Saints Row has maintained more of that humour that rumbled like a black belly-laugh through Rockstar's earlier, occasionally satirical work, but the series has never quite had the budget or script to outgun its rival, either critically or commercially.
Then there's the tone of the humour itself, always played for cheap, frat-boy laughs — purple dildo truncheons wielded by wide-boys in mankinis — the sort of tittering, juvenile stunts that those who dismiss video games as so much amoral flimflam assume defines the medium.
This, the fourth entry to the series, appears to have no loftier aims – at least in terms of its fiction. It boasts, after all, a story that opens with the protagonist climbing a nuclear warhead as it sways into the stratosphere to Aerosmith's 'I Don't Want To Miss A Thing'.
Having disarmed the nuke, he free-falls through the ceiling of the White House, ready to usher in a new administration, one in which pimps and hookers assume the most senior roles, and where the presidential suite is punctuated with a series of dancing poles. But this is just one of a number of irreverent and scaling introductions. Layer by layer, these pull apart the traditional so-called open world game premise, setting the stage for a truly postmodern blockbuster.
Earth has been besieged by an alien race, the leader of which has turned you, the president, into his plaything, placing you within a Matrix-style simulated reality, a heaving city in which you have the video game-style abilities of a super hero. Here, in this fake fake-world your actions have no consequences: the pedestrians you run over in your car are holograms, the policemen you gun down in terror chases have no fake families to mourn their passing.
The set-up allows developer Volition to amplify the in-game action to preposterous – and hugely enjoyable – proportions. You're free to steal vehicles from the city's virtual residents, and within minutes you'll have unlocked an upgrade that implants a nitrous booster in every one to allow you to speed across the city limits in minutes.
But soon enough these traditional prizes of the open world trajectory are made obsolete as your character is imbued with a supersonic sprint and Superman jump, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and bat away traffic with a sharp elbow.
As you bolster your character's abilities with the drip feed of experience points earned from completing the missions piped into your ear by a remote member of the Saints team, you become a god among men, straining against the world's confines in what feels, very often, like a game with all of the cheat modes turned on.
This freedom inside the machine is made humorous by the equal freedom you have to craft your hero or heroine as you please. A poster boy, a poster girl, a poster boy who dresses as a girl, a poster girl who speaks with the voice of a man or just about any configuration of identity is yours to conjure. You may choose your character's accent, pitch shift it up or down, tweak the weight of their genitals and, in time, dress them or cross-dress them in any one of 100 different ways (with statistical bonuses offered as incentives to choose the more outrageous options). What was intended as something to be flippantly irreverent takes on a subversive edge, playing with gender and identity in exciting ways. Could this be the first big budget video game to star a transgender protagonist? It is if you want it to be.
The cleverness of the game's humour is its flexibility; you're constantly empowered to tailor its sense to suit your tastes. If the sight of a cross-dressing 25-stone Nicki Minaj lookalike drop-kicking an alien from the top of a skyscraper doesn't do it for you, then perhaps dressing as a cockney film noir private detective and attempting to commit fraud by throwing yourself into traffic while listening to a bad reading from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on the in-game stereo might. The comedy – just like the music, the clothing and the appearance of your supporting in-game gang who can be summoned to offer back-up later in the game (ninjas, strippers, gimps, mascots etc) – is yours to tailor.
Saints Row IV makes a great number of insider video game jokes, parodying Space Invaders one moment and making fun of Mass Effect's 'romancing' the next (indeed, your vice-president is even voiced by the same actor whom voiced one of Bioware's main characters, to strange effect) and even including the over-exposed Nolan North as one of the potential voice actors for your character. But it riffs on many more in terms of its systems. Collecting blue orbs from the tops of buildings or engaging in city point-to-point races is, like much of the game's extracurricular activities, reminiscent of Crackdown. Gliding around the world casts Batman shapes on the dour concrete fast below, while the exaggerated ragdoll physics are plucked from Just Cause.
But Saints Row IV simplifies and exaggerates its influences at every turn, eliminating the downtime between the high points of action. It takes mere moments to move from a mission in which you're flying a spaceship through winding funnels to one in which you are asked to create as much financial damage to the city as possible using a 'dubstep' gun that shoots tiny black holes. The variety is intoxicating. Where once Saints Row was little more than a pale imitation of a game hoping to be a movie, trying to shock through narrative irreverence, today its ambition is simpler and nobler: to be endlessly silly and hyperbolic, and nothing but a video game.
