10 Reasons You Should Be Playing the Saints Row Games

In a surprise twist for 2020, Saints Row has been making news quite a bit lately. A new mainline entry into the series is being developed for 2021. And of course, Saints Row: The Third Remastered releases on May 22 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

If you aren’t already a fan of the 3rd Street Saints, here are 10 great reasons you should start playing the Saints Row games!

You can start anywhere, really

There are some series, such as Metal Gear Solid or Mass Effect, that you should absolutely play in release order. This prevents you from becoming confused by the plot and having specific story moments ruined due to lack of familiarity. 

Saints Row isn’t one of these games. While there is a pretty bare-bones narrative at play across the titles, it isn’t vital to playing the games. Whether you jump in at Saints Row 4 or Saints Row: The Third, you’ll pick up the plot quickly. Whether or not you’ll like that plot is subjective, however. 

It isn’t serious at all

In the current times, all of these games with serious, meaningful narratives can be exhausting when you’re looking for a little escape. For those times when you just want to shut your brain off and laugh at dumb jokes for a while, Saints Row is a good choice. 

Of course, there are times when the games have a tinge of gravity to them, but they’re few and far between. 

Mayhem with a buddy

If you’re looking for a good way to kill some time with a friend, then Saints Row has you covered. The majority of the series features online cooperative play, allowing you to explore the game’s map together. In order to keep things interesting, the game has plenty of co-op oriented activities and missions to share scattered across the city. 

Plus, there’s a lot of stupid stuff you can do together, too. Trying out weapons on each other, terrorizing the NPCs, and playing dress-up are all on the table here.

Familiar voices telling new jokes

Somehow this small, weird, and outrageous video game series managed to get some big names to join the cast. Listening to the characters speak and figuring out where you’ve heard that voice before is entertaining enough. Then you realize that you’re hearing people like Keith David, Terry Crews, Burt Reynolds, and Neil Patrick Harris, which makes everything a little funnier. 

Saints Row allows you to be the true you

Saints Row has surprisingly strong character creation options. While the series has lost a few of the more detailed options in the days since Saints Row 2, the newer games are still capable of so much. 

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You can be anything you want to be, really. Astronaut? There’s a costume for that. Maybe you have a desperate desire to be a super-powered pirate with a laser sword? That’s perfectly feasible. Perhaps you want to be you, except now you have a funny mustache? Sure, why not? The range of the character options is one of the main selling points of this series for good reason.

The activities are absurd

Saints Row is primarily a series about running a gang. As you can imagine, staying on the top of a gang requires a fair amount of street cred. How do you gain all of that respect, though? Well, crime works well enough, according to Saints Row.

In order to prove yourself to the world, you can do a variety of things. For instance, there’s Insurance Fraud, wherein you will be flinging yourself into traffic in order to rack up some medical bills. Maybe that isn’t your idea of a good time, though. In that case, there’s always the Fight Club, which is exactly what it sounds like. Plus, there are more standard side activities to find, such as taking over gang territory and secret jumps to find. 

The Awesome Button

Later entries in the franchise came with one feature that was more important than the rest: The Awesome Button. By holding this button down, your character breaks into a swift sprint, allowing for magic to happen. If you run up to a vehicle while holding this button down, your character will fling themselves into the driver’s seat, essentially drop kicking the driver out of their car. 

However, if you run up to the perfect stranger while doing this, you’ll pull off a random sick wrestling move that is both satisfying and hilarious. Honestly, it might make you wish that every game had an awesome button.

So many unique weapons

There’s a good chance that you’ve seen a few of the many weapons available in the Saints Row series. Many of these weapons are your standard open world crime game fare, such as pistols, shotguns, and melee weapons. However, Saints Row also gives you the chance to use some more interesting means to down some enemies. These options include such classics as the Shark-o-Matic. This special shotgun covers your target with fish chum, prompting a massive shark to burst out of the ground and swallow them whole.

Plenty of vehicles to try

Just like with with the weapons of Saints Row, the series has tons of neat vehicles that you just have to see. Alongside the typical cars and planes you might see in a game, you’ll find things like the Genki Manapult. The Genki Manapult is a customized truck that has a huge cannon on the back. The way this truck works is that you drive into a pedestrian, which then sucks them up into the cannon. From there, you can easily fire the person from the cannon in an amusing display of stupidity. 

It’s more than a simple Grand Theft Auto clone

The first entry in the Saints Row franchise was a blatant copy of Grand Theft Auto, except with slight RPG elements. While that wasn’t a terrible thing, the series has now forged an identity all its own. Saints Row attempts things that GTA would never even consider and embraces these outlandish ideas well enough. Things such as super powers and time travel are commonplace in these games now. By going wacky and weird, Saints Row has given itself enough freedom to do pretty much whatever it wants, for better or worse.

What do you think of Saints Row? Tell us in the comments below!