It’s very easy to have traditional movies or TV specials to watch once a year forChristmas. It’s very hard to say the same for video games though. Now I’m sure you big MMO players have special holiday raid events, but single-player game based around Christmas? It’s a rarity.
One of the great exceptions is theSaints RowIV DLC: How the Saints Save Christmas.
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Come With Me If You Want To Save Christmas
We start our adventure with a flash appearance from a robotic version of Shandi, who came from the future to get our help in stopping Klawz. According to her, Saints Row IV’s main villain, Zinyak, kidnapped Santa Claus decades ago, and just like the population of Earth, placed Santa in a simulation to gather data and torture him. The end result will be an evil clone of Santa named Klawz, a monster that the future Shandi considers far more dangerous than Zinyak.
Shandi was the right Saint to pick for this role, effectively being a mix of Kyle Reese and the Terminator, andover-dramatic over saving the existence of Christmas [not sure what this means]. It’s an incredibly funny experience, listening to her deliver lines such as"you may’t stop Klawz with that BB gun, and you’ll shoot your eye out!“as if it’s the most serious thing to bring up at the moment.
The first mission sees you saving a worn-down Santa from Klawz by playing a Christmas movie at a drive-in theater, the second is you stopping an uprising of giant elves in the North Pole (which are the size of regular-sized humans), and the final mission you ride in Santa’s tricked-out sleigh to deliver presents and coal before finally finishing off Klawz using Christmas (and those other holidays too) spirit.
Nothing feels out of place from the main game. The humor is on point, the characters act no differently than they should. Quite frankly, the DLC fits so well that I consider it canon. I do think the Saints saved Christmas before Johnny’s trip into Hell, too much is done right to pretend it’sjustan unimportant joke to add extra toys [odd phrasing, please reword]. It’s just plain perfect, and ripe for replays once the cold front starts coming in.
The Complete Christmas Package
The gameplay varies, so nothing gets stale, and if only three missions is too little for you, don’t worry: you can also find text adventures to play later in the ship! If text adventures aren’t your style, you also unlock tons of Christmas gear to use whenever you want, and spots on the map where you can play harder versions of flying around delivering presents (now called Naughty-or-Nice).
The BB Gun gets treated like a replacement high-powered rifle. You can call Santa, Mrs. Claus, Gingerbread Men, Klawz, and Future Shandi as homies to back you up. And yes, you get a free Santa suit. You can even buy another one for free at any clothing store, with the option to change the colors, and you had better verify to change the red to purple, or you can’t call yourself a true Saints Row fan.
Saints Row may be gone and buried for now, and its ingenious DLC like this that makes memourn it. This blood-soaked winter wonderland genuinely had the Christmas spirit, all wrapped up in its snarky irreverence.
And you get to save Santa. Or at least, I think you do; you just kinda just left him on Zinyak’s ship in the post-credits….. I’m sure he’s fine. He’s magic or whatever.
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