So you’ve aced the Activities and terminated the Targets. Now it’s time to crush the Challenges. The Challenges are located in the menu, at the bottom of the Quests screen. In order to get the achievement “The Challenge King” you need to complete every last one of them! There are a total of 65 of them to do, so let’s get started!

Saints Row 4 Challenges – Non-Specific Awesomeness

Challenge: Distance Super Sprinted – You’ll likely get this just by playing the game normally. All you’ve got to do is sprint, and that’s the preferred mode of transportation in this game! Related Achievement: And I Ran… Just keep running.

Challenge: Super Jump Air Time – Again, another one that’s a piece of cake. Related Achievement: Don’t Look Down. Both are probably going to unlock early.

Challenge: Telekinesis Catches – Tricky! You can’t do this until you’ve gotten the reward from Silver medal’ing all of Genki’s MOM. Once you have it, you need stuff to get thrown at you. Wardens will do this, and you can spawn a Warden by raising your notoriety to the max after you’ve fought the first one. One of their attacks is to grab an item and throw it at you with their TK power. You have to catch it.

Pro Tip This is pretty easy if you lure the Warden to an area where they can see you, but can’t hit you directly. If you stand behind a low wall, or have a small hill between you and the Warden, the object will bounce off the wall/hill and ricochet into the air. This gives you extra time to line up and catch it. I found it easiest to aim directly at the Warden, and then hit the TK button when he moves his arms outwards to throw it. The timing takes practice, but once you have it down, catching stuff should be straightforward.

Challenge: Alien High Notoriety Time – Piss off aliens, run around a bit. This is another one you’re likely to just get from playing.

Challenge: Aliens Taunted – Check your controls to find out what button Taunt is, and then do it a bunch while aiming at aliens. You have to be pretty close in order for it to count. If you move a bit while taunting, you can break the animation early, which helps to move on to the next target quicker.

Challenge: Audio Logs Collected – Completing sidequests for Matt Miller will give you the Collectable Finder, which will make these show up on your mini-map. Pro Tip You can also cycle the main map to “Collectables” in order to set waypoints from the map screen. Handy! Incidentally, if you want to listen to the logs again, they’re on the computer on the ship, next to the shark statue above the pool table on the lower deck.

Challenge: Distance Travelled in Alien Vehicle – Grindy :( Ugh, why would you ever travel in a vehicle in this game? This is an insane amount of travel, as well. The easiest thing to do is to get a Void (the Alien VTOL), put it in flight mode, and fly it in a circle by rubber banding your left stick (or leaving something heavy on your “A” key for PC users) while it is either level or aimed slightly upwards. Still, this takes a good 6 to 8 hours worth of spinning in circles.

Update: I’ve had reports from readers that they had significantly shorter times for this one – on the order of half an hour to an hour instead of 6 to 8 hours. I don’t know if this has been patched or not, but at any rate, it’s good news for those of you out there who have yet to complete it!

Challenge: Distance Travelled in Mech Suit – The Mech Suit is part of the plot in a couple of sections. Once you’ve got it, you can play Mech Suit Mayhem on the map. If you don’t get this naturally from playing the plot missions, just play this Mayhem a couple of times and you’ll unlock it no problem. You can also wait until the point in the plot where it unlocks for your garage.

Challenge: Text Adventure Collected – Same as the Audio Logs above – use the Collectible Finder on the main map to spot these, and go grab them. They look like little old-school computers. You can then play the text adventure from the same computer on the ship. There’s no challenge for “winning” the text adventure, though.

Challenge: Time Spent With Homies – This is easy to get from the start – just call Kinzie and go do something that isn’t a mission. Collect the collectables, fly around in an alien vehicle, etc. Related Achievement: Back in the Day – make sure the Homie you picked is one of the ones from Saints Row 3 – Kinzie works fine.

Challenge: Zinyak Statues Destroyed – Just another Collectible challenge. Bring a pretty tough weapon, I like the Disintegrator or the Dubstep Gun. Both make short work of statues.

Saints Row 4 Challenges – General Killin’ Stuff

Challenge: Destroy Alien Vehicles – Alien UFOs (Void VTOLs) go down in one hit from your Blast power. Similarly, you can sometimes take out more than one Alien Jet Bike (XOR) with a single hit from Blast. You can even use Buff and then jump close to the bikes to take them out. Or, you could, y’know, shoot them or something boring like that. Those things are practically crashes waiting to happen.

Challenge: Destroy C.I.D.S – CIDs spawn with portals, the “sniper” aliens, and murderbots. They’re the little floating orbs that put shields on other aliens. Blow em up. The Bounce Rifle works pretty well if you’ve got a CID in a group of other aliens. Just aim for one that the CID isn’t protecting.

