Saints Row The Third is my guilty pleasure game. I must’ve played through this game at least 5 times throughout my life. it’s truly one of my favorites, but it’s such a flawed game. This game has some incredible moments that make me love it. Driving through Steelport and singing along to Sublime with Pierce, taking over a penthouse while Kanye West Power plays, going inside a computer program to battle a computer hacker with a mega buster (and later as a dragon), the murder brawl level, and saving your friends from dying while Holding Out For a Hero plays. There are so many amazing and fun moments throughout this game that i just adore, but it’s pretty obvious that this game was rushed. There was a lot of cut content revealed in trailers and not seen in the game. on top of that there are just moments that feel an extreme lack of polish, especially in the story. The game sets up story arcs and moments for character development but doesn’t really do anything with it. The game implies that the Saints have gone soft by accepted corporate deals and there are many reference to them just being silly old people now instead of threatening gangsters, but besides the casual reference to that, the game never takes that theme anywhere. On top of that, most characters never receive a conclusive story arc despite being set up for one. The issues with the story are extremely disappointing because there was some amazing potential for this game to become better than Saints Row 2. I like to think that what really happened here is that they over shot their ambition and budget and ending up with having to rush the game to completion. Not only did they go all out with the advertising for this game, but they also had a lot of celebrity voice actors in this game. Burt Fucking Reynolds, Hulk Hogan and some other smaller but well known voices. I’m not entirely sure what happened with this game for it to feel so rushed, but it’s a shame that it ruins a game that could’ve been perfect. At least the gameplay feels incredible.

In terms of the remaster, it’s a pretty mixed bag. overall the game looks amazing and it’s impressive to see them make a ps3/360 game look this great. It’s been quite awhile since i’ve played the original so i might be wrong, but the remaster brings in a lot more bugs than the original. there are some issues with the original that carry over here such as the awful ai, but the remaster has some awful lighting issues. I assume it has something to do with the HDR, but the game is constantly always too dark or too bright. on top of that, there are sometimes some glitches that cause the game to look strange. Some other issues i ran into was a certain character never appearing to look normal throughout the game and always having his face be a fucked up collection of textures. There’s never anything game breaking like some remasters (mafia 2) but it’s enough to be noticeable. i would still recommend this remaster to anyone interested in the game.

EDIT: while looking into this, apparently the game was made with 1/3 of the staff they had for Saints Row 2 which would explain why the game feels so rushed and has so much cut content.