Video Gamers Podcast - Saints Row (2022) - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

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hello everyone you're listening to the multiplayer gaming podcast we are so glad to have you guys here we are three dads who love gaming buckle up because today we are talking about one of the more wild games we've covered to date the reboot reboot of Saints Row. Please rate our show five stars, leave a written review, and support us on Patreon. Not only will you be helping the show, keeping it running, but you'll also get bonus Squadcast episodes. Head on over to MultiplayerSquad.com to see our Patreon page, where support starts at five bucks a month. I am your host, Paul, the leader of this purple shirt mafia. And joining me,

he's on a quest for more duct tape to build some sick armor and to expand our castle. It's Michael. Oh, duct tape saved my life. No joke. Duct tape is the single greatest invention by man. It's even better than sliced bread. If man invented that, I don't know. Maybe God did. Who knows? But thank you. I am honored to represent duct tape on Teen Duct Tape today. And joining us, we had him at Murder Circus. It's Josh. Oh, I was going to say, like, maybe I'll be Kev, but I don't have the abs for that either.

That's a good one. I like it. Oh, man. Saints Row reboot. All right. This is going to be an interesting episode. that either so it's a that's a good one i like it oh man saints row reboot all right this is going to be an interesting episode before we hop on into saints row josh you got a couple of reviews people have left our show oh the reviews are pouring in like crazy i love it such a happy josh yeah i am man and uh if you haven't left us a review yet please go and leave us a review we read a few of them on the show as often as we can.

If you are not on Apple podcasts, chances are you're on Spotify. You can leave us a five star rating there. It really helps the show. If you like what you hear, it's honestly one of the best ways to just say, Hey, thanks.

Um, it helps us out immensely. So, uh, I'm going to read a couple cause these are, these are both great. And I know we got a lot to cover today. This first one comes in from rogueZone, and it's titled Amazing.

And it says, I started myself a YouTube channel, which is RogueZone. When I started wanting to do YouTube, I wanted to find a podcast to give me ideas of what games to play and how to be comfortable just talking and doing what I love. I found this podcast, and I absolutely love this one. All time favorite. And this is the best podcast I have ever found. I've been listening for almost a year now and I will be subscribing to the cast and want more. You guys are great.

And I love how funny y'all are too. Oh, that's so sweet. These reviews are so nice. They really are. They really are. Yeah. Thank you so much.

And honestly, like just cause you left us review everyone, go check out rogue zone. I haven't checked it out. And honestly, just because you left us a review, everyone go check out Rogue Zone. I haven't checked it out myself, but you left us a review, so sure, it's worth a shout out. I did actually go watch the channel and subscribe as well. Oh, very nice. Yeah.

All right, and then this next one comes in. I'm going to butcher this because I don't... I'm going to just... It's Hozuevga. Josuevga 1. Okay. Nailed it. Nailed it.

I'm really sorry, Josuevga. I know I just butchered that. And it says, the most entertaining podcast. It says, hey, guys, I usually listen to Spanish podcasts, but you guys are amazing, super funny. I've learned a lot about games through your guys' reviews. I hope you guys make some videos of you guys playing Magic the Gathering, as well as you guys are the best.

Thanks. I listen to you while I work. Oh, very nice. The fact that, and this is what's really cool, is seeing reviews and having people hop in our Discord channel and just chat with us from all over the world is incredible to me. I don't know why I get such a kick when we get

reviews from other countries or people are like, Hey, I'm from New Zealand or I'm from India. We've had... I mean, I think literally we've had representation from just about every country. Yeah, no, very happy. Josue, by the way, I believe it's Joshua in Spanish.

And Josue, más vale tarde que nunca. Thank you. I know, nunca is nothing, and I do not know the rest. I only took four semesters in college. I really hope you didn't just insult somebody, Michael. No, I was just like, I'm listening to the podcast. You know, he said he just started listening. So it says better late than never.

Oh, there you go. Very nice. Or you said something you shouldn't have said, but nobody else will know. I will know if we have the expletive symbol on the episode and Apple reaches out and says, we can't air your stuff anymore. Oh, man. All right. Well, I think we are all done with housekeeping.

All right. So, guys, grab a rocket launcher and the closest car you can get your hands on. It's time to deep dive Saints Row. All right. Now, I did want to say here from the get go that we are going to be sharing some spoilers from the very beginning of Saints Row, just by nature of having to talk about it. I think we'll just kind of leave the first three to four hours open to talk about anything in this game. And then later in the show, we will make sure to give you guys a major spoiler warning.

And that's where we'll go into late game content, missions that we loved, things that were hilarious, things we wanted to share. And so just to let you guys know, we'll make sure to give you a major spoiler warning down the road. All right. Now, for anybody who is not terribly familiar with Saints Row, this is actually a series that goes all the way back to 2006. We had Saints Row, Saints Row 2, Saints Row the 3rd, Saints Row 4. There was also a standalone expansion called Gat Out of Hell. And Saints Row IV, the last full game, released all the way back in 2013. So this is actually a nine-year gap since the last main entry

when the series now got rebooted in August 22. Now, just a simple yes or no question for you guys. Did either of you guys play the original Saints Row games? I did not. Nope. Never played a minute of any of them. I own a copy because I was gifted a copy of Saints Row 2. It is still in the sealed package, which I feel.

Steven, thank you for that. I love the gift. It's been seven years. I haven't played it. Oh, very nice. I played the first three, and I own four, years i haven't played it oh very nice i played the first three and i own four but i never actually played it now with you guys not playing saints row what's like your impression of what the saints row games were uh discount grand theft auto

yeah i'm not really discounted i honestly i like i've seen videos So although I've never played a single minute of any of them, I always knew that they were over the top versions of Grand Theft Auto, but not as good quality as Grand Theft Auto. So more insanity, but not as good. Yeah, just as expensive, but a poor man's version from gameplay. It's like if Grand The auto meets fast and furious that's kind of what it is like this car is just gonna fly off an airplane why not why not have that happen but yeah that's about about my thoughts as well so what's your guys impression for why

the series was rebooted they were going downhill weren't they i know we talked about this i only know this because of you paul so I'm gonna sound I'm gonna sound educated here but I'm really not so don't buy into it but the series went so far off the rails with like fighting aliens and you become the president but then you have to like I like I all I know is that it went so far beyond the realm of like just absurdity that there was nowhere else for them to go at that point. So they had no choice at all but to be like, hey, we've got to start over somewhere. It went so big that if they made another one, it would have been a space game. And they're like, we can't do that. And they've already done it. They've already been in space. So yeah, this game escalated so quickly. Saints Row 1 was almost a lot like the reboot. You get caught in the middle of some gunfire and a couple of guys who are part of the Saints save you. So you join their gang and you try to take over the city. It's a little over the top for sure, but it's more or less grounded. And then by the time you hit Saints Row 4 and then get out of hell, I mean, they are making movies about Saints Row because you are so famous and popular.

You find out aliens are invading Earth. They destroy Earth while you're in space. You have to go back in time to restore earth then you're playing with a ouija board and satan pulls you into hell and says you have to marry his daughter and then you end up destroying satan so this is like where the saints row games went it just escalated so out of control they literally had nowhere left to go basically exactly what josh said so here we've got a hard reboot. I thought that Broforce was over the top.

Yeah. And Saints Row 4 and Get Out of Hell pretty much take the cake for, you know, taking things to beyond ridiculous. All right. So basically that brings us up to speed here for the reboot. The reboot really is more or less exactly like the original Saints Row, which I really hate the fact that these games have the same name. We've said this before with like God of War. These games that keep reusing the same title makes it almost impossible to Google information

or to find what you need on YouTube. So I'll just say Saints Row one for the really old one and then saints row for the new one if that works for you guys that makes sense in fact it was confusing i was talking to two of my friends a few nights ago that i was playing this game they were like oh like 20 years old on the xbox like the 360 and i'm like no no no it's it's the reboot oh i didn't know there was one that's what everyone told me everybody told me that oh wow how funny all right so saints row is an exclusive on epic so here is the description according to epic game store on pc as the future boss along with nina kevin and eli by your side you'll form the saints and take on los pinteros

the idols and marshall as you build your empire across the streets of Santo Alesso and battle for control of the city. Ultimately, Saints Row is the story of a startup company. It's just that the business the Saints are in happens to be crime. Experience the biggest and best Saints Row playground ever created. The unique, sprawling world of Santo Alesso is the backdrop for a wild, larger-than-life sandbox of thrilling side hustles, criminal ventures, and blockbuster missions as you shoot, drive, and wingsuit your way to the top. All right, now we're going to switch things up a little bit here for this deep dive. Josh, can you tell us a little bit about the opening of the story and the overall goal of Saints Row?