Challenge: Destroy Murderbots – Murderbots spawn at moderately high notoriety after you’ve encountered them for the first time in a plot mission. Some have gatling lasers and others have mine launchers. Both can be exploded for great justice.

Challenge: Destroy Portals – Portals hang in midair and spawn enemies. Do enough damage and they’ll close up and stop spawning.

Challenge: Kill Aliens – Aliens! They’re everywhere. This counter doesn’t count Murderbots, CIDs, or similar. However, it does count the gang members that spawn during the plot and during Super Power Fight Club. See the section on “Super Power Kills” for more info about farming aliens through the Super Power Fight Club method.

Challenge: Kill Wardens – Grindy :( Wardens spawn after you’ve fought at least one in the main plot. They’ll arrive and replace any other enemies when your notoriety is maxed out. You have to use your super powers to take their shield down, and then hit them with your weapons to weaken them. Then, you have to do a button-mashing quick time event to finish them off. You’ve got to take down 20 for the challenge, which is a lot of notoriety raising and button mashing. Related Achievement: Zoo Keeper. Same requirements as the challenge, just 25 total.

Pro Tip Bring a powerful, fast firing weapon to a Warden fight. There are a lot of things that work here, but avoid things like the Inflato-Ray, the Disintegrator… anything that needs to charge up or requires precision aiming is probably going to be at a disadvantage. The Blast power works well to take their shields down, as it works at range and has a broad area of effect. Pick the Freeze element, since if it hits you it doesn’t effect you. Redditor Brokenglass126 suggests using a fully-upgraded Dubstep Gun – hold the trigger down to fire it continuously, and use your Blast power while it is firing.

Saints Row 4 Challenges – Kills With Special Weapons

Related Achievement: Experimental Tech, 25 Alien kills with the Bounce Rifle, the Dubstep Gun, the Abduction Gun, the Singularity Gun, the Inflato-Ray, and the Disintegrator. BIG FAT WARNING: I had major trouble doing this after I’d upgraded the Inflato-Ray to explosive inflations. I’d suggest avoiding that upgrade until after you’ve done this achievement.

General Advice: Since most of these kills need to be Alien kills, I’d suggest doing these while you’re doing other Alien kill-related things like Virus Injections, Flashpoints, Beacons, and so forth.

Pro Tip I actually farmed most of these on one Virus Injection activity, by leaving the area before I’d reached the kill count, and then going back and starting it again. If you’ve already done all of these, try to find a relatively tall building where you can avoid the enemies that don’t count for this, like CIDs, Murderbots, etc. Also remember that maxing your Notoriety will bring a Warden out, which you may not want to deal with.

Challenge: Bounce Rifle Kills – The Bounce Rifle is good against groups of enemies, as it will ricochet around between targets, killing several at once.

Challenge: Dubstep Gun Kills – This one has a pretty high kill count, so I’d suggest upgrading the Dubstep Gun with the Explosive Wubs upgrade before doing this.

Challenge: Targets Abducted – The abduction gun is unlocked by completing one other challenge. Fully upgrading the Abduction gun helps for this, as it makes it fire very fast.

Challenge: Targets Blackholed – Again, max this gun out first. This one doesn’t have to be against aliens, so I suggest you start the on-foot Mayhem which features this gun, and then running to the military base in the southeast. Infinite soldiers spawn here, and you can just shoot the gun from the bridge onto the base over and over again to quickly max this one out.

Pro Tip Even after you’ve Blackhole’d all these soldiers, you’re still going to have to kill 25 aliens for Experimental Tech, and this gun recharges very slowly even fully upgraded. If you have the “Extra Gateway Ammo” upgrade, just kill some aliens, then visit the gateway and switch out this gun for the RPG, and then switch back. It will be back in your inventory, fully charged and ready for destruction.

Challenge: Enemies Disintegrated – The Disintegrator is quite good against the XOR hover-bikes the aliens use – just line up and headshot the alien riding it.

Challenge: Inflato-Ray Kills – The Inflato-Ray is really not a great crowd control weapon until it’s fully upgraded, and as I mentioned I think fully upgrading it to “explosive kills” breaks the Experimental Tech achievement! The aliens that ride the XOR hover-bikes or who are on the turrets of the other alien vehicles are pretty easy to kill with this weapon.

Challenge: Tentacle Bat Beatdowns – Ah, floppy purple bat, how we’ve missed you! Go slam the bat into any alien that gets in your way – even without much in the way of upgrades, it’s still almost a 1-hit kill agains the easier aliens.

Challenge: Mech Suit Kills – The Mech Suit is used in a couple of plot missions, and in Mech Suit Mayhem. It’s also a garage vehicle you can call in after a certain point in the plot. Only Alien kills seem to count for this.

Pro Tip One easy way to round this out is to play the hard Mech Suit Mayhem and look for them. Most of the high-value targets (including the Voids that fly overhead) count as alien kills. The alleyways off the main road are littered with them.

