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.
