Review in one word: Lame.

Lame story, lame characters, lame writing. This isn't a Saints Row game. It's a barely passable open world game, but all the lame aspects drag it down a ton.

They made the main character some horrific looking humanoid in the art work and I'm EVER SO greatful that we can create insanely outrageous custom characters to play as instead. I honestly don't know what they were thinking making such horrible looking characters as presets.

A very positive note is that the character customization is insanely good. The community sharing is equally as good but the only strange choice is not allowing you to download and apply a character appearance at the start of the game during character creation. Thankfully you will be able to change it whenever you please later on in the game.
Another strange choice would be: Being able to change the size of your Bust or Package but not your Arse, hips, or any other individual area.

Johnny Gat has been replaced with Kevin the completely one note social butterfly gymhead who hates wearing shirts.
Johnny Gat was the guy you wanted around you as he would rush headlong into battle just to save you. He was a character that grew on you and was clearly the most like character of the Saints next to the likes of Julius and
Kevin, is the guy you want to leave at home as you'll spend most of your time trying to ignore his basic traits of I like: Cooking, Partying, Music and not wearing shirts. Kevin is also apart of the Idols gang because... uh, no reason actually. You will never actually see him do anything with the Idols besides shoot them and complain at you for doing that.

Pierce Washington has been replaced with Eli the annoyingly overly nerdy businessman who has a very cringe taste in fashion. Other than being a mouthpiece for spewing reasonable dialogue sometimes, Eli serves no purpose. Because he is a nerd and the devs are checking off some sort of box, he is also annoyingly pathetic. If it wasn't for the LARP part of the game with him, I'd write off the character entirely.

Shaundi has been replaced with Neenah the almost mary sue of the game. She amazing at driving, art, cars, history, lore, and planning due to her calm and cool-headed nature. She will bother you with things you didn't wish to know and there will be scenes of little importance about her CAR. She can seemingly handle just about every situation up until there needs to be a reason for the main character to do something. Oh and just like Kevin, she is part of the Panteros Gang and cares about what happens to them because... family? There really is no reason they need to be part of a rival gang.

Rim Jobs has been replaced with Jim Robs and it's now based on the random character who drives you during 1 action mission. There is very little point in the change other than removing the fun little double entendre. If they were so focused on changing something that has existed in the series for ages, they should've brought back Semi Broken or just left the name alone. I frankly prefer the name Rim Jobs.

The Deckers has been replaced with The Idols. These techno glowing wannabe daft punk idiots are just as annoying as the Deckers but somehow less tech savvy and more chaos, anarchy and anti-materialism. They stole the goons from Rage 2 and found all the left over Watch Dogs Legion masks they could and stuck them on the heads of Pink suit wearers. While I found the helmets interesting the overall appeal and vibe is so much less than The Deckers. Even the sex appeal is near rock bottom. I love the neon but don't care for the random blue-pink spray paint all over. It also doesn't help that ALL of the special enemy types are interesting but very annoying. 1 Shoots basically exploding stun nades everywhere, 1 spins rave sticks around blocking all your shots and not dying and the last one is the Max Alert mini boss that likes to party and summon help.

The Panteros are dumb brutes of orange instead of dumb brutes of green and being called the Luchadores.
The Luchadores are so much more interesting and their focus on heavy weapons & close combat melee make sense. There is only one interesting enemy type from the Panteros and that's their Max Alert mini boss. A Giant muscle women who attempts to kill you with a exploding sledgehammer. Everything else charges directly at you to die or tries to shoot you with launchers/guns.

The Morningstar is possibly replaced with Marshal. Although it could also be seen as Marshal = STAG military group.
Either way, Marshal is effectively another rival gang that are better at everything than anyone else. All of the units, cars, guns and tech are the cool parts of the game. Everything you get that is cool is either from them or DLC.

The criminal ventures are playing it very safe. Gone are the very wacky ideas of Saints Row 2 and instead of have very basic missions that don't seem like enough time was left for them to be tested and improved on. SO many missions are shooting galleries and very little of them are different enough to be a break from the grind and slog of it all. A lot of them will change your equipment without warning or choice and other options are hidden behind a grind.

The game requires very large increasing amounts of money in order to advance your Criminal Empire. Something you will have not completed before beating the game. I've beat the game and all DLC content and I still don't have enough income in order to full upgrade everything. And at a certain point your will to care about everything just falls off a cliff like the writers will to have a good story. The only thing keeping me going is the want for all achievements.

The story is hardly anything that interesting and a bunch of it is copied from movies/TV shows.
You spend a great deal of time dealing with 1 Big Bad only for it to be killed in a cutscene instead of a cool boss fight.
The next big bad is technically multiple and are only required to be killed because they F****d around and found out.
After that, you're back dealing with the same crap you did in the start of the game which are all extremely easily dealt with. Bingo bango, the game is done.

The DLC Heist and the Hazardous is a waste of time and money unless you get it for literally dirty cheap. It's 3 missions long. The first mission is like 10 minutes? The next is equally as short depending on how many times you screw up. The last mission is where everything important happens and once it's over, you get only some objects and a new worthless HQ/Home to show for it. No 1 Mill. No improved income. I love doing END game based missions and being rewarded like 5k for it.

The DLC A Song of Ice and Dust, is clearly about nonsense and I'm all for it. It's the Eli adventure into LARP'ing and funny enough, I really enjoyed it. I heard from other s that it's their most hated part of the game but man, there are so many low points here it's all low hanging fruit. I rather take the unique items with new challenges over the nothingness of the other DLC above.

The DLC Doc Ketchums Murder Circus is like taking Genki and making everything about that entire experience worse and more worthless to do. Why would I want a Arena Shooter mode? Why would I want to collect coins to slightly improve the playing experience of it when I want it over with as soon as possible? Why wouldn't you just use Genki here? What is the purpose of changing things to just make it worse and less familiar? As of typing, I have not 100% this DLC yet but I can safely say, it's as much of a slog as everything else in the game.

maybe it's a shame, I like this game, I like the content, the gameplay, the crazy ragdoll, those crazy explosion, the potential was great i'm not afraid to say that, but the game is not polish at all, for exemple it's look like a lot of sound effect and ambient sound is missing and even worse the co-op multiplayer is a mess, not a funny one.
You can't play this game in co-op without experiencing infinite loading screen.

Play this game, but alone.