Damn, knowing this reboot was supposed to be the start of the new Saints Row franchise. It's depressing to just see it crumble down like this.
I mean seriously in the broad scheme of things what happened here? It's like after SR4 they were all out of ideas.
Let's try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist ... and also he's now in hell.
I'd say that was probably the general attitude for SR1 and 2 overall - they were largely GTA clones, but when GTA took a turn into gritty and realistic, SR3 took a left on silly and surreal which allowed it to separate itself from the stigma of being a "GTA clone" and into its own category.
Even SR2 has a lot of really silly stuff that they don't really do in GTA games, like the property value minigame where you spray literal shit over everything. Stuff like that eventually became too absurd for Rockstar to want to do but it was perfect for SR.
3 is one of the only games I managed to 100% because I enjoyed it greatly. 4 was funny at first but then it became boring after a while when you had all your superpowers and it got boring to keep fighting the same alien SWAT cops over and over again.
For Gat out of Hell, I never bought into the "Johnny Gat is the GOAT" attitude that SR tries to get everybody to acknowledge. It was literally just a filler game comprised of mini-games, and I would often opt to play Kinzie instead of Johnny because I just like her character more.
This has more to do with Embracer Group's June announcement for upcoming large scale restructuring, layoffs, game cancelations, and studio closures than anything else. Embracer has even hit hard at studios that were profitable or had games in the pipeline that were expected to be a huge sales success.
As much as I love games, the industry is a tough place to work, and the layoff cycles are striking once again.
Saints Row 2022 took a very different direction than all of the previous games combined, and it wasn't a direction the die-hard fans of the series liked for the most part.
The same thing is gonna happen with the always-online likely DRM-filled freemium Skate 3 sequel called Skate. I can see that one end up flopping and that might kill off the series, and that makes me really sad. It makes me even more sad because it's the first Skate game in the series actually coming to the PC, and they're almost guaranteed to fuck it up. Corporate greed is killing gaming, modern gaming is shit for the most part.
Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.
And IMO even that would have been okay (plus playing as Kinzie was far better) if it had been actual DLC. It was alright as a "I played SR4, and wish I had ~12-15 more hours to go in it". It was essentially the same game, some new areas, swapped main char but it matters little, done. It was clearly once much smaller and meant as DLC, tbh.