So basically, you are a group of friends that are just struggling to try to make it. You're starting off, you're trying to make rent. Life is tough. You get introduced to your friends. You're all sharing an apartment together. You are working for, as like the boss, the main character of the game, you are working for a security company. And it's like your first day on the job. And of course, you start to see a little bit of the over-the-topness of Saints Row right away because your first day on the job

as this recruit for this security company called Marshall, you have to try to bring in this criminal called the Nuali and you wind up ultimately like jumping on top of this fantastical Avengers looking spaceship and clinging to this with like one hand and bringing it down and making a name for yourself. And that kind of starts the whole game. You know, that's literally like the opening sequence of this game at that point. So you go home, you tell all your friends, hey, I had a crazy day. You then do a few missions for your boss and kind of make a name for yourself before things kind of fall apart a little bit.

And now you're struggling to figure out how you're going to pay your bills. All of your friends are basically the same as you. Nobody's really got their act together until, lo and behold, you have this bright idea. Let's become a gang. Let's just start a criminal empire guys get out your whiteboard get out your whiteboard what do you need a name and a logo and don't forget yeah i was gonna say don't forget the logo yeah um and then it just you know the game progresses from there uh i won't get into any spoilers yet but the entire point of this game is to build this criminal

empire with your group of friends who all kind of have specialties they all belong to different gangs in the city which i thought actually was kind of neat because they have ties to different you know gangs and activities and things like that in the beginning uh and then so that ties into the story a lot is like you start your own empire and how you deal with those gangs and such um and then that's basically it the game has just become a criminal and start this empire yeah become the greatest criminal you can be yeah yeah that's essentially what it is take over the city by any means necessary whether it's insurance fraud selling drugs transporting waste barrels and you're ultimately just a tie in the name of the game, because I never knew this, right, is that your gang is named The Saints.

And so the game is Saints Row at that point. And like I said, for somebody that never played on it, I didn't know where the name Saints Row came from. But if you were like me, there you go. And that's because your headquarters is in an abandoned church, which is also a callback to the original Saints Row. And that's where the Saints meet there. So that's kind of like where you get the name. I just kind of figured the first game was based in New Orleans.

That's just what I thought. New Orleans Saints Row. Yeah. All right. And then, Michael, you want to tell us a little bit about gameplay and how the game actually works? I don't really know how to do this yeah it's a lot to tackle so this is not a metroidvania it is not that is correct um it is an open world sandbox so i will try to not make too many comparisons to grand theft auto and that series in this but it's going to be inevitable because

it's it's a very similar type of game you take a lot of missions you have a whole bunch of things to do while you're driving around the city uh you can blow up almost anything you can wreck almost any car you can shoot just about anybody that you want to shoot in the streets when they die you take their money you amass an empire that kind of stuff so as far as the overall game and the story goes essentially about a few hours into the game you unlock what's called the empire board and everything that you're looking to accomplish in the game is is basically laid out on this map in front of you when you're at your headquarters and uh it you can just start a bunch of criminal ventures and do a whole bunch

of things uh looking at that board and all the things you do make you money and amass your fortune as you try to build the most super gang in the city. What's the city called again? I forget. But that city. The Dirt City. Santo Aliso. Yeah. Very dirty.

The Dirt City. Santo Aliso obviously means Dirt City in Spanish. There's some factions. There's the Marshals. There's some people called Pantera. There's daft punk also as you're playing he's not wrong okay wait a minute he's not wrong that was really good because at first i was like no you said it wrong michael and then the daft punk got me man

every time i'm playing it i'm like there's pet i'm like oh wait which i walk up you know because there's a whole bunch of different side things you can do. And this actually kind of plays into what I'm supposed to talk about is there's a whole bunch of side missions you can do and, you know, wrecking different factions and stuff. And one of the things you can do to earn experience and new abilities is just take out these factions who are on the corner or at a gas

station. Every time I pull up, I'm like, wait a minute. Is this Pantera or Daft Punk? Oh, they're wearing helmets and they have like a whole bunch of lights on them. That's Daft Punk. I'll take them out. They're actually they're actually called the idols, but they were Daft Punk? Oh, they're wearing helmets, and they have a whole bunch of lights on them. That's Daft Punk. I'll take them out. They're actually called the Idols, but they were Daft Punk in my mind. And Los Panteros, not Pantera.

And Los Panteros, yeah, which is basically muscle cars painted with flames on the side and monster trucks, which was my favorite part of the whole game, was the monster trucks. Anyways, I digress. But you also uh pretty much everything in this game that you do earns the experience and new abilities so almost anything in the game gives you rewards uh car upgrades abilities just about anything you do so the game truly rewards you for just playing it because everything you do gives you even if you side swipe a car or you get in a head-on collision with a car you're getting points for that that you can spend on something so that's really a lot of the gameplay there's

guns there's cars there's bicycles there's boats there's helicopters no spaceships so far at least i didn't play long enough no aliens um and almost everything is destructible so i think that basically covers a lot of the a lot of the high level stuff yeah yeah absolutely i think you did a good job there michael now we have to talk a little bit about character creation. Now, this is one thing that Saints Row has always taken. I don't know if seriously is the right word, but they have always intentionally given you a million options. You know how somewhere around 15 years ago, games started letting you add clown makeup or a a clown nose or like wild and crazy accessories. Saints Row is the first game I remember doing that. So anytime there was a new

Saints Row game, I would make my eight foot tall, 500 pound female who's wearing, you know, clown shoes and just like run around these cities beating people up. So I felt like we just needed to talk a little bit about character creation. Did you guys use preset characters or did you actually build your own? I built my own 100%. And you are right. I was actually kind of taken aback when I was starting the game. Yeah. And I saw the number of customizable options in the game. I was like, oh my goodness. And my first thought was people are going to create some incredible characters. They're going to copy... Kind of like we saw with Elden Ring, where people are making Shrek and all these other characters and stuff.

I feel like this is one of the best character creators in a game that I've seen in a long time. Yeah. And it was easy to use. I also created my own character the one thing i can say is is josh's point you can do anything it's so layered because at first you're just looking at you see okay body head stance voice and then as you go into it there's more options like yeah but then you click on you click on like face and you're like okay eyebrows okay i'll pick from some presets of eyebrows and you click on eyebrows and there's even more options like tilt, width, and it's like, oh my goodness, this is like how Bethesda does their stuff

when you can modify just about anything except a million times more. That being said, I normally spend hours creating a character. I spent like 20 minutes on this one. I tried not to get too down the rabbit hole. Not too far in the weeds. Yeah.

So not only can you build and create pretty wild characters, you can share them with the community. I don't know if you guys poked around at all. I grabbed a couple of screenshots that I want to show you guys of characters that people have made. So between the character creation and the clothing and the outfits that you can buy in the game, people have done an incredible job.

So I'm going to share these with you guys. I want you to take a look and tell me what you think about some of these creations oh we got heisenberg this is what i'm saying like yeah you can dude that looks exactly like him yeah and the joker goodness oh it's a good mask yeah like look at, look at the mask. Click on that one. That is Jim Carrey, the mask, though, which is insane. The cheekbones and the chin. Like, it looks exactly like from the mask.

Okay, Paul, this one's just indecent. I can't believe you threw that in there, Paul. He's got a human Pooh bear with no pants on, and there's a blur. There is a blur on the screen. He's only wearing a red shirt. Yes, and Pooh bear is anatomically correct, ladies and gentlemen. There's a blur. There is a blur on the screen. He's only wearing a red shirt. Yes. And Pooh Bear is anatomically correct, ladies and gentlemen. He's in a crop top.

Oh, my goodness. Wow. He's got a very hairy belly. Yeah, we got She-Hulk in here. Two of my favorite ones here for last. Michael Jackson. You almost think it's a picture of him. It looks so good.

