Publisher: Firestoke
Developer: Usual Suspects Studios
Medium: Digital
Players: 1-4
Online: Yes
ESRB: Not Rated
It may be easy to forget now that the Saints Row reboot seemingly killed the whole franchise, but there was a time when a new Saints Row was an event worthy of anticipation. While some people hated how cartoonish the series became after starting off as a straight-up GTA clone, others – myself included – loved how progressively more absurd and over-the-top every successive Saints Row game was. When the series gave all that up in favour of a dull origin story, it was a huge disappointment.
While I wouldn’t say that It’s Only Money fills the void left by Saints Row’s departure entirely, it definitely does a very good job of trying. Its production values may be a lot lower (and more on that in a bit), but the game captures the same sense of customizable anarchy that made Saints Row great at its best.
This is evident right in its premise. The game is set in the fictional town of Rockhaven, which has just elected a new mayor whose first act of business was to rid the town of undesirables by throwing all the people who didn’t have proper jobs into a pit (or something like that – it rushes through its origin story pretty quickly). It’s up to your character to overthrow the mayor and his corrupt cronies by engaging in all kinds of crimes.
A set-up like that obviously opens up plenty of possibilities for causing chaos, and It’s Only Money constantly seeks to deliver those opportunities. You can pickpocket and rob people to your heart’s content, steal cars, run over pedestrians, get into fistfights with passers-by – and that’s without even getting into the more focused missions. The story may occasionally feel like a bit of an afterthought, but that’s kind of the best thing about open-world GTA-style games: you can get lost in a decent-sized city, causing mayhem to your heart’s content.
It’s Only Money also does a great job of making you feel like you own your character. You can dress them and their vehicles up however you like, no matter how outlandish or stupid it may be. If that doesn’t capture the spirit of Saints Row, I don’t know what does.
Of course, seeing as It’s Only Money was created by a much smaller team than those that created the Saints Row games, the game isn’t without a few flaws. Most notably, the performance suffers, especially if you try playing the game on underpowered hardware – I was barely able to get through the first mission on my Legion Go before the game crashed completely, and no amount of fiddling with the settings after that made it run. It worked noticeably better on a stronger handheld (GPD Win Mini 2024 for the win!), but if you go in expecting perfect performance without a reasonably powerful PC, you may be disappointed.
I also regularly experienced weird glitches and AI that I don’t think were entirely intentional. Cars zoomed around the streets constantly, running over every pedestrian that dared set foot on the street. Cops were constantly chasing my character, even if I’d done nothing wrong and had no bounty on my head – and, what’s more, they tended to start spawning and multiplying out of nowhere once they cornered me. I also ran into a case early on where I accepted a mission to throw a milkshake at someone, except I was locked out of the store where you could buy milkshakes – everyone else was able to literally walk through walls to get in, but I was stuck on the outside until I finally abandoned the mission entirely.
Still, as annoying as those things could be, I wouldn’t say they made me dislike It’s Only Money. In fact, in a way they kind of reminded me even more of Saints Row, which, near the end of its run, regularly leaned into glitches as a way of making things even more cartoon-y.
Does this mean that It’s Only Money is ready to instantly fill the void that Saints Row left behind? Definitely not – it needs to be a little more fleshed out before it can achieve that. But if you’re looking for that kind of game and wants something that scratches the same itch, you’d be wise to start your search with It’s Only Money.
Firestoke provided us with a It’s Only Money PC code for review purposes.
