Saints Row – Preview, Action-Adventure

An hour with Saints Row

When the caretaker’s cousin at Rockstar North tweets that he’s super fond of playing Fortnite, rumored news about a possible Battle Royale mode in GTA 6 will certainly come out the next day. Combined with the statement that fans are currently worried that the game might not appear until sometime in 2026. Because: It’s just GTA. Everyone buys it, everyone plays it, everyone talks about it and everyone is excited to see how the next part will turn out. Spoiler: Expect an open-world action game that takes place in a fictional North American city that is based on a US metropolis. You will steal cars, rob banks and have dozens of side hustles; and of course the successful and long-lived GTA Online is somehow integrated into GTA 6.

On the other hand, if Saints Row is only three months away from the release, it’s the other day absurdly detailed character editor and the press is now being shown around an hour of the finest in-game material? Then nothing happens, but the general excitement is pretty limited. That means: With what I was shown from Saints Row last week – unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to reach for the pad myself yet – several previews could be filled at once. Or, transferred to Grand Theft Auto, carving out GTA news for the next three decades. I’m not saying the GTA brand buzz is undeserved, but the difference in attention to the rather similar Saints Row is staggering. The reboot of Volition’s flagship brand leaves a really competent impression…

The gaming record of the Illinois studio, which now operates under the name Deep Silver Volition, is impressive: After two strong Freespace titles and the successful role-playing excursion Summoner, the studio plunged into the shooter genre – Red Faction amazed with what was then an amazing level Interactivity (keyword: Geo-Mod). An extremely brutal Punisher game and a Red Faction sequel later, Volition, despite a strenuous development phase with the first Saints Row, shot into a comparatively young genre: that of open-world action. The Saints Row brand, designed from the start as a kind of gang simulator, poached the territory of the GTA series fairly successfully right from the start. Rockstar had already released three popular 3D episodes – GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas – but Volition took a fresh approach and went on to carve out its own over-the-top niche.

Tester Mathias was already impressed by the first part (84%) and attested to the “bold GTA copy that it drilled into the well-known game principle in exactly the right places, added small details and mixed it into an action-packed gangsta excursion that was consistently good entertainment offers”. Three successors, plenty of dildo weapons, an infinite number of purple buckets and the less successful Agents of Mayhem later, Saints Row and thus Volition are back in a similar position as in 2006. At that time, Rockstar had created a new, extremely popular genre, but needed it still time until your own HD debut – today GTA 5 has taken this success to a completely different level, but nobody can predict when a new episode for PS5 and Xbox Series X will be released. Saints Row, on the other hand, completely renewed and turned inside out, is ready to order the field of easy-going open-world action with a gangster attitude.