That is really, really well. I don't have the patience for that man no but like kudos to these people man oh doctor the doctor doctor disrespect well you can download all these immediately and play as these characters yeah no so i just sorted by the highest rated and just started looking through them all. And yeah, you can just click and download it. They will also automatically buy those outfits for you. So that way you get the full aesthetic right off the bat if you want. And yeah, how cool is that? I feel like people did such an amazing job with the character creation. Except for maybe Heisenberg.

He kind of looks like a discount street magician in New York. That's the Heisenberg that ate the pizza versus tossing it i love that he's got the black you know uh whatever kind of hat that's called a bowler hat i think it's a bowler yeah i don't think it's a bowler hat that he wears in the show i gotta look this up now because the bowler hat's the round top hats well the fedora the bowler hat well he's he's wearing a bowler here in this picture but in the show he's not wearing a bowler hat's for the round top. Mike, you know you're a hat. Well, the fedora, the bowler hat. Is that not a bowler? Well, he's wearing a bowler here in this picture, but in the show, he's not wearing a bowler. Yeah, a bowler is a round hat.

You're right. That's not a bowler. Well, they did the best they could, Michael. Fine. Okay, I accept. I accept. Discount street magician Heisenberg. Fair enough.

So I feel like whenever you talk about any kind of GTA-style open-world game, you have to talk about transportation because inevitably you have to drive, fly, pilot your way between objectives, right? So there's always a lot of traverse around the map. I thought that we could talk a little bit about vehicle mechanics, some of the other ways to get around the map. We don't want to share like late end game spoilers where you do find some outlandish science fictiony kind of uh travel but let's just talk mostly about like vehicles the wingsuit and the helicopter uh what do you guys want to talk about here as far as transportation i don't know how deep you want to go into cars but like do we want to talk about the modification of the cars

and stuff because it's kind of gran turismo where you take the cars and you can modify any car to do lots of things it's one of the things that i found kind of cool about this game is any car in the game that you pick up has a special ability and so i i maxed out my cars you can keep 10 cars in your garage i maxed them up real fast um and unlocked special abilities it was basically my my my way of spending all my money but the cars cars were really, really fun. Spike it to Josh now for your next transportation or more on cars. I think I've mentioned this before, but one of my favorite things in Grand Theft Auto is to just drive around. The driving in Grand Theft Auto is so incredibly good that I'll just cruise around, man. I'll run people over. I didn't admit to that,

if anybody asks. But it's just great. And in Saints Row, the driving is good. It is not Grand Theft Auto levels good, but it is still an enjoyable endeavor. It's a little bit more arcadey, in a sense. The cars do feel a bit more floaty. But I really enjoy driving in Saints Row. And cars do feel a bit more floaty, but I really enjoy driving in Saints Row. And that kind of surprised me because I thought, well, this isn't going to hold a candle to GTA V. And it doesn't necessarily, but it's just fun. There's nothing like hitting the handbrake and drifting around a corner and not slowing down a whole lot or finding you know the ramps that are in the environment that are you know are obviously there and then just seeing how long i can go airborne

smashing into cars and it's like if you hit them hard enough they actually explode which i thought was neat you know like yeah there is a lot there it is a cheap man's version of gta driving but there is still something very fun to be had there with that so i want to disagree real fast which is the cheap bands i don't think it's cheap bands at all i thought they intentionally made it more arcadey and i thought it was almost more fun in a certain way because you have all these special abilities you can use i thought it was more fun to have different cars that do different things um but yeah i thought it was easier to control a car but yeah it's definitely a little more arcane. Yeah, the driving in Saints Row is where

you almost never have to lay off the gas. You can fly around these corners really quick. One of the things I love in Saints Row, and Michael, you kind of alluded to it earlier, is that almost anything you do, including while driving, they give you different challenges. So how long can you drive in the opposite lane? Like that's fun in and of itself. So as you're driving, you know, GTA has more detailed worlds. They have better cars, better handling, but Saints Row give you these little nuggets that make the driving fun. So, you know, can I drive in the wrong lane for two straight minutes? Well, let's find out. How many near misses can I get on my way to the next marker? And the one thing that I think is really neat is the side swiping. So every game like this has where you are driving next to someone who pull out guns and you have to fight them back.

Usually it's a matter of pulling out your gun and shooting them. And you can do that in saints row but they also added where you can ram your car almost like a dodge mechanic left or right into vehicles and drive them off the road or cause damage and so the fact that they give you more options for the vehicle combat i thought was actually pretty cool yeah like one of the things you can do too with that sidesw swipe mechanic is if you hit a car just right like on the rear quarter panel you can actually do the pit maneuver which is great you can spin them out and so that works great for missions where you're trying to run away from someone and you're like man stop i just want to get somewhere you know whereas in grand theft auto you just have to shoot them or they keep coming in this one you just do a quick pit

maneuver and you're gone yeah or you can crawl on top of your car by pressing and holding the button to get in or out and you will lay on the hood and you're free to shoot rocket launchers or guns or one of the neat things is you can jump into the air and hop into your wingsuit or if you're on top of a building already you can use your wingsuit to fly around the city and i thought the wingsuit was a lot of fun in this game it's it's never a chore getting anywhere on this map there are no 10 minute drives across a wild map i feel like no matter how far away markers are you can get there in about two to three minutes and it's still pretty fun the the wingsuits fun i i want to say one thing about the cars that I wish they had done just a smidge better,

is that the variety of vehicles is there, but the driving on them, they're very, very similar. They're copy-pasted. It's like, guys, you almost nailed it. Could you just not make this little sedan be slow and clunky and make this sports car like sporty and fast and there is a difference but it's so negligible that it's kind of like i found myself fine to just drive like a family van man like i was driving minivans because it was like what difference does it make at this point you're 100 right you are not like in gta trying to find the infernus or trying to find the banshee or oh was that an infernus i gotta turn around and go steal it no if you hop into a little i think

they were called like oasis it kind of looks like a ford taurus and it's like it drives 95 as well as the best cars in the game so i i never bought vehicles like you michael i just stole the closest vehicle i could get my hands on oh i never i never bought a car i just what i would do is i'd steal a car and i'd bring it into my garage and then i'd upgrade them and i think that's the whole point is that all the cars don't they don't turn very well unless you're using the space bar which is the drift which by the way if you're playing this game and you're playing with mouse and keyboard you should probably play with controller because it's i imagine there's a sensitivity on the stick i was turning with um a and d and it it's like you either get on or off for the turn you know it's

like an old nes nes um controller where it's either push yes or no but uh what i found is that as you started putting points and money into cars there was a wild difference like i had cars that had completely different turning radiuses abilities uh my favorite car was actually... It looked like a 5 Series BMW. But I put NOS on this thing and off-road tires and a tow package. And dude, that thing would slide around corners like crazy, jump over anything. And I found that there was... But you're right, though. If you're just driving around and stealing random vehicles, there's not a huge difference. But if you put the time and the investment into actually upgrading your cars, it makes a big difference.

And don't you think we're not going to talk more about the tow packages later? But I figure we're going to hold that off until spoilers. You can use a tow cable and you can grab objects, other cars. There's a lot of towing in this game that play really well. Wrecking ball basically comes to mind. Yeah, or Fast Five. I was going to say fast five is exactly what i thought yeah clearly inspired by fast five yeah uh yeah you also unlock a helicopter pad pretty early so you can just run right outside the church hop into a helicopter and beeline your way to anywhere in the map which i thought was

kind of nice and have a blast crashing the helicopter multiple times too because it's hilarious and fun like all these games or just jump out of it yeah all right so let's talk about the game's gunplay and combat i think this might be the weakest part of saints row but i was curious to get your guys take it's terrible it's not just the weakest part it's terrible terrible. I thought when I, like, I remember booting up Saints Row for the first time and hopping in, I'd never played one. I was like, I know this is a reboot. You know, they've spent a lot of time on this. I thought the city was fine. I was like, Ooh, like, look at this. This is a big city, man. This is very, I'm good. We're going to keep referencing GTA, even though I know that may not be fair, but it's like, it's kind of GTA-ish in size. And then it was like, okay, well, let me do the shooting.

