I have an ongoing problem with the Saints Row franchise, and this one is no exception, so I'll get that out of the way first. There are certain parts of the games (I first noticed this in Saints Row: The Third during the Moonraker bit) where you're required to fight off a large group of enemies who arrived on the scene a few at a time. If the rate ever increases, it's not by a noticeable amount. It gets boring and repetitive after a while. Hold your position, defend the area, either for X amount of time or until you've killed X people. I really wish they'd ditch that one activity, because "stay and fight for a long time in one area" really just does not gel with "open world sandbox."
I'm not talking about boss battles, although I admit it's been a long time since I had a boss battle I particularly enjoyed. (Tela Vasir in Mass Effect 2's Lair of the Shadowbroker DLC came pretty close for having a cool and unique moveset and all, but she was still an irritating bullet sink.) I don't enjoy fighting bullet sinks, and I don't enjoy fighting my way through quick-time events or complicated gimmicks that only appear on the boss's fight stage, and nowhere else in the game, so you never have time to learn how to deal with it. Actually, Mass Effect 2 itself wasn't too bad in that respect; the final boss was a new and unique thing, and the first baddie in the franchise where you had to attack its weak point, but it didn't feel overly complicated. It had a big attack that was easy to avoid, and the rest of the fight was just fending off the waves of minions it sent at you. That's acceptable.
Having boilerplated all that, let me start out by saying that I enjoyed Gat out of Hell. Ironically it's the most I've ever had to pay for a Saints Row title (thank you, Steam sales), but it's totally worth my money. It is, for those of you who don't know, an expansion to Saints Row IV that does not require a copy of Saints Row IV to play (although if you have a copy of SR4, the President will look the same as they did in your most recent save of that game, so Volition or whoever ports their stuff to the PC finally figured out how to copy data from one save-file to another).
The plot: In the aftermath of SR4, the President / God Emperor of the Universe gets sucked into Hell, and gangbanger-turned-celebrity Johnny Gat and FBI-agent-turned-gangbanger-turned-Press-Secretary Kinzie Kensington go after him/her/it. Their plan: shoot Satan in the face. You may think that such a plan requires more thought, but, come on, they specified in the face, and that's specific enough for Johnny Gat. Yes, it's that kind of a game.
Hell is smaller than Stilwater or Steelport (the locations of the first four games, more or less), which is unsurprising, because this is an expansion and is priced as such. This does mean that a few objectives are crammed together; for example, not long after you get wings, Satan sets up anti-air emplacements called Spires all around Hell. There are less than 30 of them, but at first it'll seem like you can't go five feet from dealing with one before another is shooting missiles at you. That quibble aside, it's not like you're limited to one city block or anything. Without really comparing it, I'd guess Hell's about half the size of Stilwater.
Anyway, on the way to shooting Satan (in the face), you're basically given the usual batch of Saints Row activities; the Survival one I bitched about, the Mayhem one, the "steal a vehicle and drive it to Location X" one (although here it's only one type of vehicle, and you can do this activity any time it spawns), the Assassination one (although again it's only one target who just respawns). There are a few new ones, a sort of king-of-the-hill-style minigame and one where you fly around rescuing falling souls. As soon as you get the hang of the flying mechanic (or hell, even before that, since it's a better tutorial than the flying tutorial), go check that one out.
There aren't "Missions" per se, although there are still a handful of things you have to do before the final confrontation, like recruit (and later rescue) William Shakespeare, Blackbeard, and Vlad the Impaler. All of which makes me wonder where Richard Nixon is. (There are references to tax collectors galore being in Hell, though.)
Speaking of unusual omissions, there's no radio in this game. I get that the radio was basically superfluous once they introduced flying superpowers in Saints Row IV, and that for a $20 game they weren't going to go in for licensing like that, but consider a) the number of famous dead artists and b) the number of "hell"-related songs they just missed out on.
All in all it's good fun and yeah.
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