This review contains spoilers
Honestly kind of shocked to realize that a lot of this turned out to have just completely washed over my 15-year-old self when I first played this when I later got completely attached to all the little character moments in The Third and IV that define my love for those games, because this does that just as well: from the seeds of The Boss and Pierce’s singalongs being planted with their radio fighting (along with Pierce just not being taken seriously in the slightest), to Johnny Gat being a complete Wife Guy when he’s not being the most murderous fucker on the planet, to The Boss taking a huge liking to Carlos even when his performance hasn’t been up to snuff (and thus making the latter’s death feel even more tragic), like, god the primary reason I love this series was just staring me in the face for so long and I glossed over it because most of my memories with the game in high school were just cruising around town to Gen X/Ultor Radio with a bunch of cheats enabled as well as some of the side activities like Insurance Fraud (which is still legendary af, don’t get me wrong).
Honestly it’s because of the character work that the only thing that slightly holds this back a bit for me is the structure of the game: this might just be an issue with how I played through the game, but being able to just go through any rival gangs’ missions in one go (or essentially just do that because of Respect being required to do missions) before tackling another’s makes it more obvious that once that’s done, characters hugely involved with said gang’s goings-on are pretty much absent from the others. The only real exception (aside from Pierce since he’s a general intel guy with no connections to any of the rival gangs) is Shaundi who has involvement in the latter half of the Brotherhood missions too, which is good since she’s a hell of a lot of fun here! But then you have things like Johnny Gat being stuck in the Ronin missions until the other gangs’ stuff is done, and Aisha being completely absent from said other stuff because she dies halfway through this one storyline that you might finish first. Same thing applies to Carlos in the Brotherhood missions, and it’s a shame because what they both have here is really goddamn good and I honestly wish that the structure of the story was more linear, even if I know that’s probably heresy to Open World Games, so that even more could have been done without the fear of it fucking with the continuity the player sets up.
Outside of that (and the lack of a regular soundtrack for when you’re outside of vehicles making things like warehouse raids incredibly silent for no real effect IMO, though there is a joy in having radio stations come in from vehicles if you’re on-foot, and even more from having rival gangs chase you down with their own music blaring and clashing with yours), though, this was an absolute joy to go back to and I’m glad I’m appreciating it a lot more this time around. It might not go to the goofier (compliment) lengths of the later (pre-reboot) games of the series but the pure chaotic nature of it is still certainly felt, and the balance it strikes with both its silly elements and a genuine darkness is a perfectly-executed tightrope walk. It’s still not my favorite Saints Row game at the moment, but I definitely understand now why a lot of people consider this to be the gold standard for the series.
(note: I do have this playthrough and rating marked as for the PC port, but the rating’s more in spite of said port because goddamn, even as someone who’s not way too bothered by technical bullshit, this port really is infamous for a reason. From the more minor in retrospect things like needing to install a mod (Gentlemen of the Row) to get the game to even properly start, to the more painful like all the audio being super compressed (aside from the radio stations if, again, a mod’s applied) and loud to the point where I had to turn the volume down because it started to get painful (and even after adjusting the volume cutscenes could just play stuff at max volume anyway), to bits like how even with GotR installed there was always a chance that the game would just crash if I was entering a vehicle or a firework effect was going off so if I forgot to save after a bit, well… yeah, this whole thing’s fucked and I hope that the patch that’s supposedly still being worked on comes to fruition because otherwise I’m just hoping that performance for the game on RPCS3 and Xenia improves if I go back to this for a third time because it was somehow worse with those)
Honestly it’s because of the character work that the only thing that slightly holds this back a bit for me is the structure of the game: this might just be an issue with how I played through the game, but being able to just go through any rival gangs’ missions in one go (or essentially just do that because of Respect being required to do missions) before tackling another’s makes it more obvious that once that’s done, characters hugely involved with said gang’s goings-on are pretty much absent from the others. The only real exception (aside from Pierce since he’s a general intel guy with no connections to any of the rival gangs) is Shaundi who has involvement in the latter half of the Brotherhood missions too, which is good since she’s a hell of a lot of fun here! But then you have things like Johnny Gat being stuck in the Ronin missions until the other gangs’ stuff is done, and Aisha being completely absent from said other stuff because she dies halfway through this one storyline that you might finish first. Same thing applies to Carlos in the Brotherhood missions, and it’s a shame because what they both have here is really goddamn good and I honestly wish that the structure of the story was more linear, even if I know that’s probably heresy to Open World Games, so that even more could have been done without the fear of it fucking with the continuity the player sets up.
Outside of that (and the lack of a regular soundtrack for when you’re outside of vehicles making things like warehouse raids incredibly silent for no real effect IMO, though there is a joy in having radio stations come in from vehicles if you’re on-foot, and even more from having rival gangs chase you down with their own music blaring and clashing with yours), though, this was an absolute joy to go back to and I’m glad I’m appreciating it a lot more this time around. It might not go to the goofier (compliment) lengths of the later (pre-reboot) games of the series but the pure chaotic nature of it is still certainly felt, and the balance it strikes with both its silly elements and a genuine darkness is a perfectly-executed tightrope walk. It’s still not my favorite Saints Row game at the moment, but I definitely understand now why a lot of people consider this to be the gold standard for the series.
(note: I do have this playthrough and rating marked as for the PC port, but the rating’s more in spite of said port because goddamn, even as someone who’s not way too bothered by technical bullshit, this port really is infamous for a reason. From the more minor in retrospect things like needing to install a mod (Gentlemen of the Row) to get the game to even properly start, to the more painful like all the audio being super compressed (aside from the radio stations if, again, a mod’s applied) and loud to the point where I had to turn the volume down because it started to get painful (and even after adjusting the volume cutscenes could just play stuff at max volume anyway), to bits like how even with GotR installed there was always a chance that the game would just crash if I was entering a vehicle or a firework effect was going off so if I forgot to save after a bit, well… yeah, this whole thing’s fucked and I hope that the patch that’s supposedly still being worked on comes to fruition because otherwise I’m just hoping that performance for the game on RPCS3 and Xenia improves if I go back to this for a third time because it was somehow worse with those)