And I found it to be hot garbage. It is my number one biggest complaint of this game. So I'm glad that we're getting it out of the way right now. But the aiming is terrible. I'm used to like fine aiming with my mouse and in saints row, it just, there's something very strange about the sensitivity or the mouse acceleration or something where it does not want to allow you to manually aim very well. And that was the thing. I had no idea. Right. I'm trying to aim. Yeah. You don't aim. You do that move where you go lock,

shoot, and you do like a burst fire, lock, shoot, lock, shoot, lock, shoot.

And then you're hitting all the other games like that. Yeah. GTA games are like that too. I mean, dude, this threw me off like for honestly a solid, like 20 minutes. I was in the settings looking, going,

what am I doing wrong? What's wrong with my mouse right now? Why can I not like just snap to somebody and shoot him in the head? And that's when I started realizing that right click is literally lock on. So then it was like, well, wait a minute. And then it's too easy.

And then it's too easy. Yeah, it's very easy. And then so it was just this pattern of right, left, right, left, right, left. Just click, click, click, click, click, click. And my guys just sounding people. And then I got kind of I'm not going to lie. I kind of went, well, this sucks, man. Yeah.

And I think that it's the harder two of the five difficulty settings don't have that lock aim, but nobody starts playing a game for the first time on the hardest setting, typically, right? Because I did see that because I was kind of disappointed, too. I'm like, am I playing this game on too easy of a mode? Nope, that's just the way it works. And also, it's like it'll lock on to random parts. If you're closer to their body, it'll lock on to your body. So I'd unlock and then move the mouse up a little bit and then lock on their head because i know that if you shoot someone in the chest you're gonna be shooting them for like 30

seconds you shoot them in the head you shoot them like for like five seconds but people are not realistically dying in this game when you're shooting at them um and then if you did try to if you did try to auto or aim on your own josh i know exactly what you're talking about it almost seemed like it was floaty it was fighting you it literally was like no you're not allowed to shoot them in the head manual yeah which is funny because i found the movement in this game for the characters to be significantly better than gta like gta's movement third person is really kind of clunky and funky and like you know it does that witcher thing where like i'm just trying to walk through this doorway but my character keeps doing this weird twisty turnaround move this one didn't have that.

You were able to turn and go the direction you want. And I'm like, this is great. But then it lost it in the gunplay. Yeah. You know, the gunplay is definitely weak. However, they do make fun of the fact that the boss is so good at murdering people. So it's like the fact that the game is easy is almost built into the story. Like, your character literally says several times throughout the game that he's really

good at murdering. Yeah. So this game is definitely not a hard challenge. This is a game that you play casually for fun. It's like a more casual GTA and GTA games aren't terribly difficult either, but this one's even a little bit easier, but it's a little more over the top kind of like just for fun now the game does throw a fair amount of weapons at you you've got melee weapons like slud sludge hammers sludge hammers sledgehammers i want to know what a sludge hammer is uh stun batons spiked bats you've got pistols, SMGs, which I really hated, rifles, shotguns, grenade and rocket launchers, snipers.

And you do get some very special weapons late in the game, like a certain kind of football that we will cover later in the spoilers. And the game has no cover system. So how would you guys describe the gunplay? Because you're kind of just running around in the open at all times. I think we just did. It's bad. Yeah. So to kind of delve just a little bit deeper on that, because I hate the aiming system,

number one. But number two, I hate this system that all enemies take like 40 bullets to kill. Like everything in the game is just a bullet sponge. And it's okay in small doses, but there's multiple sequences in the game where fighting your way into something or out of something means you have to wade through like 50 to like 70 bad guys. It can be a lot. And there's no cover. And there's no healing in the fighting in this game, except for a takedown, which is where you do like a, you know, they're cool. I like them. I think they're neat. But in animation where you basically just murder somebody in some fantastical way, and then that gives you your health back.

So the issue that I found is you can't really take cover. You're wading into 30 enemies at a time. You're just, you're unloading magazine after magazine into these characters and you're getting shot the whole time so it was almost just this it was almost like a timer is like am i going to be able to kill enough guys fast enough to get the takedown so that i can heal or am i just going to take enough chip damage that i ultimately die before that happens and did you ever upgrade your weapons it's very easy to miss that you can do that in the game. I'll be honest. I didn't even know you could upgrade your cars. Michael was talking about upgrading his car. This game has a lot of stuff.

But see, that's not my thing. For me, it kind of goes with cosmetics with you and me, Paul. Unless I'm playing a racing game, I don't care about upgrading my cars. And unless I'm playing like Call of Duty or something, I don't really care about like my weapon attachments and stuff like that. I just rather find a new weapon to use at that point, you know, and so it's like I did get some really good weapons and the time to kill did go down. It's just, it's the whole system as a whole that I have an issue with in that regard, because it's a very large part of the game that I found to be thoroughly unenjoyable. Hmm. Yeah. See, I think what the game's idea was and whether or not they were successful is up for debate, but rather than putting you behind cover, that would not feel like it would be congruous

with the rest of Saints Row. They want you to play aggressively. You're out in the open. You're not ducking behind anything. You're just murking fools left and right. You're doing finishers to do your health. You're jumping to the next guy. The fights are definitely action-packed. Whether or not you find it fulfilling is another story.

But I upgraded the pistols and rifles multiple times to where nothing was a bullet sponge. I was almost going to go the other way where outside of bosses, I was killing guys in four bullets to the head. I mean, they were just going down so fast. I was sometimes switching off just to run around with melee weapons because I thought that those were sometimes really fun where you could like charge them up and hit guys. But this game has just so

many mechanics i feel like it would be so easy to miss out on an an awful lot in that regard uh what about you michael it sounds like you weren't terribly crazy at all about gunplay so i i have to i have to break the subject for a minute because audience paul is probably the nicest human being you'll ever meet ever this is to hear him to hear him say merc fools i had to mute my microphone because i was afraid i was gonna snort i was laughing so hard so anyways uh back to the show he's working fools go ahead yeah I was gonna say if we're on the subject of merkin fools I was going

to say the music in this game kind of going back to the driving yeah the the hip-hop station was my favorite and don't think I didn't get really excited every time party up by DMX came on the

radio man I got so excited I was like yes I wish we had like this video on all of us when we play these games i just want to see paul just getting down on oh yeah if i got some howard then it's gonna be quick oh yeah wrapping with dmx the whole time i'm playing it's great oh so um yeah no i the other annoying part about uh because i also didn't know that you could upgrade your guns i totally missed that

and i use guns a lot because you have to use guns a lot in this game i found that in between all of the things that josh was talking about you know uh rolling around having to stand in the open make sure that you tune takedowns make sure that you're not you know we'll fight in this timer i'm also almost eternally out of ammo so as i'm doing this i'm running around grabbing like okay killed four guys i'm gonna run grab their ammo off the ground real fast yes it's rifle ammo i can use that and then go back to shooting them again and then every once in a while one of them would just come up behind you because you don't see them and they'd kick you down you gotta use mash the control button stand back up and then it takes like ungodly long it takes like three seconds to get off the ground which seems like forever when you're

getting shot by 50 people um i didn't mind it as much as josh did but it wasn't it just seems like it just seems like it could have been fleshed out a little bit better and there could have been a little bit more logic applied to this like okay i get your point paul that we're gonna go in and just work fools all day long i can't even say it with straight face um but at the same point like but that's i know it's arcadey but it makes more sense to you put so much into this game like the cars and stuff and the game, the world, and just put a little bit more time into making the gunplay a little bit better. It's such a big part of the game.

It's a huge part of the game. Yeah, arguably, it's not any improvement over GTA V, which is so old, you would think that there would be some kind of improvement with these open world shooters. Yeah. But in any case, since we're about halfway through the episode, we're going to go ahead and take a short break and we will be right back. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points.

