"Saints Row" is a driving/shooting/flying ragdoll-em-up that leads a notorious gang of sociopaths. They alternate between organized crime and spirited shenanigans like throwing themselves into traffic violations for insurance money, while also doing light drug dealing on the side. It's probably the only way I can think of to describe the entire series, including this new reboot, without saying it's "Grand Theft Auto" except that the jokes are funny, which is probably the only way I can think of to describe it vaguely enough.

To date, every "Saints Row" sequel has been more over-the-top than its predecessor, eventually finding a new pinnacle, and then somehow over-the-top. Saints Row 2 featured a villain with voodoo powers and a sidekick taking on a police force single-handedly. Saints Row The Third pitted him against wrestlers, cyberpunks, and zombies; Saints Row 4 surpassed him with an alien invasion; and the spin-off Gat Out of Hell featured Satan as the final boss.

When SR2 fans say they miss the grounding, they mean it's OK if the game has a motorcycle katana showdown, but SR3 crosses the line with a Japanese game show that is straight-up about killing people. Personally, I enjoyed the escalating eccentricity of the series, but I lost my way. That's why, instead of making a new "Saints Row" that involves time travel and establishing a branch on an alien planet, Bolshon hit the reboot button.

Starting from the ground floor, Saints Row might please those who miss the "grit" of Saints Row 2, but judging by the online reviews, they already seem to hate it. The reboot will feature a new cast that they despised in the first trailer. I've seen these Saints referred to as zoomers, millennials, and hipsters on the Internet.

One of the new Saints quit his unpaid internship to become a mechanic for a crime boss, one is a startup entrepreneur who has overdosed on motivational TED talks and podcasts, and the other is a DJ who is allergic to wearing shirts. Meanwhile, you work for a private security firm whose disposable employees often can't stand training. All of these characters are parodies of typical modern characters, just like the energy-drink bigwigs, hippie-upper stoners, and auto-tuning pimps who appeared in the old games. Like the rogues who grew into a tight-knit family over the course of the original game, I'm not interested in a new crew, but these characters haven't grown up with a bunch of sequels. They'll be fine.

The culmination of the rebooted Saints begins with an intro where they run the city, and the next 25 hours are flashbacks to how they got there. So, after completely customizing your boss to look like, say, an aging Batman villain or a crime-fighting mime, you suddenly become a regular guy with a day job in law enforcement and a roommate young enough to know and care about Doja Cat's true identity It is. I felt like a miscast actor, so I decided to replace my carefully designed character with the first preset an hour later. It's a shame, because he's a great character in a series where I'm known as a character creator.

Even if you stick with the default face, the clothing options allow for elaborate layering, such as wearing a shirt under a jacket or socks and shoes separately. This is something that "Saints Row" has not done since it adopted clothing with physics. The trade-off is the stiffness of the coats and skirts, and most hairstyles are fixed. The reason for this is that when I tried a ponytail, it cut right across my face. Still, whether you want your boss to be a leather-jacketed badass, a bright green goofball, or someone dressed as a taco, "Saints Row" can make it happen.

When I'm wearing a luchador mask and killing EDM-themed, glow stick shield-wielding criminals, "Saints Row" is a good time. You can unlock abilities to shoot while prone on top of a moving car, shove gun-fu and grenades down people's pants and throw them into the crowd. Takedown animations include painful knife and pistol work as well as human torpedoes and Karate Kid crane kicks.

Options to change the way you play are a welcome abundance, and there are menus to show other games while you sit in the corner and think about what you did. You can turn off the GPS arrows that light the way and show you where you're going, adjust them to highlight only the corners, resize the mini-map, change enemy stats if they're too spongy or too weak, change how little ammo you have, toggle between nudity or not, or cover them with a humorous censor bar, extend the time limit or turn it off completely, etc.

After one failed attempt where the countdown disappeared due to a bug and I didn't realize the clock had started, I wanted to set a more forgiving timer for the mission. In the end, I did not tamper with these settings, except for the snappiness of the vehicle camera, and I would never bother with the two-person drop-in mode either.

It runs fine on PC; I had to turn off Windows 10's data execution prevention feature to get a decent frame rate out of Saints Row: The Third Remastered. The rebooted version, on the other hand, maintains over 60 fps and looks cleaner than the early trailers suggested. Some of the corners that were cut to achieve this frame rate are obvious, such as the fluffy fur that makes your cat look like it just stepped out of another game, the occasional strange shadow or jagged clothing, and the way a car in the middle distance shifts to the ethereal plane when it spots you.

The city is not particularly lively, either. Santo Ireso is a desert town somewhere in the American Southwest, but it is not as bustling as a stolen helicopter buzzing through a forest of high-rise buildings. It's so flat that when I wasn't doing side work that required the use of a wingsuit, I forgot I even had one.

The hallmark of Saints Row games is how they connect open-world activities. You can go on a side-quest rampage and never feel like a different character from the main storyline. You have to complete side quests to unlock new missions, but this push-and-pull usually results in a chore due to eating too much meat before you've had your fill of vegetables.

This game has the worst job to do ever, called Crime Venture, which makes it even more annoying than usual. Having to drive a truck full of toxic waste to the dump without causing a spill is really tedious, and the returning insurance fraud act (the one where you run into traffic) is less fun than before. The ragdoll aftertouch has been toned down, and it's harder to roll into multiple cars and score combos while flopping down the highway like a fish with a death wish. [Sticky rocket bombs, called hoverboards or thrust busters, propel targets into the sky as if they've been abducted by aliens. Otherwise, they stuck to vanilla side missions like stealing food trucks. It costs more and more money to unlock these criminal ventures, and it really grinds my gears to spend $400,000+ on something that turns out to be a dud. (Frankly, let's delay the toxic dumping as long as we can.)

Compared to spraying sewage on a mansion to lower property values or driving a car while being attacked by a tiger in the passenger seat, the reboot's activities seem tame. One of them is literally just taking pictures. Likewise, with the exception of the thrust buster and foam glove pistol, most of the weapons are real guns, and although they have the privilege of throwing anti-gravity grenades and summoning support saints from the air, only four can be on the ability wheel at a time. (The supporting saints often stand there doing nothing and are often shot.)

"Saints Row" is always at its best when it's in full-on dubstep-gun silliness, but the reboot forgot that for a long time. Recall it, for example, the stories of joining LARPs around town, donning cardboard armor, and fighting Mad Max role-players with Styrofoam weapons, etc.