As with most open-world games, we start playing Saints Row on the default difficulty setting. We’re immediately pleased to discover that we can adjust the challenge at any time should we wish to up the stakes a touch – or to tone things down if we’re dying too frequently. A little over halfway into our playthrough, we reduce it to the second-lowest setting, but not for the reasons you might suspect. It’s not that we’re failing too many missions – in almost all cases, that’s either down to friendly AI having a death wish, the oddly exacting time limits of cleanup missions, or stepping beyond mission boundaries (in one instance while engaged in a shootout with the police we need to kill before the next objective triggers). Rather, it’s because encounters have become too tediously attritional to bear: enemies are showing up in ever greater volume, with larger numbers of tougher or shielded variants among their ranks, dragging out firefights to wildly excessive length. When the biggest difficulty you’re having isn’t staying alive but staying awake, it’s probably time to cut your losses and, if not necessarily make things easier, then at least shorter.
Granted, there’s nothing we can do to stop Los Panteros, Marshall or the Idols turning up in their droves, but Saints Row does offer a rare degree of modularity in its challenge settings. In a game that frequently makes you travel more than 2km between objectives, this is the right way to go the extra mile. Here, there are no fewer than seven difficulty sliders, ranging from danger level (the amount of damage your character takes) and enemy durability to ammo scarcity and timed objective difficulty, the latter worth nudging upwards for those cleanup tasks. On the default Entrepreneur difficulty, everything is set to five, while the next step up, Sensei, is mostly sevens and eights. The hardest setting, Boss, sets everything to nine, and for Hustler it ranges between two and four, though to add an element of risk we dial up the danger level a couple of notches while dropping the tough enemy frequency to avoid bulletsponge boredom. (Bravo, too, for the non-condescending difficulty descriptions. Tourist mode – all zeroes – reads, “You’re not looking for trouble. You’re just here to enjoy the scenery and the story”, while Hustler says, “You like to take it easy but are not afraid to mix it up. If there’s an angle to play, you’ll play it”. In other words, we’re just doing what a criminal mastermind would.)