Visit Superstore.ca to get started. right guys we are back i know that this isn't exactly the most exciting topic to talk about but i feel like one of the biggest criticisms about saints row was from a technical aspect so i was curious to know if you guys encountered a lot of bugs. I had more than a few. Did you? What did you have? So, at the very beginning of the game, I had a bug where my character would randomly change outfits. Like, not as part of the game. Okay, so it's the very opening scene that Josh was talking about where I'm jumping on top of this flying Avengers, like, hella plane plane like a harrier jet or whatever and i'm i'm wearing my my full-on combat armor that that the marshals give you and then a cut scene happens and i'm

wearing like a jacket and a cowboy hat and and and boots and it just makes no sense that's a feature yeah and it was yeah right and it was it was is that actually a feature is that not a bug no okay i was like that was weird because she changed my character was i played a female like my character went to a country club i don't know what's going on right and then it just changed back um at the end of the scene as well the cut scene she's magically back in her combat man she just changes fast the other thing is i walked out of the church more than a couple of times, and normally there's a couple of cars parked out front, and I would walk out there, and in front of

my church or my house, there's 50 of my exact cars just sprinkled everywhere. Really? Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. You had that too, Josh? Which one do I get into? All of them. I was going to say, I know this game, a lot of people were talking about how buggy the

release of this game was. I had no bugs. I had none. Zero. At all. The only bug, and it made me chuckle, was what Michael said. I didn't have 50 of them, but I had six copies of the main truck that you start the game with just parked out front.

Wow. And I could literally get into any of the six of them. And it was like, why do I have so many trucks right here? What's going on? And then that was... But I had no bugs. So the complaint about it being buggy, I don't know if that was maybe pre-day one patch or what, but none for me. It was better than I was expecting, for sure sure it was small stuff i i was expecting a hot mess and it wasn't a hot mess yeah i don't know if there was like a last minute patch or something because i tried to avoid everything i could until i beat the game and then i hopped on youtube and i was seeing people walk into chairs and then the chair would damage them and

they would die i saw people fall through the floor of the whole earth and just keep falling forever i saw where one guy said his money randomly went to zero um there were like all kinds of bugs like that that's called getting robbed again that might be a feature to say and throw right yeah i i saw zero bugs and normally that bites me the worst. Like when we all got cyberpunk, I was posting pictures left and right of all the bugs I had. So I was very pleasantly surprised for once. I did not have any, not even the six copies of your truck out front.

Yeah. The only thing that I would say also in addition that I just, it's not really a bug. It's just annoying. So I'll cover it now real fast is when you're going to do character creation and you're going to do this many cut scenes, every single time that I make a character, it looked like Skeletor when they finally started talking. All of the characters around me, like your companions.

I know Kevin's one of them. I forget the two names. They look great. Like the mesh and stuff is great. Yeah, Mina and Eli. Those people. They look great. They're talking.

They look all natural. But if you create a custom character, like your character, like the mouth is weird looking. The eyes are weird looking. And like they look normal when they're walking around. But when they're actually moving and talking, it's just strange looking. So kind of funky. And if you've got a giant five-gallon bucket hat, or if you're eight feet tall, like things are going to clip through walls and doorways yeah i was wearing a taco hat for a while by the way which was great nice all right well

this is where we're going to get into spoiler territory so let's talk about missions funny moments late game unlocks criminal ventures i definitely want to get into some of those so if you want to avoid all spoilers at this point, go ahead and jump forward 11 minutes and 28 seconds. I don't know why that kills me every time because when I go back later and fill that in, it just, it sounds so stupid, but I always want that when I listen to podcasts, I'm like, I don't know how far to jump. And if I jump too little, you end up hearing things. So hopefully it'll actually serve some people. You can edit this out, but it might be better to just say jump to the timestamp because on most podcast apps, you're just scrubbing through the time bar. But it's not the same if you have no ads. Ad-free, you can't do that.

Oh, right. See, this is why you're the smart one, Paul. And we're leaving this in the episode. Oh, man. He leaves it in just because... We try not to compliment Paul, and when it happens, man...

This is what happens. He lords over us. And for the record, we never cut anything out of our episodes. Whatever we say, we record in one take, and it all goes in there unless we talk over each other. I might take one of us out so you can actually hear what we say. But no, whatever we say goes. So let's talk about spoilers.

What do you guys want to talk about first? Okay, we got to hit the good stuff. We got to talk about the LARP quest. Yes. Josh, I want a whole game of nothing but this storyline. It was so good. This was my favorite part of this entire game. I'm not going to lie. I remember the very first quest. So basically, Eli likes to LARP, which is live action role playing. And he talks like he's a knight, verily this, and doth have to join me here.

Huzzah! Yeah. And your guy at first is kind of like, what the? And you're like, all right, well, you're my friend. I'll play along. And then your guy gets super into it. He gets sucked in. The whole game changes because instead of murking fools, now you're nerfing fools. So you've got a nerf gun.

And as you're running around, like, shooting people with a nerf gun, your guy's going pew, pew. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew people with a Nerf gun, your guy pretends to merc somebody. So he'll pretend to punch him in the face. He'll go down and he'll do the speed bag on the family jewels. And then he'll rip out their heart and sit there and hold it in front of them. And because they're roleplaying, the other guy falls down or something. It is the most hilarious thing in a game I have seen in a long time man

dude the best part of it is at the very end you go in to take out the dust king and that's the person who's like over the whole thing if you've ever seen the movie role models it's like Ken Jong's character where they're like high and mighty over all the other LARPers takes it way too seriously.

Yes. And you walk in and he's got a throne of, I think it's like soda cans, like the 12 packs. Yeah. And it's in a gas station. And so he gives you a little bit of a speech and then you shoot him with your Nerf gun. And he runs to the counter, like by the hot dogs, grabs a ketchup bottle, starts spraying it everywhere, and he has the most overly

dramatic death I have ever heard in a video game. Don't think I'm not going to include the audio here right now. I was rolling, laughing after it. It is a full 45 seconds until this guy actually finally dies. And your character is finding all sorts of funny poses to

continue to shoot him as he's dying dude whatever i don't know who came up with this storyline and who put this in the game but give that person a raise because it is my favorite part of all of the saints row game to be honest like there's so many over the top things that happen in this quest line you get a card that i think they're trying to reference the balrog from like lord of the rings but they call it the bowel rod yeah and it's got this gigantic like worm on the top of it but i can't help but think that's a giant intestine because they're calling it the bowel rod yeah at the same time like there was just so many things that were making me crack up during that

quest line man oh it's fantastic even when you're running through the tunnels you're shooting the anal polyps and i talked about how it was it was for like cancer awareness month so there's there's a lot of jokes in there about like colon cancer and that kind of stuff oh man oh yeah the the larping missions are great castle kraken is the criminal venture there where you build so the whole goal is you're always trying to win more duct tape so that way you can build more of your cardboard armor which was also funny uh what about the eureka baiter did you guys build that because you have so many ventures to choose i don't know which ones we all picked the eureka baiter is where you get your hands on stolen Marshall tech and you

get like a hoverboard from back to the future. Oh, I did not do that one at all. I needed to do that one though. That sounds incredible. Okay. Okay. So this is,

this is a great one. They tell you, we keep stealing these boxes, but we got to calibrate and test these things and we want you to do it. So they give you a hoverboard and it, it plays great. And they tell you, okay, so go ahead and take it over the water to shore and you're like oh this thing works on water and they're like well of course that thing's got power so there's like all these

back to the future quotes and then basically you then um get a shield that you can use for the rest of the game where it draws a giant curtain in the air, but it lets you see through buildings and you can shoot people that are through walls or through buildings, which is kind of neat. But then the last one was my favorite. It was called the Thrust Buster and it's a football that's a sticky grenade. So what you do is it's full of rocket propulsion fuel. So you throw it on someone, it sticks, and they go flying like a balloon with a hole in it. But they'll fly 200 feet in the air and then plummet to their death and they're screaming the whole time. And so I was just chucking these footballs at everybody, sending them to the moon, and it was just cracking me up

the whole time. if you pick like certain ventures some of them are fantastic like the eureka baiter some of them are really dull like the repo like the repo business where you just go find a car and you drive it back like that was kind of boring the there's the i did the toxic barrels one because i thought it sounded funny initially where it's like you know you're just disposing of toxic waste right in the middle of the city. Yeah. And it's radioactive.

