Review: Saints Row: The Third Remastered Serves Multiple Masters at Once

Saints Row: The Third is a game with an identity crisis, both within the context of its story and outside of it.

Saints Row: The Third Remastered
Photo: Deep Silver

Even in its original form, Saints Row: The Third is a game with an identity crisis, both within the context of its story and outside of it. Are the rowdy street gangsters turned superstars of the game’s title better off moving forward as common criminals constantly looking for the next big score or, as Saints Row IV would end up putting it, “puckish rogues” prone to all sorts of comic shenanigans? In the broader, meta sense, the game is asking whether Saints Row as a series is better off giving up trying to be a realistic crime simulator in any way. The answer is a resounding yes, but it’s interesting to go back to Saints Row: The Third in 2020 just to see that creative struggle play out in real time.

The game’s gotten a massive visual overhaul in its newly remastered form—the city, the NPCs, and the lighting are all absolutely stunning now—but this is still very much a sandbox game from 2011, full of random, annoying little glitches, an inconsistent framerate (even when locked), and a character creator that’s both incredibly deep and hilariously janky in spots. And yet, all of that works oddly well in the context of this kind of game in 2020, especially when the appeal of the most popular sandbox game of all time, Grand Theft Auto V, comes from people trying to break it in the specific ways that this game is already broken.

Saints Row: The Third doubles down on the ridiculousness of its predecessor but still seems unsure whether that’s the way to go. A fun opening set piece that involves a gunfight during a freefall gives way to the comparatively dark note of series mainstay Johnny Gat getting got—or so we think—by the Syndicate, a European criminal organization that manages to cheat the Saints out of their stranglehold on the city of Steelport. Gat’s presumed death is treated with a measure of gravity, then immediately undercut by the next mission, where the Boss and former slacker turned no-nonsense henchwoman Shaundi end up taking over a military supply depot and ordering drone airstrikes on tanks. That sort of thing happens fairly often in the game’s early going. Throughout this stretch, the sort of bread-and-butter urban fetch quests that form the foundation of your average open-world crime game are heightened to the point of absolute absurdity, while any comedic momentum the game builds over time is eventually muted by the modern gangland material that’s played more straight than necessary.

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That isn’t to say that Saints Row: The Third’s serious side is a complete wash. In fact, one of the game’s—and, arguably, the series’s—best missions is its most straightforward: a brutal, John Wick-ish shootout inside a Syndicate penthouse set to Kanye West’s “Power.” Enemy placement throughout the lavish environment is ingenious, but even this comparatively grounded moment still escalates quickly into a city-wide helicopter chase. That’s long before you factor in glorious absurdities like hovercrafts, Land Shark Guns, BSDM pony-cart chases, mind-controlling octopus launchers, and protracted jaunts in cyberspace where you get turned into a toilet. The game’s problem is one of consistency, where it would be so much stronger picking a tone and sticking with it instead of trying to serve multiple masters at once.

It doesn’t help that much of the middle stretch of the game involves introducing new and weird Activities to the player, couching them in the conceit of how they help the Saints take over the city as opposed to simply allowing them to be fun diversions for their own sake or crafting one-off narrative set pieces that stand on their own. Disguising mini-games as narrative progression creates a bit of dissonance, where the ridiculous story comes off as perfunctory as it develops, just a paper-thin excuse to introduce more grindable content dotted around the game’s map. Despite the fact that the characters you meet during these activities are by and large a joy to interact with, hanging out with them involves running the same activity for them over and over, they’re only delightful in short bursts of gameplay.

There are maybe a dozen different types of activities to do around Steelport, and the ones where the sharp writing and dialogue get to shine make going back to them worthwhile. For players who’ve already spent dozens of hours in Steelport, they’ll at least be able to marvel at the visual upgrade, of seeing these places and characters feel more impressively real without skirting into the Uncanny Valley. The level of customization for your player character, the friendly NPCs in your gang, and the arsenal you take into battle is astonishing.

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With the original release’s entire DLC content included here, those options are even more expansive and ridiculous, and available from the early hours of the game. There’s a vast number of ways to approach activities and liven them up, and Saints Row: The Third is far more welcoming to players looking to break the world instead of trying to grapple with it, especially now that it’s been visually brought up to current standards.

Mainly, having Saints Row: The Third looking like a current-gen experience truly hammers home that, yes, the Saints are much better off as puckish rogues. We already have plenty of po-faced games trying to give players the experience of being a crime boss ruling the underworld with an iron fist. Why should Saints Row try to be the 20th game to offer that experience when it can be the only experience allowing you, dressed as a Mexican wrestler wearing a clown’s face, to cruise through traffic at 100mph with a live tiger in the passenger seat?

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Tinsley PR.

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Score: 
 Developer: Volition, Sperasoft Studio  Publisher: Deep Silver  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: May 22, 2020  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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