What does six minutes’ worth of a hands-off PAX East demo of the new Saints Row get you? Not much, but it’s worth sharing simply because of the expected and utterly ridiculous weapons that were shown. If you have a quick eye for details though, you’ll likely have noticed most of this in the first trailer released for Saints Row IV (above).
Let’s break down what I saw, and what you may have seen a small fragment of in the trailer:
Super-Powers
- Speed-running: you can demolish and burst through cars and people as you run long distances at high speeds.
- High jumps: the Volition dev on the controller ended his long run with a high jump to land on top of a tall skyscraper. He then soared through the air, invoking memories of Infamous, to switch from building landing to building landing.
- Freeze Blast: basically how it sounds. You can freeze people and punch them into bits. Or even freeze vehicles.
- Telekinesis: telepathically pick something up and throw it at someone to hurt them. Well, likely kill them. They showed off combinations of super-powers, like freeze-blasting a car and using telekinesis to throw it at an alien.
Ridiculous Guns and a Mech Suit
- Inflato Ray: you saw this one in the trailer, too, but it’ll basically swell a dude’s head until his eyeballs pop out and burst.
- Dubstep gun: no one can help themselves. It’s like the attack of The Mask and his samba dancing, except it actually pixelates and kills people. Even cars malfunction if you use the deadly power of dubstep on them.
- Mech Suit: once you unlock it, you can trample around the open-world as you please. It looks like it shoots two weapons, a primary machine gun of sorts and a secondary rocket launcher from what my eyes tell me. It also flies. You also saw a bit of this in the trailer.
Ridiculous Gun Skins
- Sure, your RPG/rocket launcher/whatever is pretty cool, but what if you dressed it up in the El Fugitivo skin? Then you’re walking around carrying an RPG that looks like a worn-down guitar case.
Boss Battles
- I saw a total of one (1) boss for a total of maybe 30 seconds. He growled and charged the super-powered player and then BAM a flash to a white screen. What a bunch of teasers. Although, I can tell you that he was a “warden” of the alien invasion, and he looked kind of like Bane from Batman: Arkham Asylum in that hulky yet small-headed way, but with lava embedded into his skin.
Saints Row has always been about ridiculous, over-the-top shenanigans and decorative wear. The very, very few details this six-minute demo showed me feel like Volition will hold to that dedication. And why shouldn’t they? It’s what makes the series great.
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