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Saints Row is getting a reboot set to release in February

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The Third Street Saints are back, but without the cast of characters fans of the franchise may remember. After they conquered the galaxy, the story of the original Saints is over. But developer Volition revealed today that the franchise is being rebooted with a new title simply named Saints Row that’s set to release February 25, 2022.

SAINTS ROW Official Announce Trailer

While the franchise is being rebooted, Saints Row won’t be forgoing any of its core tenets. Players are still gangsters, and the game itself is promising plenty of wacky and over-the-top gameplay. However, Saints Row will be more grounded than previous releases in the franchise. Players won’t be going to hell and fighting Satan, and they won’t have superpowers. Instead, Saints Row will have more in common with Saints Row 2. Players will build up their gang and take over the game’s city, block by block.

The crew of the Saints Row reboot stands against a wall.

Saints Row will take place in Santo Aliso, a sprawling city inspired by the American Southwest. The game’s map will also be larger than any in previous entries in the franchise and will include a city, its outlying suburbs, and vast stretches of wildlands. Players will slowly take over this city with a new system called Criminal Ventures. By exerting their power, either financially or with lots of guns, players can take over land in the city’s districts and put whatever they want there. In an early presentation, developers at Volition gave the example of players being able to put toxic waste dumps in Santo Aliso’s financial district.

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Of course, Saints Row will still be a, well, Saints Row game. Players will be able to go through the entire game with a co-op partner, customize their character from head to toe, and use an arsenal of weapons. The game’s developers also made a point to say that this isn’t a grim and dark reboot. Saints Row will still have the humor of its past entries, with activities like Insurance Fraud, in which players hurl themselves into oncoming traffic, taking center stage.

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Saint Row is set to launch on February 25, 2022, for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC.

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Otto Kratky
Otto Kratky
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Otto Kratky is a freelance writer with many homes. You can find his work at Digital Trends, GameSpot, and Gamepur. If he's…
Saints Row: release date, trailers, gameplay, and more
Saints Row characters on top of a movie theater with guns.

Certain games were so influential that they almost single-handedly created entire genres. The most successful of them, like Grand Theft Auto, would almost immediately attract other developers to try and compete with them in the hot new space. Saints Row was just that, an attempt to take on GTA in the realistic, crime-focused, open-world space. The original was viewed as mostly fine but didn't really do anything to set it apart as more than a slightly-worse version of GTA in most people's eyes. It was good enough to spawn a sequel, and after that, things got a little weird.

Saints Row 3 and Saints Row IV pivoted the series from being a straight imitation of GTA and embraced the more ludicrous and comedic aspects of gaming. By the time the fourth game came around, your gangster character had become president, the world was invaded by aliens, and you were placed in a simulated world where you had superpowers. These last two games were by far the most well-received and popular of the series, but we have never heard from the Saints since.

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Saints Row doesn’t evolve the series, but it never needed to
The Boss shooting at police in Saints Row.

The first thing that comes to mind when Saints Row is mentioned is The Penetrator, the floppy purple pleasure device synonymous with the third game in the series. I don’t imagine I’m alone there. It’s a strange legacy for a franchise that reaches back 16 years, but a fitting one. Saints Row has never been about breaking the mold in terms of gameplay -- it was a derivative series from the start. What it has always been about is over-the-top action, ridiculous encounters, and a heavy dash of crude humor.

Saints Row, the 2022 reboot, doesn’t break the mold either. It takes sparse influences from more recent open-world sandboxes, but still focuses on the core of the series: a cast of cartoonish characters, blockbuster action, and an open world that just begs for you to cause mayhem within it. Saints Row doesn’t evolve the series, but after spending four hours with the game at a preview event, I realize it never needed to.
Not an evolution

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Saints Row reboot still looks wacky, even if it’s formulaic
The main character of Saints Row glides in a wingsuit.

The Saints Row series is making its grand return after seven years. The Saints Row universe fully reset at the end of the Saints Row IV DLC Gat Out of Hell, so Volition's next game is a full-on reboot of the series. After the underwhelming Agents of Mayhem, this reboot allowed the developer to redefine what a Saints Row game could be without the constraints of classic characters or settings. Unfortunately, that new vision is much more plain than I'd hoped despite the series' expected madcap tone.
While the results of this reimagining have the enjoyable and wacky Saints Row flair that one would expect, I was left quite underwhelmed by a recent hands-off preview of several missions, combat, and the open world in Saints Row. This upcoming game is set in a new Southwestern city of Santo Ileso and features a new cast of Saints characters, so Volition has an opportunity to go big and bold here. Ultimately, it's looking formulaic for a series that's known for being off-kilter and wildly creative.
SAINTS ROW – Game Awards Gameplay Trailer
Grounded absurdism 
During my hands-off preview, I got to see the new team of Saints in a variety of missions. These include a loan agency robbery gone wrong that results in a big car chase, a raid of a car-loving Panteros gang's headquarters in a helicopter, and a rescue mission for one of the player-character's friends after he's kidnapped by a bunch of Deadmau5-looking crooks from a gang called the Idols.
The new cast of Saints seems likable enough, but the "angry but endearingly funny millennial" tone of each character's writing has yet to be nearly as endearing as classic Saints Row characters like Johnny Gat or Kinzie Kensington. The "try-hard lulz" writing that the series was known for isn't as funny now as it was in 2015 when the last Saints Row game was released. It's hard to tell from this early look if Volition's writers will succumb to the same unfunny writing problems that plagued 2019's Borderlands 3.

Also, because it's an entirely new cast of characters that have yet to prove themselves to fans, there isn't any nostalgia factor that can help make up for subpar jokes. Currently, Volition's strategy is to give the narrative a sense of "groundedness" despite its kooky aspects to make players care about this character and that narrative.
"Absurdism for the sake of absurdism, that's where everything feels fluffy, and it doesn't feel like anything really means anything," lead writer Jeremy Bernstein said at the preview event. "We worked very hard to avoid that, so there's a groundedness, even to the most absurd things that you do in the game." It remains to be seen if this new, more grounded approach successfully introduces a new cast and setting for Saints Row or just leaves me yearning for the classic Saints and city of Steelport.
Absurdly generic 
While each mission that I described earlier does have the Saints Row series' trademark quirk, they aren't exactly pushing the boundaries of what to expect from a third-person, open-world game so far. While I only saw a few side missions, like one where players had to ride shotgun and fend off cops for a jewelry thief, our look at the map and missions suggest that Saints Row may be a fairly boilerplate open-world game.

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