It's just a pool. And so I was like, well, this sounds fun. But then it's really just trying to drive this slow truck through the city without crashing into anything. Yeah. I thought it was going to be fun. And then it just kind of became a little bit mundane, to be honest with you.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of really good quests in this game it is one of the better parts of the game in my opinion like i kind of trashed on the gunplay but the quests and the variety of quests and some of the over-the-top things that you can do i i thought was really great um i really enjoyed like the helicopter attack helicopter missions like you know that was i thought was a lot of fun because it was very over the top. But there's nothing like locking those rockets on and then just seeing them fly down and stuff. So there's definitely some satisfying stuff there, too.

It's just the problem is they ruined me with the Castle Kraken and the LARP mission. That set the bar so high that there was really nothing else that was like oh well this is a close second because everything you do from there you're you're you're setting it against that bar that's been set or holding it against that exactly i i had some fun creating a drug empire out of taco trucks um which was great and i got a nice i got a nice taco hat yeah and i think that i think that in that case like i think i made it more fun because the whole time i'm thinking well insert rv instead of taco truck and i'm basically heisenberg so every time i did one of those missions i would completely change

my character's outfit into something unrecognizable go steal the truck and then just change afterwards which i think i made it more fun than it really was but it it's kind of cool that it does kind of play to the fact that you do have a lot of options, which I do like about the game, is that there's so many different ways you can make money and so many different ventures. And I clearly haven't scratched the surface on many of them because I didn't ever experience the sticky football one that Paul was talking about.

Alice didn't know you could upgrade guns. So there's a lot more to play. There's a lot. I also wanted to talk about boot hill now you may not remember that's what it's called but this is the part of the main story when you realize that you're building your empire but you have to raise more awareness and that's when they tell you oh yes why don't you participate in boot hill it's kind of like Club, except it's streamed online. And it's all these guys. I call it the murder circus. That's why I couldn't think of it.

I'm like, Boot Hill. I'm like, what's the murder circus, man? And that's what Eli says. Eli jumps in and goes, Fight Club? More like murder circus. And so then Kevin is like, yeah, if we participate, everyone's going to see us. They're going to know we're the real deal. And he's almost like trying to talk the boss into it. I't know you're the one who have to do this what do you

think y'all had me at murder circus y'all had me at murder circus yeah and so then you get to play basically in a real life battle royale i mean that's really all it is on like this abandoned island and you are just running around killing everybody that that mission i i did laugh quite a bit as well the mission also pays you a lot of money that you can use to upgrade cars there's just there's a lot of funny ones the insurance fraud venture i thought was pretty funny like you and i worked in the insurance field for a little while like throwing yourself in front of cars to make money was pretty funny as well. And that goes all the way back to the first Saints Row.

You could do that as well. Yes, I didn't know that either. But I thought when that came up, I was like, wait, I have to get hit by cars? Like, really? Okay. Oh, man, it's too funny. Anything else you guys want to talk about spoiler-wise? I got one last thing.

I also really enjoyed the mission where there is a wanted app so basically if you ever need to like kill or capture someone you can just pay and put them on this wanted app and so somebody puts you in there and all of a sudden every single person in the city is trying to kill you it's kind of like that scene in john wick when i was gonna say i felt like it was a john wick yes or not a hundred percent like the continental yes you're just driving and all of a sudden every single car is hitting you and everyone's shooting at you and you have to like hack your way into the app and remove yourself but that's just kind of like uh just a small picture of what this game is like oh you also use the toe cable to grab the

last idol yes in the port-a-potty i thought the port-a-potty one was really funny you're trying to get information from one of the like uh rival gang members and he's in a port-a-potty yeah and so you attach the toe cable to that and then you basically have to just swing him around in that porta potty until he until he gets tired of getting pooped on i guess and like and finally tells you where somebody's at oh man too funny all right well now that we're done with spoilers here that is a little bit about the game from our perspective josh you got some community reviews people have left i do we normally go to steam on this but this game is exclusive to the Epic Games Store if you're playing it on PC.

And even though Epic Games did recently start a kind of review system, you're not allowed to actually write a review. You can just leave whether you think it's fun and things like that. So we had to go to Metacritic, which is what we do sometimes on games like this. So I did go to Metacritic, which is what we do sometimes on games like this. So I did go to Metacritic.

I found a... I tried to take a very good review, a very bad review, and then two in the middle in this case, because it's Metacritic's rating system. You just know right away whether it's a good one or a bad one. So I tried to cover a little bit of everything for people here. All right. So this first one, they rate this a seven. Remember Metacritic is a scale of zero to 10 using decimals. This one is a seven and it says it's not terrible. It's not great, but it is enjoyable. My only faults would be enemy sponges and gunplay is bad, but it's nothing that can't be fixed. Enjoyable sandbox exploration, serious with a touch of stupid. It's a reboot, reboot not a remake not sure if half the reviewers even played it to be honest i basically completely agree with everything that's in there yeah it's

not great it is far from bad i found it to be thoroughly enjoyable it's cringy at times some of the storyline is really bad and stupid i totally get that but i think it's like it's a straight solid seven i'd maybe even bump it slightly higher but i think it's a like it's a straight solid seven i'd maybe even bump it slightly higher but i think that's very fair um all right so this next one they rated a five and it says saints row was never going to please anyone its tone is consistently inconsistent its characters are one-dimensional and the gameplay is from 2010 what saints row needed was a drastic makeover drenched in purple with reimagining of the old characters people loved get out of town or or

get out of hell sorry i read that wrong provided a good ending to recreate saints row from scratch but the devs missed that opportunity despite all that the game is competent just sadly very boring and dated with a huge lack of identity i think that's also very fair it's um it's a little harsh but it's fair but harsh i feel like the other one was fair but beneficial and then this one was fair but harsh um and then we're gonna get into a beneficial and harsh uh so that's why i kind of tried to run the gamut here. That goes off with us at first, then it really hits us. Well, this one's going to hurt, so strap in.

Alright, this person rated it a 3, and it says, got so many hours of fun in the older Saints Row series, but this new game is a huge disappointment. Dead gameplay, flat characters, as well as a flat story, and even the old Saints Row games weren't about the story.

And they still have a more meaningful lore with fun and crazy ideas. This game has not any of them. I can't recommend this game, even if bugs are fixed. This is not a Saints Row game. Sad to see a game dev team kill a game like this. Okay. I mean, I think a lot of people will probably say that i mean every saints row game plays a little bit different and i feel like this series has always been kind of polarizing

and they're never gonna please everyone it is what it is it'll be great for some it'll be bad for others i will agree that the characters are very one-dimensional like what do you know about kevin other than he doesn't wear a shirt what do you know about Kevin other than he doesn't wear a shirt? What do you know about Eli other than he likes to dress nice and he wants to be a businessman. You don't know anything about these characters outside of like one phrase, but you're not playing it for the story. It's you're playing it for the open world and for the fun and the criminal activities that you do.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Okay. And then this last one, this person rated it a 10 and it says game is great. Don't believe all the hate out there.

Co-op is tons of fun and gameplay is tons of fun. Haven't experienced that many bugs either. The AI is weak. That's for sure. But the game is fun. That's the point. I think in the end. Okay.

Yeah, I get it. AI is weak. Yeah. So, okay, I get it. AI is weak. Yeah. So, okay. I will say this. A lot of the 10s were people saying this game did get... Well, actually, I don't want to spoil anything.

