Many Saints Row fans point to the 2022 reboot as the death of the series. This half-baked, half-hearted attempt to bring back the 3rd Street Saints after nearly a decade replaced the fan-favourite characters of old with walking Millennial tropes drenched in cringe, abandoning what made the earlier games so special.
It was doomed from the start, selling just 1.7 million copies, and so Volition sadly shut its doors after nearly 30 years. Saints Row, and its other IP, were given to Plaion, but it looks unlikely that we’ll ever see the 3rd Street Saints again. However, it’s not just the reboot’s fault. The dominos started to fall ten years ago with Saints Row 4.
Saints Row 4 Was Too Silly For Its Own Good
Love it or hate it, Saints Row 4 was a stark departure from the games before it. The first two, even with a futuristic megacorp and its army of private mercenaries, were grounded street dramas about gang warfare in America. The third game was far sillier, featuring zombies roaming the streets, gimp ponies, explicit rubber weapons, and mind-controlling octopi flung out of rocket launchers, not to mention the French (sorry, Belgian) Bond villain and his luchador lieutenant, not-Bane.
But even with all of the self-referential humour and outlandish set-pieces, it was grounded in the heartfelt story of its characters, who we grew to care about as much as we did Julius and Carlos. Then we became the President.
Saints Row 4 opens with The Boss, now the Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America, deciding whether to cure cancer or feed the hungry, before jumping into a mounted turret at the White House to fend off an alien invasion. Before long, the Earth is annihilated while they — and many of the 3rd Street Saints — are kidnapped and plunged into the Matrix where they get superpowers and tear down the system from the inside like Neo and Trinity.
Saints Row 4 started as an expansion pack for Saints Row: The Third called Enter the Dominatrix, which was announced on April Fools’ Day, setting the tone for the whole game.
It established a new rule: every single Saints Row had to be more off the rails than the last. Outside of a complete reboot, that mindset left no room for another game without completely sacrificing the heart of the story. So Volition went for a reboot, but 2022 was not the first time it happened.
Agents Of Mayhem Tried To Dial Things Back
The 2015 spin-off Gat out of Hell wrapped the series as we knew it with a few different endings, one of which saw Johnny Gat completely rebuild the Earth after its wanton destruction in SR4. But it wasn’t the Earth we knew.
In this alternate reality, the Boss never joined the 3rd Street Saints, likely being gunned down by The Kings which they so narrowly avoided in the first game. Without their leadership, the gang fell apart. Gat moved back to Seoul, and future members — like Shaundi — were never recruited.
This is the world that we see in Agents of Mayhem, which brings back Gat, Oleg, Pierce (who ended up leading the Vice Kings), Aisha, Kinzie, and Persephone, showing what their lives would have been like had the 3rd Street Saints never recovered from Troy’s betrayal. It was an interesting attempt at shaking up the formula, swapping the GTA inspirations for a hero shooter-style, mission-based action game.
But it wasn’t received well, with critics and players alike lamenting how “generic” and “repetitive” it felt. Now, it’s often lumped together with Crackdown 3 and Gotham Knights – hardly ideal company.
Once again, Saints Row hit a wall. This new approach clearly wasn’t going to cut it, and so much of the charm of the original games had been lost in favour of a vapid, by-the-numbers open-world game with far too big a cast. Even if Volition wanted to go back to basics and do the series justice, the 3rd Street Saints didn’t exist anymore, so the only option left was… another reboot.
Two Reboots Too Many
Sillier than even Saints Row 4 is the fact that this series was rebooted twice in ten years. Agents of Mayhem left no room for a traditional game, so Volition started over with a new crew and a new city, the only connective tissue being the name.
It was a fresh start (again), a chance to finally be unshackled by the series’ convoluted, over-the-top history (again). But its attempts to stay trendy and hip felt painfully artificial, and with no standout characters to latch onto, it was never going to hit the same strides as its predecessors.
Yet, had Saints Row 4 not flung itself into space in the first place, a reboot wouldn’t have been necessary, let alone two. Gat would never have needed to do a mediocre Doomslayer impression to restart reality and usher in Agents of Mayhem, and we would’ve never needed the entire history of the series to be wiped away to make it approachable again. Volition could’ve easily built on the foundations of Saints Row: The Third, taking us to a new city as it had originally planned to, and stuck to the street wars that made these games so iconic, to begin with.
Saint Row 4 was way too over-the-top, and looking back ten years later, the biggest legacy it ever left was that it marked the end of a once beloved series.
