Hell. The very word conjures images of the worst kind of punishment centre, filled with molten lava and torment to pay the wages of sin. Hell certainly doesn’t sound like a place where you could have some fun. Saints Row: Gat out of Hell aims to change that perception. It‘s an expandalone game that continues the story from Saints Row IV and sets up the plot to allow for another instalment in the franchise.
The plot follows the same absurd vein that the franchise is known for, starting off with the Boss (the President of the United States) being kidnapped by Satan on Kinzie’s Birthday. Johnny Gat and Kinzie follow Satan to Hell to free the Boss. And what an interesting Hell it is. Satan plans to marry his daughter Jezebel to the Boss and have them lead his newly acquired armies (Thanks to the events of Saints Row IV) against the forces of Heaven.
The Hell in Gat out of Hell is a city with five main areas that are all designed around a unique theme. The Barrens are desolate and uninhabitable, the Shantytown is packed with slums and cramped buildings, Downtown is a fortress with buildings resembling a business district, The Entertainment district is full of various sinful offerings to make your stay in Hell interesting and the Industrial district is a hotbed of pollution with its multiple factories. Hell is certainly an interesting city, though much smaller than Steelport from the previous two games. It is populated by shrivelled bodies called Husks that have no identifiable gender.
It seems Dane Vogel has been preparing Hell for the Boss’ arrival and gets a rude shock when Johnny and Kinzie show up. He offers the Ultor building for your HQ and that is where you will respawn every time you load up the game. He also grants them Lucifer’s Halo that allows them to obtain superpowers such as flight using Angelic Wings and Super Sprinting. These again make travelling by the cars in Hell rather redundant. You also get the Blast power that has the elements of Stone, Shadow and Soul. You can also summon Imps, Towers and Titans. The Ground stomp power has the elements of Force, Vacuum and Holy while the Aura power has the elements of Coldfire, Vamp and Worship. While the basic elements of each power can be found by meeting up with the powerful leaders of Hell, the rest must be collected by visiting their altars and offering enough kills to the altar to let you keep the power.
You are reunited with some characters from older Saints Row games and some other historical figures who are disillusioned with Satan and are vying to establish their own dominion in Hell. Dane Vogel of Ultor and the Dewynter sisters, Viola and Kiki make a return in Gat out of Hell. You also meet Blackbeard, Shakespeare and Vlad the Impaler. Each of these characters has their own loyalty quests as in Saints Row IV that involve completing certain activities for them. There is no dialogue on offer though, so you are free to pursue the open world gameplay as per your wishes. Completing missions and open world gameplay adds to Satan’s Wrath, which can trigger an unskippable cutscene once you reach each of the three milestones on that progress bar.
Volition must be lauded for the excellent implementation of the bird flight model in Gat out of Hell. You can hover in mid-air, glide around as your stamina permits and flap your wings to gain speed. You accelerate by diving down and slow down to stalling as you climb upwards. The Hellblazing activity showcases this model well and requires you to gain mastery over its basics to succeed. The only drawback of this flight model is that you don’t drop down vertically, but instead fall in a projectile motion. This might require some adjusting to if you play Gat out of Hell after getting used to the flight mechanics of Saints Row IV.
Hell has no shops in Gat out of Hell and you don’t get to call homies for help either. In a first, you can play as either Johnny Gat or Kinzie Kensington, and characters can be switched in the lobby of the Ultor building. Completing the Loyalty missions for the characters in Hell doesn’t come with the same motivation as it does in Saints Row IV, since they seem to serve no real purpose in the game. The short storyline will let you finish the game in barely 3-4 hours, but you will get your money’s worth if you spend more time pursuing the open world gameplay in Hell. The only things that resemble a shop in Hell are the Sinterpol Armory kiosks that let you buy and upgrade your weapons.
