The Saints Row IV embargo lifted earlier today, and some of you may have already read my contribution to USgamer’s review. Since I wasn’t the main reviewer on that, though, I thought I’d take a moment or two to write something a bit more personal about why I like it so much and why you, dear reader, should probably pick the game up when it comes out.

Saints Row IV is exactly, as many people have already said today, where the series needed to go. Rather than aping Grand Theft Auto — something the series hasn’t really been doing since its first installment, and even then it was its own distinct thing to a certain extent — it’s gone full-on batshit crazy, and is all the better for it.

Let’s back up a moment and look at a game that clearly had a significant impact on Saints Row IV’s development: Crackdown.

Crackdown was an interesting game, and one of the more underrated titles in the Xbox 360’s library. Most people picked it up purely for access to the Halo 3 beta, but I spent a lot of time with both Crackdown and its subsequent sequel. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good fun, particularly when you shared the experience with a friend. It was one of the few games in which the relative lack of storyline helped rather than hindered the experience — it meant that leaping around from rooftop to rooftop collecting those elusive “agility orbs” didn’t feel at odds with what you were “supposed” to be doing in narrative terms. Rather, Crackdown set itself up to be a superpowered playground, and that’s exactly what it provided. To make things even better, it makes the best use of Achievements I think I’ve ever seen on the platform, encouraging players to cooperate with their friends to complete various silly challenges, such as playing tennis with a car and a pair of rocket launchers.

Crackdown’s biggest thrill was its sense of freedom — the feeling that you could go anywhere, do anything, or at least anything within the constraints of the controls you were provided with. The game encouraged you to explore and try to do ridiculous things. One of the first things a lot of people tried to do was climb the tallest tower in the city, then leap off without dying. Sure enough, in the full version of the game you get an achievement for doing both of these things. It’s a game that not only encourages its players to have fun, it rewards them for it.

Saints Row IV is, to a certain extent, the same. While it has a more structured narrative than Crackdown ever did, it has that same sense of freedom that comes from the use of ridiculous superpowers. Not long after starting the game, you’re provided with both super speed and super jump powers, both of which can be gradually upgraded. Eventually, you’re not only hurtling along the roads faster than traffic, you’re running up walls, leaping from building to building, gliding across half the city in a single bound, then crashing down to earth, scattering everything and causing chaos around your landing area. You’re encouraged to make full use of these powers by collecting Saints Row IV’s equivalent of Agility Orbs — and there are over a thousand of them to find. You’re also challenged to make skilful use of them by climbing vertigo-inducing alien towers, and to use them in creative ways to clear out heavily-fortified alien outposts.

The activities you’ll be indulging in while playing Saints Row IV are diverse, and there’s been an obvious and conscious move away from the more “criminal” activities seen in Saints Row The Third. You’re still doing things like deliberately injuring yourself for insurance fraud, though this time around your superpowers causes your ragdoll to go cartwheeling down the road for miles at a time, making the experience far more akin to something like Burnout Paradise’s Showtime mode than anything else. At another moment, you might be using telekinetic powers to throw objects, cars and people through hoops. On another occasion, you might be carefully using your superjump to accurately land on platforms in an abstract environment, or racing through Wipeout-style tunnels in an attempt to score as many points as possible before you reach the end. There’s a lot to do, and pretty much all of it is genuinely fun, whether you’re alone or playing co-op with a friend.

The story provides a good impetus to keep playing, too. The characters are all endearing, despite all of them having “asshole” tendencies to varying degrees, and there’s a real sense of camaraderie between them. Those who have played earlier games in the series will be pleased with some significant nods towards series continuity — including a guest appearance by Eliza Dushku, who played Shaundi back in Saints Row 2 — but this is never done in such a way as to feel exclusionary to those for whom this is their first Saints Row game. Collectibles include audio logs from each of the major characters, so you can delve into their backstory as much or as little as you like — and it’s clear that the team at Volition considers this motley crew far more than just generic tropes.

By far the best thing about the whole experience, though, is how much ownership you can take of it all. You can design your own character to be however you please. It can be male, female, transgender or anything you please. It can be attractive, ugly, fat, thin, realistic, alien-looking… the list goes on. And once you’re into the game, you can continue to feel like your character is “yours” by choosing their voice, the way they taunt people and the way they compliment them. Seeing them in cutscenes is a constant delight, even if they don’t look anything like “you” — there’s something inherently satisfying about seeing a character that is entirely of your own design playing the leading role in a game. Of course, it’s mostly an illusion — there’s only a limited selection of voices to choose from, for example — but even knowing that, there’s a huge amount of joy to be had from it being “your” character while still having a personality that has obviously been written with some care.

Short version, then: you should play Saints Row IV. It’s out soon. Buy a copy. You won’t regret it.