So, okay. So what we do now is we always guess what we think the overall score is. And usually that's on Steam, which is 0 to 100. On Metacritic, it is 0 to 10. And so I always write down my guess before I actually start looking up reviews just to be fair with things. But on a scale of 0 to 10,

what do you guys think the overall rating is on this game? Are there decimals? There are decimals, yeah. Okay. I feel like this could be anywhere uh across the board yeah uh i'm gonna say i think it's gonna be a 6.2 that's my guess okay 6.2 for paul i'm scared i'm really scared on this one i mean the thing is is that it's funny with these games because the early reviews said so much the thing is is that it's funny with these games

because the early reviews said so much about like oh it's it's trash when it comes to bugs it's buggy this and that i think a lot of people are going to compare it to grand theft auto which unfortunately the last grand theft auto issue was gta5 which is heralded and loved like crazy so i don't think paul's too far off i'm gonna go a little higher though because i think some people are going to rate it a little bit higher just because they're gonna try and it's kind of like what people do on imdb like oh this movie's great give it a 10 when we know it's not a 10 the last guy gave it a 10 he knows it's not a 10 but he gave it a 10 try and bring the score up i'm gonna say 6.8 and just roll the dice there and say it's but i don't i don't think it's i don't think it's loved so okay that's funny we're all fairly close to each other to be honest i guess 7.2 um so i was actually

the highest out of the bunch of us i'm not super familiar with metacritic scoring system like steam i get you know what i mean a lot more so i'm like well what's wait what's is anything over an eight considered good like under an eight is okay like i don't know. So I just kind of went what I thought was a safe guess. I guess 7.2. The actual on this... And just to be clear so that somebody's going to go to Metacritic and look, Metacritic always divides the ratings by platform. And even though we all played on PC, PC score was a lot lower. I think that might have been due to the buggy. So I went with the PlayStation rating because it was a little bit more fair and higher and that was a three and that was one of the better ones to be honest guys so um this game did get review bombed like it seems like almost every game does nowadays which is stupid stop review bombing things if

you don't like it you don't like it that's fine rings of power don't review bombing yeah i mean you know just if you don't like it that's okay but you don't review bomb something just because but then what we're seeing is like every good like 10 was basically like i thought this game was average but i'm giving it a 10 to counteract some of the review bombings yeah so basically, ratings that we all rely on mean nothing anymore. So what was the rating on PC? 2.6.

2.6. Yuck. Yeah. To be fair, it's kind of a small sample size. There's only 396 ratings. I mean, that's true. So you're pulling out kind of the trolls who are going to review bomb it. You are. You are. That's a bad that's a three is not fair i will say that a three is not fair um we'll get into what we think of the

game here in just a second but i don't think a three is fair either i thought i thought that i was actually going to get to finally do a pickup line because i thought i felt really good about this one and i lost as usual well paul i think this is this in a row. Three in a row. That's a pattern. Oh, man. Michael, we got to up our game the next one. I would say he was cheating, but he guessed a 6.2. Yeah. Which was way off.

I was way off. I would never accuse Paul of cheating, by the way. All right, Paul. Well, bring us into this next segment, buddy. All right. Let's hit that music. Hey there, Nina. Can I have your picture so i can show santa what i want for christmas all right this is make love marry or murder this is where all three of us give this game our

individual rating is this game marriage material you should pick it up highly recommended you can have a lot of fun get a lot of hours out of it is it make love potential where it's kind of on the border maybe you should buy it maybe not maybe wait for steam sale maybe play it for a couple hours and then drop it or is it murder material are you gonna take it to the murder circus so michael i feel like i have zero take on what you would give it here. I'm very curious to find out. Oh, it's funny. I can probably guess both ears. I should write them down.

Mine is... Here's the thing about the game, right? Aside from the fact that my character looks like she was talking like a bunch of marbles moving around under pizza dough, it was... Overall, the visuals of the game were really good. I liked the game as far as um the grand theft auto-esque of it if you will like it was fun to steal cars it was fun to joy ride i did put a lot more time into a lot of side stuff like the main story was fine my issue with the main story we already kind of brought up i did not give two poops about these characters like

even even five six hours in the game i'm like am i gonna learn anything that gets me to actually kind of buy into that and i'm like okay at least now we know that we're just trying to make an empire out of crime that gives me something before that i did not care at all about the story of this game and i'm very story driven so immediately um marrying this game is out because i care too much about the story that being said i don't think it was terrible i'm gonna make love to the game because uh the one thing that i really did like about the game is i granted that it's 60 bucks right it's a flagship priced game which is rough but i think you can get a couple hundred hours of fun out of this game to

be honest with you because there's so much stuff to do i i really thoroughly enjoyed just driving looking on my map and being like i can do something on the mini map right here. And sometimes it was more stuff than I thought I was going to buy off the chew. I had some fun with just roaming around and doing stuff. Beating up Pantera and killing some Daft Punk was a lot of fun with it. So I think it's worth checking out. That being said, it's hard to stomach at a $60 price tag. I just can't murder it because I had fun. I really did. So it's a long-term girlfriend that's not quite marriage material,

but you're going to stick with them for a very long time and not be completely happy. Is that kind of what you're saying? I didn't say I was going to play this game for 200 hours. I will probably go back to it from time to time. I think it's closer to murder than it is to marry for me, to be honest with you. It's in the middle bottom-ish. And that's pretty harsh coming from Michael.

I was going to say, yeah. The lover of all games. I feel like that's the worst rating Michael's ever given the game. I will tell you, though, if I would have stopped playing less than five hours in, I would have murdered this game. The first five hours, I was like, I do not care about the characters i'm not like i'm going through mission and the first five hours it's very linear on the missions you do it's one mission next mission the game opens up like five or six hours in and then we are like oh i have lots of things i can do before that you can aimlessly steal cars and blow them up and stuff but there's no point to it what about you

josh i i'm a little torn on this one to be honest i've actually been really waffling back and forth on what i think my rating on this game is um this game has some very enjoyable moments i love the larp mission i think that's a phenomenal it I'll remember that mission for a very long time. There are very good moments in this game. I found myself actually enjoying having fun, laughing, and thinking like, hey, this is great. The problem for me is that a few enjoyable moments does not a game make. And I found that more often than not, I was despising the gunplay. I found that to be very just mundane. It was not enjoyable at all to me. It was just wave after wave after wave of guy with really no variety whatsoever. There were times when there was

variety. I mean, riding on the roof of your car with a rocket launcher, blowing up, you know, cars that were chasing you, I thought was a neat, like that's a neat segment. But the overall feeling of this game for me is just that it was just not done really well. There were peaks, but I felt like there were more valleys than there were peaks in this game. The $60 price tag for this game is what pushes it over for me. It's not that there's not things to enjoy in this game. So I'm not saying I hate this game by any means because I did enjoy playing parts of it. The problem is that I didn't like more of the game than I actually did like of the game. And with a $60 price tag, I just felt like that was too much.

The story is meh. The characters are too much. The story is meh. The characters are meh. The gameplay is meh. A couple really fun quests just don't make up for all the meh. And it's like, so for me, it's regrettably because I don't want to do this, but I feel like it's the rating I have to. I'm going to murder it. But it's like a hesitant murder.

It's like an involuntary murder. It's like, I didn't mean to kill you, but you kind of deserved it. Yeah, you know what I mean? Covering your eyes while you're shooting. Do me a favor. Turn around. Turn around. I don't want to shoot you in the face because I feel guilty.

But it's not a game that I could go out and say, hey, I recommend this game to you. I think you are going to enjoy it. If it was $20, that might change things a little bit. But for a premium price, I don't feel like this is a premium game. I feel like I would much rather just go back and play GTA 5 for the 50th time than I would to play Saints Row. I just don't know that it has anything redeeming enough other than a couple quests. So for me, it's a regrettable murder. Okay. Yeah, I totally hear everything you're saying, and I don't completely disagree with you. I feel like on the pendulum, I'm just on the other side where I say there are more peaks

than valleys. I think the gunplay is not great, but I don't think it's horrific. It's exactly the same as GTA. And as someone who will still dial up GTA 4 and 5 every single year, to me, it plays exactly the same. So it's more so for me a disappointment that it has not been more revolutionary on that side, where it feels like a 10-year-old open-world sandbox game like this. I found the good parts to be so highly memorable that I do recommend people play the game. If this game was $20, it would be the easiest buy ever. I mean, I don't know that $60 is worth it now in this age where there are so many good indie titles. I think this is a game that's inevitably going to go on sale

quickly, and I would highly recommend playing it, but I would wait until it goes on sale. Anything in the $40 to $45 range, I think is more than fair. If this game is your cup of tea, you're going to be able to sink a lot of time into it. If I wasn't doing this podcast, this is the kind of game I could see myself 100%ing. I did 100% in Cyberpunk when it came out. These are exactly the kinds of games that are built for me. But all that being said i still feel like it's a make love i mean i i really enjoyed playing this game but it still

has a lot of alleys so i'm gonna say overall make love i was really hoping you'd marry this game so we'd have the first one of each yeah because you were close from it i'm like he's gonna do it that's exactly what i wrote down by the way you can't see because my pen oh i literally wrote down that that uh i knew for sure josh was gonna murder this game and i thought you'd make love to it i was hoping you'd marry it yeah to me it's definitely closer to mary than it is murder i found this game to be highly fun but i also know josh plays games more for a challenge or competition i play games more for escapism and i think this is just more suited for the kinds of games that i enjoy i feel like it's

the green bean of video games the green bean yeah it's not like nobody hates green beans necessarily but nobody likes green beans either i don't know get some greek green beans going yeah you can dress it up but this ain't dressed up tomato either is what i'm saying you know what i mean so it's like it'll keep you alive like if you need a game to play it's not like this game's terrible yeah you know but it's just like there's nothing like you're not gonna eat it go like ah it's the best game this is a mcdonald's hamburger like i don't even know about that it's fine it's a green it's great it's a green bean i mean it great. It's a green bean.

