Saints Row Criminal Customs Edition

Saints Row is a franchise reboot that strips away the purple gang legacy and starts over with a new crew, a new city, and a tone that sits somewhere between GTA irreverence and superhero movie energy. You play as The Boss, a customizable protagonist who teams up with three roommates to found a criminal empire called The Saints. The setup is deliberately grounded compared to the alien invasions and presidential antics of older entries, which will either feel like a welcome reset or a step backwards depending on how attached you are to the series' weirder years. Santo Ileso itself is genuinely one of the better open-world playgrounds in recent memory - a sun-baked fictional American Southwest city split into distinct districts controlled by rival factions, each with its own aesthetic and mission flavor. The core gameplay loop runs on familiar open-world rails: story missions, side hustles, criminal ventures that you build out across the map to generate passive income, and a steady drip of unlockable weapons and abilities. Combat has a floaty, arcade quality that rewards aggression. The Weapon Wheel gives you access to a solid arsenal including the returning Notoriety system, and a handful of skills like Piledriver (slam enemies into the ground from height) and Intercept (commandeer incoming vehicles mid-chase) keep fights from going stale. Co-op is available throughout the full campaign online, and dropping into a friend's game is mostly painless - this is one of the better cases for just playing it with someone. What works: the city is fun to move through, the criminal venture system gives you a reason to care about territory beyond just clearing checkboxes, and the character creator is genuinely one of the deepest on the market with an absurd range of options. The side content - Shady Oaks insurance fraud, wing suit time trials, choplifter rescues - ranges from throwaway to legitimately entertaining. What doesn't work as well: the writing swings for a specific brand of Gen-Z humor that lands inconsistently, the story missions are rarely surprising, and at launch the game carried a fair number of bugs that have been patched down over time but left a mark on the review score. The companions - Neenah, Kevin, Eli - are likeable enough but feel underwritten outside their intro missions. If you're coming in expecting the escalating madness of Saints Row IV or even The Third, temper expectations. This is a more straightforward open-world crime game than those. On its own terms it's a reasonably entertaining one - not groundbreaking, but competent and occasionally a lot of fun, especially in co-op. The 72 percent positive Steam score reflects a fanbase split between disappointment at the direction change and genuine enjoyment of what the game actually is. New players with no franchise baggage often land on the more positive end of that split.

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