You thought that all of the crazy and ridicules stuff stopped with Saints Row: The Third? Think again.

User Rating: 9 | Saints Row IV X360
Saints Row IV is one of the games in the Saints Row franchise and is the forth installment of the game, it was developed by Volition and is the first Saints Row game to be published by Deep Silver after the fall of THQ.
The game assumes you the role of the leader of the Saints that is now the president of the united states, lo and behold aliens start attacking the white house and you are their first target, all your crew is abducted into a spaceship and you are up in a fight with the alien leader going by the name of Zinyak, he proceeds to imprison all of you inside a virtual simulation for no other reason than for fun and it is your job as the president, and the leader of the Saints to save all of your crew and friends from the deadly and horrifying simulations and exterminate Zinyak for all what he did to both the Saints and Earth!

Gameplay- "It's the same, but destructive in more ways than one!" (9/10)
I really enjoyed Saints Row: The Third's gameplay, it was and still is a sandbox world filled with gangs, crazy weapons like the giant **** bat and its Japanese counterpart the tentacle bat or even the new edition of the Dubstep gun!
Saints Row IV has learned from its older sibling that making fun of things is good, moreover it learned that giving it a bigger push will give more interesting but fun results like the additions of superpowers such as super jump, super speed and even fireballs that can be changed into any element you want to result in so funny and out of place situations.
But even with all the good and fun stuff there is a down part, due to all of these powers the game started to feel a bit less of a casual sandbox like the other Saints Row's were and started to take a bit of a Prototype feel to it, you don't need cars because you can technically fly through the air with no problems if you are a high enough level and collected a few things and its a shame that it turned out this way because personally I really enjoyed driving to a mission rather then just super speed all the way to it and shorten up my total game time by an hour or two.
The missions and questing part of the game come together hand in hand with the activities around town unlike in the other Saints Row games, you can do a side quest for someone of your crew and do the activities they want you to do and they will reward you with cool new weapons, new powers or even new hilarious outfits to wear while you are beating the living hell out of aliens in virtual reality, or you can do mostly story quests and dash through the game in about 6 hours in total while skipping all the fun and crazy things that await for you aside from just aliens.
In short i really like the combat of the game and it reminds me a lot of the older Saints Row games only now you get legit cheats that give you an edge, alongside with that the questing system makes sure that if you did all the possible side quests until the end you have completed 100% of your activities and the main quest is there for the story and the craziness of the entire game, however even though the powerup is a major upgrade it is also a major downgrade on the fact that it replaces one of the key elements for a sandbox game like Saints Row or GTA but overall the loss is not that big.

Presentation - "They promised more, we got so much more!" (9/10)
The presentation in the game is simply amazing, the music is varied across all genres and types, the customization is over the top and the cameos, fun-poking and simply stupid but hilarious set of ideas that the development team came up with are all ground braking ideas that were simply made to entertain across such a level of immaturity but in the same time stay a bit with reality and tell us that when you hit an officer, shit will go down.
However the visuals on the game were a little disappointing, I was playing the Xbox 360 version of the game and even though the game is filled with graphical errors as part of a crashing virtual reality there were really some odd things going on with the visuals on parts of the game that shouldn't be forced errors, for example I noticed the the texture quality was on the level of a 2010 game, it was not horrible by any chance but it made my eyes cringe a little each time I saw the sky suddenly box up into pixels and the little amount of detail on my characters suit/body/face, I know that this is a very outdated console but a few little improvements to the textures would have been a great help to the Xbox 360 version.
In short the graphics were kind of a letdown on the Xbox 360 but other than that the game has an awesome selection of music and customization.

Story - "Well I can't see where will the franchise will go- WAIT, ARE THOSE ALIENS?!" (9/10)
Simply to say, the story rocks.
As usual we start off with a very serious start-off that involves the Saints in one way or another and the next thing you know is that you are disarming a gigantic rocket with the song "I don't wanna miss a thing" by Aerosmith playing in the background, still not enough? How about the fact that you are getting abducted by aliens, they really wanna kill all of your race while you are having Mass Effect knock-off romantic scenes with all of the characters on the ship (and I do mean ALL of them), dodging ships in the alien mothership while listening to "What is love" by Haddaway and moreover, completely **** up the entire virtual world you are trapped in just to make a door back to reality that will lead you to kill Zinyak.
The story gets out of control and becomes a laugh-off because of all the comedic things that occur in it, its also very well crafted because there are times in the story where you have no other option but to take it seriously, however one minor complain that I have about it is the fact that if you take out all of the side quests in the game, the main quests are barely enough to last you 4-5 hours of gameplay and while the amount of times I completed the game I always did the side quests I just couldn't help but notice that i was progressing through the main story faster then a really hungry guy in a diner eats his meals.
In short, the story is hilarious but its shortness made me feel a bit incomplete inside.

Replayability "Keep fooling around? or start a new game? hard choice..." (9/10)
While like in other sandbox games once you finish the whole story up your save file is left there to just take space on the hard drive and so just serve you as a doorway to complete all of the missed challenges and side quests but on the other hand you can start over with a new character and build him/her completely different for maximum fun, it would have been better though if they had more activities to do around town even when you do complete all of the side quests and main quests.
Overall its something very basic that as much as I hoped will be something different for a change just stayed the same.

Conclusion - 9.0
Saints Row IV has to be as one of my top games for 2013, the game has everything I love such as ridiculousness and complete lack of boundaries, It's really a game that is made for the person that likes to just sit back and enjoy killing things with tentacles, black holes and dubstep, and is most certainly not a serious game and if you do want a serious sandbox game then you are in the wrong place buddy, this game will make fun of anything whether you like it or not and that is the reason why I still keep this game in my drive ready to be played again.

Thank you for reading this review.
~J-Jazz.