I kind of took a break from life and spent the weekend playing the new Saints Row game.
Once you got past the initial glitches and the day one patch and hotfix, it's not a bad game. It's tone runs somewhere just a little past Saints Row 2 rather than closer to Saints Row 3. The trouble being that when it's running as it's meant to it's a competent game, rather than anything fresh or new. It's got a decent open world design, some lush visuals and ambience. The empire building is an interesting idea, but fails to take off or rather be used in any meaningful way - it's like they've partially used it as an excuse to shove in a batch of mini-game / repeatable shallow side-quests rather than really make it interesting. Some of which are interesting, others not so much. And some you really have to question why they had you do it 14 times in a row.
Perks linked to challenges is nice enough, but the skills are fairly terrible to use and pretty forgettable. The melee is like all Saints Row, fairly atrocious, and the shooting is that standard run and gun and have fun.
The writing lays some good foundations, but they don't manage to develop a lot of it with what they've done. The principle companion figures are interesting and have some minor development, provide a couple of good emotional beats, but again fail to really be developed beyond the basics or one note points. Some slightly silly missions that then turn around and have some impactful emotional connections related to their backstory once you know it. And then it moves on with nary a mention or anything built on that.
The main sequence of storyline is fairly short and again, in part it feels like the framework is being developed for something later. Whether that's future DLC or the next game in the franchise.
So in principle, if you don't have to deal with too many of the tech glitches, it's a decent game without too many memorable points, that you should be able to enjoy if you like that sort of stuff. There's nothing that fresh about the gameplay or structure to make it stand out. But there is entertainment to be found.