Saints Row: Gat out of Hell

This game is such a piece of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Completely devoid of any spark that made the previous games better, the story is non-existent, and the content is mostly boring and repetitive. The final boss itself is either A. A bullet spongey mess or B. A wet fart that takes 2 minutes if you have your stuff upgraded. It is no small wonder that the franchise ended shortly after this and the mess that the reboot was. Do not buy this game.

The biggest issue with [i]Saints Row: Gat out of Hell[/i] is the fact that this should have just been DLC or an expansion pack to [i]Saint's Row 4[/i] directly. Selling it as a standalone video game is a weird decision given how short it is, and when it first released, the "game" cost more than what it does now as of this review, $15 USD full price. I'm not going to gratify it as a full release video game and will just refer to it as DLC in this review, as I don't think it deserves being considered anything more than just downloadable content. The developers could have easily tied this DLC into the main game (except by having you play as your customized character) and added an extra 10 or so hours to it. That is about the length of this DLC should you want to hunt the achievements, where the last achievement requires you to idle/play for 20 hours minimum, which I just stood around until the achievement popped. Otherwise, I was a bit disappointed when I created a manual save file about an hour into the DLC and it stated that I was already 40% completed with the entire DLC. But does that make it bad or not worth the playthrough? No, not really. If you've played [i]Saints Row 4[/i] recently (or just skipped out on this DLC at first) and want more silliness and satire and everything over-the-top that makes [i]Saints Row[/i] the franchise that it is, then you might as well play this DLC (maybe on sale still) and just treat it as a DLC to SR4 rather than expecting a fully fledged gaming experience. There's still the existence of cooperative play with a friend, the super powered abilities and upgrade system for both the powers and guns you can buy/obtain, including now the option to spread hellish wings and zoom around the open map which I thought was really fun. There's the melee takedowns, the silly dialogue and humor from satirical billboards and caricatures of historical figures such as Blackbeard and Shakespeare, etc., but it lacks other basic features that you could expect from a [i]Saints Row[/i] title like character customization and there's a disappointing amount of weapon variety just to name a few missing or lackluster ideas. In fact, this DLC shoehorns you into playing either Johnny Gat or Kinzie Kensington as they teleport into hell to rescue an abducted Saint, where Kinzie is perhaps meant to be an extra character just for the lady fans of [i]Saints Row[/i] who may have had a female custom character they used to terrorize Steelport. But, I digress, Kinzie is pretty hot so it was a good choice, but Johnny is obviously the main character for this DLC, from the pun in its title to the very end mission which will swap you into the Johnny character to be awarded one of five endings (not including the secret 100% map completion ending which just explains what happened to his allies that he made in hell). I had fun with the DLC, playing on the hardest difficulty is pretty easy especially once you unlock the unlimited ammunition upgrade for your favorite gun and continue to upgrade your powers. There are a lot of collectibles, with dialogue from the characters to satirize how excessive it is, which probably means that the amount of tomes and soul clusters you can collect was done deliberately, but it's also not necessary to collect it all unless you are hunting for all of the achievements. Fortunately, you can eventually purchase an upgrade that just shows all of the collectibles on the minimap to help reduce the tedium. Perhaps the story and plot isn't the most original, but it's still what you can expect from a [i]Saints Row[/i] video game and so I don't think it's entirely bad. This franchise is meant to be silly and over the top, relying on humor and satire to make the players laugh as they play. And, well, it's the last [i]Saints Row[/i] game before the franchise was massacred by the studio hiring a bunch of millennial and gen Z activists instead of actual talented video game developers. I'd rather replay this DLC for 1,000 hours than just 2 hours of [i]Saints Row 2023[/i] as I listen to a bunch of whiny adults who are still mental teenagers complaining about the patriarchy and capitalism.