Shooting is fine, driving is fine, jokes are fine, missions are fine, map is fine, everything is fine. There are also telltale references to things like speed dating which betray the ages of the writing team. They need to pay rent! That’s a thing kids need these days! They also hit up payday loan companies rather than banks, and one side quest involves leaving bad reviews online, which gets a little less funny every time. It doesn’t feel like it’s a bunch of Millennials discussing what they care about, it feels like it’s a bunch of Gen Xers trying to guess what Millennials care about. It also tries to be relatable, with an emphasis on ‘tries’. It feels like somebody who loves Saints Row: The Third has been forced to make Saints Row 2, and is deeply resentful of the fact.

It’s trying to shake off the silliness of Saints Row’s history, while simultaneously embracing it and trying to make it mean more. Original thoughts are few and far between. It’s taking something popular from the series, making it worse, then wedging it back in. No Genki Bowl, no Fight Club, but there is one mission that offers a facsimile of them. I’m yet to unlock all of them despite finishing the game (due to their prohibitive cost), but I don’t think from what I have left that Genki Bowl makes an appearance.

Deep into the Venture Quest storyline, I unlocked both Insurance Fraud and Mayhem, but they now happen on a pass-fail metric rather than medals. The others just annoyed me that the classics had been removed. The wingsuit one is fine, but only because flying itself is enjoyable and near-impossible for the rest of the game. There are some non-Venture side quests that you get very early on, but they’re quite dull.

Video game girl wedgie