For instance, the “Insurance Fraud” activity is back, but now you’re controlling a soul condemned to hell, and the more points you score, the more years are taken off that soul’s condemnation. It’s a game built around the middling-to-decent side activities from previous Saints Row titles, without the opportunity to go off and do a “real” mission with “real” writing. Gat Out of Hell is a lot of setup without the payoff its jokes really deserve. Then you finish those side quests and Blackbeard goes “Great, thanks for doing that,” and then you basically never hear from Blackbeard again. The loyalty missions are the same as they were in Saints Row IV-complete side quests. It takes five minutes, and doing so unlocks one of your superpowers (Summon Imps) and gives you a new Blackbeard Loyalty mission. Imps (the easiest enemies in the game) are invading and you have to kill a certain number. In Gat Out of Hell, by contrast, you have one sort-of mission with Blackbeard. Maybe Blackbeard would sit on your lap in this armchair. Maybe you’d sing a rousing sea-chanty version of Biz Markie together. In a real Saints Row game (read: not an expansion) this would be the start of a fantastic line of quests, perhaps culminating in your sailing the Queen Anne’s Revenge into a statue of Satan or fighting Blackbeard in a beard-growing contest or hell I don’t know. He lives on a recreation of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. For instance, you meet Blackbeard, famed pirate and scourge of the seven seas. Gat Out of Hell has no real missions, and thus a lot of its potential is wasted. This is a vertical city-skyscrapers giving way to apartment buildings giving way to strip malls and residential suburbs giving way to street level giving way to tunnels, all surrounded by massive cliffs above an unending lava sea. Gat Out of Hell, you literally control Johnny Gat like an airplane or like an enormous bird. Saints Row IV contained a half-baked gliding mechanic that felt kind-of-almost-but-not-really-like flying. Where Saints Row IV basically copy-pasted the Steelport map from Saints Row the Third and added in superpowers, Gat Out of Hell‘s city of New Hades is a creative and ludicrous version of Hell that’s crafted specifically to take advantage of the aforementioned powers.įlight in particular has been overhauled. Gat Out of Hell is in many ways far more ambitious even as a “standalone expansion” than Saints Row IV proper. Shoot guns! Blow things up! Murder demons! Murder civilian-souls! You don’t even have to feel bad because everyone here must’ve done some horrible things to land in Hell, so just murder away! Satan’s only in control of Hell because somebody bigger and badder hasn’t come along to take it from him yet. To do that, you have to indulge in what the Saints do best: Rampant Chaos.