I’d have preferred to have Eli with me on more missions, but you can’t change who you’re stuck with. It reminded me of the sticks-and-stones-style warfare of South Park: The Stick of Truth, and provided an enjoyable shift in tone from the more murderous mayhem found elsewhere. The actual combat experience in these sections remained fundamentally the same as every other shooting gallery sequence, but it was funny to hear the characters make the gunshot sounds with their mouths and perform pretend executions, or to come upon enemies who would stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that you shot them instead of lying down and playing dead. None of these partners in crime have particularly interesting personalities, but the one I warmed to the most by far was the brainy pacifist, Eli, mainly because his side story missions involved donning some cardboard armour and swapping my assault rifle for a Nerf gun in a series of live-action role-playing battles. They can also be summoned via your phone’s contacts to fight alongside you in the streets, which comes in handy later on when you’re trying to clear out rival gangs from your turf and you want to get the repetitive fights over with in a slightly speedier fashion. Joining your created boss character, who is a self-described “walking murder party”, are three other foundational members of the new Saints who accompany you as AI partners on certain missions and provide some consistently cringe-inducing banter in the cutscenes in between. The fact that you can scramble onto the roof at speed and launch into a wingsuit glide (a move straight out of Just Cause) also makes for some spectacular getaways, although it seems like an oversight that you can’t do the same thing from a motorbike’s saddle.

The floaty and largely homogenized handling meant that I never really grew to favour any one vehicle over the other (aside from the glorious hoverbike unlocked late in the story), but the ability to drift and sideswipe other cars at the tap of a button does give chase sequences a welcome burst of Burnout-style gratification. Though there are a handful of aircraft and boats to discover, most of my time in Santo Ileso was spent behind the wheel of a healthy fleet of land vehicles, from motorbikes to monster trucks and everything in between. It’s also fairly conventional in its approach to driving.

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