New Saints Row trailer is just a showreel of explosions, but in a cool city
Santo Ileso is going to be the real star, I can feel it
Remember Saints Row? It's back, in trailer form. After Volition's reboot of their wacky crime RPG series was revealed in August, then delayed in November, we were treated to a new gameplay trailer at last night's Game Awards.
The trailer is a series of clips, each averaging about 3 seconds long, of different people shooting different guns and rockets and so on. So it's technically a gameplay trailer in the way that loads of different corpses stitched together is a person (no comments from Frankenstein fans). Still, aside from confirming the new release date of August 23rd next year, I think this trailer also confirms that the new city of Santo Ileso is going to be the star of this game. Check out the trailer below to agree with me.
I'm a bit whatever about the car explosions and rocket launchers. We've seen those kinds of things before. I am also similarly uninvested in the different gangs, because history has taught me that they mostly become colour-coded dots I am trained to shoot. But the town? Those orange badlands I can do wheelies around? I'm into that.
Especially in the early part of the trailer, we get a decent look at some of the strange lights and sights of Santo Ileso, which has different districts that will (ideally) have different identities. I particularly enjoy the neon sign of a dog playing guitar advertising ROCKABILLY'S, and the huge dinosaur statues in the desert. You can see a bit more about Santo Ileso in a video Volition put out back in August, where they reveal the city's motto is "Keep Santo Strange" - which is just a copy of Keep Austin Weird, obviously, but I'll take it.
Santo Ileso is inspired by the US Southwest, as I was told in my hands-off preview. At the time, art director Frank Marquart said that it's "an amalgam" and "definitely not exact replicas of what's in the Southwest, but I'm sure as you drive around the world you'll see things that are reminiscent of the actual Southwest."
The all new rootin' tootin' Saints Row reboot is coming to PC on the Epic Games Store on August 23rd 2022 (we assume coming to other storefronts later, but do not know when), and will also be on your console box of choice. At present, Santo Ileso is unfortuately not sold seperately to all the explosions.