple choice and an achievement for each option. A strategic save before can allow you to replay the mission to get the alternate achievement but considering it’s earliness in the game, there isn’t a huge time cost for missing it.

The last achievement I unlocked was for completing all the challenges which is a total ballache in reality. One of the challenges is for taking 50 hostages and to do this you need to steal a car with a passenger in it. You have to search the roads looking for these vehicles and 50 is very excessive and repetitive. Another is for destroying 30 Emus which are pieces of shit cars that are also few and far between. I got this one done by grabbing one and storing it in my garage and then continuously blowing it up – boring but the quickest way of doing it.

Downloadable Content

There are three different DLC extensions to the game and in my opinion only one of them is worth getting. I mentioned earlier that after you have played through the game, it starts to feel really silly. The DLCs take this to the next level as well.

Gangsta’s in Space I can only assume is a joke. The Saint’s as gang members gaining celebrity in itself is a ridiculous concept, but to actually have you play out a movie based on the Saints finding an alien and trying to do... something? I don’t know. It was so stupid I stopped paying attention.

 

The Trouble with Clones was equally as dumb. Some idiot supposedly creates a clone of Johnny Gat and you have to track him down and save him or something? Whilst drinking Saint’s Flow, the Saint’s Row custom energy drink. Bizarre and over the top so I didn’t find it at all funny.

 The only one worth playing is Genkibowl VII as it offers some semi-sensible fun, in Saint’s Row terms anyway. You basically have to play through variable instances of Professor Genki’s Super Ethical Reality Climax from the main game which just so happened to be one of the most fun parts.

So to sum up, Saint’s Row the Third offers 30 hours of play time of which about 15 to 20 will actually be enjoyable. If you are going for all achievements, the DLC will feel a like a poor addition. On the whole, I would say it is a solid seven out of ten and the average gamer will get to the end of the story before get bored/fucked off with the characters.