I mean, it's not a Five Guys burger. It's not a steak, certainly. But yeah, it's a McDonald's burger. It is what it is. All right. Well, guys, let's go on to our last segment here. Let's go to the leaderboard and see where this game stacks up. All right.

Michael, you want to tell the people about our leaderboard and where they can find it? Yes. So the leaderboard exists as a one-stop shop to see every single game that we've done a deep dive review on in the order of which we rank them. So you might wonder, why is a certain dive review on, in the order of which we rank them. So, you might wonder, why is a certain game not on this list? It's simply because we haven't deep-diven it yet. Deep-dived it. Deep-dove.

Deep-diven. Deep-dove. We haven't deep-dived it. We have not deep-dived that game. Now, if you want us to deep-dive a game, though, I can plug a little place called MultiplayerSquad.com, where you can go over, support the show, and if you go Legendary Status,

you can put a game on this list, because we have to review a game. But not go look at this leaderboard and what we're about to do is rank this leader rank the leaderboard it's the number one leaderboard by the way it's ranked number one we're going to rank our game that we've played here called saints on this leaderboard now just to go through a little bit the number one game on the list is red dead redemption 2 uh rounding out the top 10 is outriders uh divinity original sin is is at the 11 range go a little bit towards the middle we've got hollow knight forgotten city fallout new vegas destiny 2 rounding out kind of the the mid to the late 20s um and then uh all the way down at the bottom we have overcooked 2 because it is horrendously frustrating and battlefield 2042

because it's a horrible game now Now, in this list somewhere, we're going to kind of combine our minds on the Make Love, Marry, Murder that we've done and compare it to other games on here. And I think we can all agree that this game is absolutely no Elite Dangerous. That's very true. It's way better. See, we all agreed.

We all agreed it's not Elite Dangerous. This is weird. I know exactly where I want to put this game. Start. Go ahead. Let us know. Just to tell you guys, I'm looking. The perfect number for me is 60.

Oh, no way. Dude, I would rather play It Takes Two. I would rather not play The Quarry. And I think I'd be tied with phasmophobia for my interest in playing that puts it below elite dangerous wait it does oh 53 never mind never mind forget that okay it's only 52 uh it would be very difficult for me to put this below wasteland three. Really? Oh, for me easily. I, I can't put this below tiny Tina's wonderland.

See, that's a good cutoff point for me too. I, even as much as I trolled tiny Tina's for being just a reskin of a game and with no innovation at all, I'd rather play tiny Tina's than I'd rather play this. Wait, you'd rather play saints row yeah yeah i can't

put it below tiny tinas like i i like in fact i don't know paul what what are you thinking i had it more like 42 if it was my list i mean i'm not i'm not trying to put this like in the top 20 or anything i was thinking early 40s josh was initially thinking 60 maybe a little bit higher what are you thinking michael since you're kind of in between the two of us i i would almost say split it i i i i didn't like a way out myself i found it to be remarkably boring even with two people doing co-op that being said it was a co-op um so i'd want to put it above that and below keep talking and nobody explodes i haven't played a lot of the games in this range though um i didn't play borderlands 3 i stopped at borderlands 2 so i think i think low 50s high 40s or is it high 50s low 40s i know we could never figure that out if anybody knows the bad

right in and let us know let's just call it the bad 40s or the good 40s yeah so bad are we thinking bad 40s good 50s do you guys want to put it right below keep talking do you think that would be a fair spot or is that still too high I like it there because again I will go back and play this game so my murder at 60 because you both put it in 40 where does my influence come in here

this is why it's not 40 and it's down in the bad 40s what what are you thinking? 48? I think Deathloop's a better game by far. And we weren't crazy about Deathloop, dude. But at least it's a better video game.

Oh, it's way better than Deathloop. Alright, well, we just gotta plug it somewhere. I doth protest, man. 47. I think Borderlands 3 is way more fun than this game is. All right, 49. Okay, deal.

All right. That's how you make a deal. It didn't take much. I just wanted a little bit. Just end this segment. We'll throw in a car freshener. Okay, sounds good. We'll give you one year of free car washes all right all right

all right we will lock it in at 49 uh keeping it below borderlands 3 and little nightmares 2 but keeping it above death loop wasteland 3 and tiny tina's wonderlands and most importantly keeping it above elite dangerous that's really. That's really the most important thing. You know what that felt like to me when we just did it? It feels like when you're searching for a movie on your TV. This happens once an episode. I almost made it through the episode without doing this. I almost made it. I was almost there.

You're on your TV or whatever you watch your movies on, and you're searching, and you're like, oh, it's on Showtime. showtime and then you're like oh i can get showtime for seven days for free and then right afterwards you're like i forgot it's day eight i was charged for this and then you feel bad about it that's how i feel about ranking this i'm just like i feel bad about it but okay about it well you know what in hindsight down the road we'll always do another leaderboard review and we'll see where it ends up so yeah if you want to see the full rankings you can go to multiplayerpodcast.com it's right on the main page just scroll down a little bit and anytime people ask us like what games should we pick up a lot of times we say hey go check out the leaderboard if it's anything in

the top 20 that's a really highly recommend uh part of the leaderboard so you can go check that out and then then guys, do you want to tell the people what our next deep dive will be? It's going to be cyberpunk 2077. Yeah. Two year retrospect. We're going to cover it again. Well,

you know, we, we covered it a long time ago. We covered it very shortly after it came out. The game has changed an awful lot, or at least I hope it has, because I was very hyped for it. They say that the game is fixed now, so we want to give it its due and actually give a good, fair review of it. I'm really hoping that it's better because I don't think I've ever been more hyped for a game. But yeah, we are going to do a review and michael's

never played it um which is nice so this will be brand new for him so you're going to get a fresh take on somebody that's playing the current version of it as well um but funny thing on that for anybody that's going why are you doing cyberpunk 2077 the highest played game on steam right now is cyberpunk 2077 the fantasy the phantom liberty trailer did its job man wow everybody's playing it again it's too funny yeah all right and also just to let you guys know we are going to be taking one week off of deep dives so october 3rd we will run back in older greatest hits episode and that's just gonna give us enough time you can't knock out everything in cyberpunk in two weeks it's impossible right yeah i i mean i think even

the next month that i've got to play this game i probably still have to play it four hours a day to get through it yeah it's a lot of content for real so yeah we just want to thank everyone for listening once again if you want to check out our patreon page it's multiplayer squad.com come follow us on socials on tiktok twitter or instagram at multiplayer pod and come join us on discord check out the link in the episode description don't you dare did you say tiktok paul i said tiktok michael are you saying we have content on tiktok now we have t Oh, man. Go check us out on TikTok. I'm sure there's content going up all the time there. So far, there's been a thing that went up with an episode.

So yes, there is content. By the time you listen to this episode, there's probably more content. There will be at least three TikToks. Yes. There will be some TikToks coming. And there already are. I figured it out guys i look here let me let me level with you i'm 40 years old okay i've clicked on tick tock on accident

one time because my friend sent me a video and i thought it was an instagram video i'm like ah what is this how do i and i couldn't figure it out but i posted something and hey you know what baby steps an old dog can learn new tricks ladies and gentlemen mostly gentlemen because i know what our demographics are. Oh, goodness. So, yes. Thank you to everyone out there for listening. We really appreciate all of your support.

And we'll be back with a Twig episode on Thursday. Can't wait to talk to you guys then. Happy gaming. See you, Chooms. I get so excited. Bye. Outro Music