Weapons are a prime focus of Gat out of Hell. There are seven unique weapons to be collected, each representing one of the seven deadly sins, and these tie in beautifully with the eight slot weapon wheel of Saints Row making you wonder if this was the original intent of that design. You don’t get different weapon skins like Saints Row IV though. Upgrading weapons to their fullest requires a lot of currency, which is called the Wages of Sin in Hell, and since there is no metagame to let you earn it by spending time in the game, you are forced to grind a lot for getting a yellow background in the weapon slot. The upgrades can really make some weapons highly overpowered.
There are two random events that can occur and give you some extra Wages for doing them, namely killing Dex and Stealing an Armoured transport to deliver to the Dewynter sisters. The other activities in the game are the staple Mayhem and Survival activities from the series. Other activities include the annoying Salvation activity where you must catch falling souls to save them from damnation. Building up your multiplier requires you to rescue souls being pulled upwards. As mentioned earlier Hellblazing is a race against time that tests your flying skills, while Insurance fraud has you trying to reduce the punishment of a specific husk by being run over by vehicles. You can clear the guards to disable missile towers around Hell that obstruct your smooth flying, or dominate Satan’s Marshalling Grounds by defeating all the minions that defend it, or take over one of his sin processing facilities in a game of point capture.
Gat out of Hell has plenty of Barnstorming locations. It also has the clusters from Saints Row IV that will have you covering every inch of hell to get. Clusters are now called Souls. There are two types, ones that you collect directly and ones that you where you must correctly hit multiple orbs along a flight path to gather. The Monster Trucks that are driven by the lawkeepers of Hell can be used to start a minigame of flattening other cars, while the Rambulance has a minigame of running over the Husk pedestrians. There is a volatile car called the Comet that has its own minigame of driving around sans collision while the car is on fire. Commentaries may be found from the playable characters or as books scattered around Hell. These tell you more of the story of Hell’s locations. You can also collect sigils to unlock a treasure chest in an area.
The Level Cap of Gat out of Hell is 20, which makes you wonder if it was tied to the price. Within this cap, Volition have included a multitude of upgrades that will soon make your characters nigh invincible. The upgrades are relatively cheap though, so powering up shouldn’t be an issue. Your enemies in Hell are various male and female demons. The Basic demons will fire at you with a variety of standard weapons. There are specialist sniper demons that can teleport around if you get too close and there are annoying imps that will cling to your body and whittle down your health. Dark Inciters are a new enemy type that summons other enemies and are protected by a shield. Grenadiers are the heavy infantry of Hell and Titans are the muscular Grunts. There are some Flying Demons to challenge you in the air too. The highest level demon that appears when you get the heat level high enough is the Arch Duke who can be defeated similar to a warden from Saints Row IV and whose death resets the notoriety. There is a random chance of Professor Genki spawning instead of the Arch Duke.
Gat out of Hell thankfully has no QTEs within the game. The only real boss fight you get is with Satan. This fight is much simpler compared to the rather tough fights you get trying to rescue each of the emissaries from a dark ritual as Satan doesn’t actively fight back. The shortness of the story makes you wonder if it was designed to be just as straightforward as Johnny’s plan to put a bullet in peoples’ heads to fix all problems. The game offers you five different endings of which a couple can easily set up more entries in the franchise. This makes one suspect that the expandalone was produced for this filler purpose.
Gat out of Hell can have an inspiring soundtrack playing at times, but seems lacklustre or silent for the most part. Sound effects are well done and the graphics are good. The flight animations are quite detailed and it’s nice to see the accurate portrayal of lava behaviour. The artworks used to advance the story are also well drawn in their medieval story book style.
Gat out of Hell can be summed up by calling it wasted potential. It has a well designed game world, but is let down by the short story and the excessive grind if you wish to get all the achievements. The NPCs in the game serve no real purpose and offer few reasons to finish their quests. All these shortcomings can be easily ignored if you partake in the excellence of the flight model and just wreak your own brand of mayhem around Hell. If there was ever a game that made you look forward to visiting Hell, this has to be it.
