Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell - Review
Johnny Gat has to be one of the strangest characters to ever grace a video game, he is brash, loud, murderous and still charming as hell.
Gat Out Of Hell is a standalone, expansion/sequel to Saints Row IV and sees Johnny Gat along with Kinzie leap into the bowels of hell in order to recover the boss, who was whisked away to hell via a possessed weegie board. Yep, the story is about as crazy as you would expect from a Saints game, but it is also really fun. Upon arriving in Hell, Johnny and Kinzie make their way to the Ultron building, where they believe the boss to be, but of course it is not that simple.
The boss was taken by Satan himself, so he could be wed to his daughter Jezebel and she in turn wants nothing to do with that, we learn about it all through a very long musical number. The premise for Johnny doing what he does best is that it will cause disruptions in the day to day operations of Hell, something which Satan will not take kindly. It is a very thin plot, but it amounts to Johnny, or Kinzie as you can switch at any time, being allowed to cause as much mayhem as he wants.
Mayhem is the name of the game here as well, for in order to help take down Satan, Johnny needs to unite some of the worst of the worst in order to disrupt Satan’s business and these come the form of Blackbeard, Vlad the Impaler, the deWynter sisters and Shakespeare. In order to get them on side, you need to repeat the same tasks over and over again, racing across the sky, taking down waves of enemies and such. In fact it is the same mission types over and over again, which would not be an issue except that they are really boring missions to begin with. Once you level up some and get some more powers, they can be a little more fun, but the problem is that the welcome is well and truly warn out.
The powers in question are the same as those from the main game, but with a little twist here are there. The glide power has been replaced by flight, which makes sense given that Johnny now has wings, but the remaining powers are the same. Flight is perhaps the thing that makes the game worth playing through, being able to zip around the world with ease and speed thanks to flying, but even that can’t save the rest of the game. Even during one of the story sequences they poke fun at the fact that the game does not even have more missions to do and while it is fun to see them doing that, I wish they would have put a few more mission types in there.
From a presentation point of view the game has a few bugs, most of them carry over from the engine, so textures pop in and out and there are some issues with character animations breaking, but for the most part it has a solid performance, thankfully the pretty awesome art direction works for the game as well. The city in hell has lots of cool touches, like billboards promoting fragrances called Agony, or ambulances that actually go out of their way to hit people.
The voice work is also top notch, Daniel Dae Kim has really made Johnny Gat his own over the years and the character would not be the same without him. The demons of hell are wonderfully brought to life by Dee Baker, who has amazing talent, but we are also treated to great performances all around. Apart from the musical number, the overall music presence in the game is minor, it has a soundtrack of course, but unlike Saints Row IV, there is no traditional music to be found, which is a shame, it could have been awesome if they selected music to match the setting.
Overall Gat Out Of Hell is one heck of a little game, it offers up bite sized fun at a decent price, of course the repetitive mission structure will turn some people away. But with Johnny Gat staring here, players will get some laughs and fun, which is enough to overlook the flaws.
The Score
8.0
Review code provided by Deep Silver
The Pros
+More Johnny Gat
+More super powers, keeping the fun from the main game alive
The Cons
-Repetitive missions make the game feel like a chore to play
-Minor graphical issues do pop up from time to time
