I want to preface this review with three notes. One: I played the original Saints Row the Third when it came out and while I agree that it was sillier than the previous games I did not care, unlike the rest of the internet. Two: My favorite part of any Saints Row game has always been creating outfits for the Boss and it's always what I spend the most time on. Third: I played Remastered on Hardcore mode because I thought the original Third was too easy and had no reason to play any of the side activities.

I wish I knew more about game development, maybe then I would understand how a remaster can look worse than it's original, how it's character creation can be uglier than games that came out before it, how you can screw up colors. Sunset Overdrive looks better, and that came out in 2014. It's bad enough that I had to spend an hour trying to make my Boss not look like a bug-eyed Neanderthal, but I cannot make any good outfits. They screwed up the color black, most of my clothes look terrible because they think dark grey is black and my Boss can either look old or have a bad dye job. Same with dark blue, your only choices are aquamarine or violet.

There's something off about the character models and the clothes that I cannot quite describe. The clothes don't look like they are naturally hanging off your Boss, everything looks like it's made of wool and are one size larger than the Boss.

There was a point early on when i killed a guy and his pool of blood perfectly reflected the sky. That's not how blood works, why would you put that in your game?

As I said before I played the game on Hardcore mode, and it was harder, but not harder in a way that's satisfying. I am pretty sure Volition and Deep Silver didn't test the hard mode to make sure it was reasonable. I would lose heli assault mission because Pierce would drive 20 mph even though he was getting shot at by rocket launchers. I would lose insurance fraud missions because the cars would forget to drive fast. I would lose main missions because the guy I was escorting would stand out in the open and let his health bar be obliterated in a second by a guy with a minigun whose health I could not hope to deplete in time without explosives.

This is the most boring Mario game I've ever played. I've played previous Mario vs. Donkey Kong games, they were a lot more challenging and the level design was more creative. This feels like Nintendo dug out rejected levels from past games and slapped a fresh coat of paint on them.

You know what's the best sign of how uninspired this game is? It's not the fact that the second player character is a nameless Toad instead of Luigi or Pauline, it's how the cutscenes are the same action of Mario chasing after Donkey Kong instead of the varied actions in the cutscenes in Donkey Kong '96.