Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell Review
Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell is not as long as any of it's predecessors. Neither is it as absurd, or as funny, or as deep. In fact it's plainly far less entertaining than either Saints Row The Third or Saints Row IV. However, as a cut-price, stop-gap to whatever the next piece of insanity Volition put out next; it's pretty darn good.
Gat Out Of Hell tells us the tale of Jonny Gat and his descent into hell to save the player character "The Boss" from Satan, and The Dark Lord's plan to marry his daughter to superpowered president of the United States. Gat teams up Saints hacker Kinzie Kensington to meet up with old friends and some famous faces from history to take over the devilish town of New Hades and stop the unholy matrimony. How does one do so? By causing havoc and pissing off the Mephistopheles himself.
The upcoming nuptials are the thrust of not only the narrative but your progression as well. Up the top right corner of your pause screen is a bar at the fills up the more of New Hades you disrupt. Here's what it comes down to: finish each main mission to unlock the final boss. There is a couple of cutscenes every 90 minutes or so to break up the gameplay - one of which is beautiful in the most right and wrong ways but, there just never seems to be enough depth of content, in the five-or-so hours it took to finish, to show off the amazing and creative stupidity that Volition have.
That very same problem bleeds into the mission design. Those standout moments, those ones you've come to expect from the series by now, never happen in Gat Out Of Hell. From the start straight through to the end, every quest is simply a string of side mission content. You've got races, mayhem, survival, insurance fraud, etc, etc. Standard open world stuff. They've got a hellish twist on them, so some thought was put into it, but you have to do them on repeat to the point where it does get tedious. Even more so with the fact those same mission types make up 90% of the open-world gameplay; with a few collectables making up the last 10%.
The rest of the playing is much the same as Saints Row IV. Left trigger/right trigger to aim and shoot with various ridiculous weapons. Use your bumpers control your super sprint and magic projectiles with super jump helping you traverse Hell. Over in the pause menu, the game gives you the same upgrade options as before, allow you more stamina and health, or to carry more ammunition. This time around, Jonny and Kinzie have been granted wings, giving you the option to fly across the map. It's quicker and gives you a new perspective on your surroundings, but it's not quite a game-changer.
When it comes to Hell itself, Volition have done a great job making whatever was left of the Steelport map into New Hades. All the cars, pedestrians, lava lakes and buildings convey that cartoony version of hell you'd expect. The performances of the characters are well done and the sound design is similarly creepy and cartoonish. It's a shame that Gat Out Of Hell doesn't look as good as it could running on the PlayStation 4 because of it's last generation ports. It's quite obvious that the game engine is needing an upgrade, it's serviceable but starting to look old.
Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell is a strange beast. Much of my time with it was spent replaying similar scenarios over and over, which, as you can expect, is rather tiresome and somewhat uninteresting. However, the Saints Row series has a certain charm to it. It's the belly laughs, the pop culture references, the goofiness. Everything about it leaves me with a stupid grin on my face. While this expansion is not exactly enough after the year and a half since SRIV, but it's certainly good enough to warrant a quick play and to leave me wanting more from the Third Street Saints.