Saints Row 4 Challenges – Kills With Super Powers

General Advice: Most of these require you to kill aliens specifically – not normal, everyday citizens, and not police, murderbots, CIDs, vehicles, and so forth. As you progress, it’s going to be harder and harder to get alien kills via Notoriety – just too much other stuff spawns.

Pro Tip The best way to get aliens to kill with super powers is… to play Super Power Fight Club. If you play the “Hard” instance of this, the second wave is “King of the Hill.” An infinite number of gang members with baseball bats will spawn. These guys count as Aliens for the purposes of your challenges! Just don’t capture the hill – fight the infinite gang members with your powers instead. When time runs out, restart the activity and repeat.

WARNING: tiddy experienced (in the PC version) that failing the activity reset his challenge progress. I’ve completed challenges and then exited out or failed the activity and I’m fairly certain I still got credit. However, to be on the safe side, you may want to test this theory and/or quit out of the activity early to avoid losing progress.

Related Achievement: There is a “global” achievement for the Super Power kills catgeory which is I Am Become Death. I’d leave this one until you have all the other achievements/challenges, since you’ll make good progress towards it just by doing the others. Again, Super Power Fight Club makes this easier. You can get at least a couple hundred alien super power kills from farming the “King of the Hill” wave in this activity until you run out of time.

Challenge: Aliens Super-Kicked – Just walk up to an alien with a weapon out, and hit the melee button. You’ll blow his gonads into next year. Lather, rinse, repeat for 10 kills. This one might be easier to do outside of the “Fight Club” trick I mentioned above – the melee doesn’t seem to work well for this while in that activity.

Challenge: Death From Above Kills – The DFA power is unlocked via the main quest. To use it, hold the “Aim” button while in midair, and then press the “Shoot” button when you’ve lined up your shot. You’ll need 100 alien kills for this one. Related Achievement: Fist Meet Ground, 100 kills with this power.

Challenge: Superpowered Beatdowns – Sprint up to an alien, and then stop sprinting just before you hit them. Keep your forward momentum, and hit the melee button. You’ll get a little animated cutscene where you suplex them or similar. Do this to 10 aliens, although you may want to practice on civilians until you get the hang of it.

Challenge: Telekinesis Kills – Pick up and throw an alien against a wall, repeatedly if required. Power upgrades that increase the recharge rate make this go faster. Related Achievement: Here! Catch! – 100 kills with TK. Just keep going!

Challenge: Throw People With Telekinesis – You’ll unlock this one no problem while going for the challenge and achievement above.

Challenge: Vehicles Super-Kicked – Kick a vehicle by meleeing near a vehicle with a weapon equipped. This can be done against civilian cars, no need to piss off the aliens more than nessesary.

Challenge: Arc Lightning Hits – This is pretty easy to do with the Lightning element for Buff, which you can get from doing sidequests. Just activating it once during the King of the Hill round of Super Power Fight Club ought to do it.

Challenge: Enemies Mind-Controlled – Mind Control is an element for Telekinesis that you get from doing side quests. Just use it on enemies to get credit for this.

Challenge: Fire Element Ignitions – For this, you’re going to need the Buff power, which you get via the main quest. When you activate it, it will ignite nearby enemies. Related Achievement: Bringin’ the Heat, 100 aliens killed. Use the Super Power Fight Club trick I mentioned at the top of this section. Note that they have to die and not just get ignited for the achievement.

Challenge: Freeze Shatters – Any of the “Freeze” element powers works for this. Blast is the one you’ll have from the start, but later you’ll get Freeze as a Buff element. Related Achievement: Chill Out, 100 aliens shattered. Freeze Blast + Tentacle Bat FTW!

Challenge: Gravity Float Kills – Gravity is an element for the Stomp power. Get a group of enemies together, do a Gravity Stomp, and then use the Bounce Rifle to kill them all quickly.

Challenge: Ground Stomp Stuns – The Stone element for the Stomp power is what you need here. Just hitting them with it is enough. Related Achievement: Pounding the Pavement, 150 alien kills. This goes really quick with the Super Powered Fight Club trick I mentioned at the top of this section.

Challenge: Health Stolen – Life Steal is an element for the Telekinesis power, which you can get from side quests. With this element selected, grab aliens and you’ll suck their life. You can then throw them and grab another.

Challenge: Shrunken Enemies Squished – This is an element for the Stomp power which, again, you can get from side quests. Once you’ve stomped, then just walk over the shrunken enemies. It can be a bit tricky to do this during the King of the Hill round in Super Power Fight Club, but the number of these you need is so small it shouldn’t matter much.

Saints Row 4 Challenges – Guides That Are Elsewhere

If you look at this list, I’ve left some out. That’s because we’ve already got guides for those! Here’s where to find them.