Saints Row 3 Remastered

[Margaretha Palone]

Gettingremastered games feels like a bit of a monkey's paw at this point, doesn't it? The finger has curled, and we get remasters of all the old games we loved - but we have to play them a decade after their original release, and not as the person we were when we loved them. And I did really love Saints Row. It has this kind of uplifting, ur-adolescent energy, where if you feel like you want to punch the world you probably can, and you can do it dressed as a witch or an alien. Also, I had a massive crush on Johnny Gat.

Probably still the most beloved of the Saints games (though I still have a soft spot for Gat Out Of Hell), The Third opens with a bank robbery seguing into a mid-air shootout on a plane, followed by an extended skydive. See, the eponymous Saints have taken gangbanging and made it a mainstream career. They're famous. They have fans who ask for autographs, a line of energy drinks, and a movie is being made of their lives. So another powerful gang has decided to knock them off their perch.

This means the Saints are starting almost from scratch in a new city, Steelport, and set about claiming territory from the rival gangs there. Every mission you do that undermines the incumbent gang (dominatrix vampire cosplayers the Morningstar, cringe neon hackers the Deckers, and... luchadores the Luchadores) gains you more sway in that area. There are various justifications for these missions - drug deals, theft, etc. - but it mostly amounts to an excuse to shoot some of said gang members.

To be fair, the set pieces get more and more ridiculous as you go, beginning with the plane shoot out as a kind of "start as we mean to go on." This was always Saints Row's USP compared to, obviously enough, Grand Theft Auto. At some point the developers realised if players like exploding things and shooting people and hitting them around the face with big purple dildos, hurhur, so by God, just let them do that, why don't we? And give them increasingly silly scenarios in which to do it. Realism be damned.

Some of the more fun bits actually came as DLC, but you get them all here. There's Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax, an illegal gameshow where you shoot people dressed as animals or beer mascots, or The Trouble With Clones, where the Saints self-described biggest fan has made a clone of perennial favourite character Johnny Gat, and it is on a rampage. But even the main story missions have peaks. There's one almost iconic one very early on where you parachute out of a helicopter onto a penthouse, whilst Power by Kanye West plays. Then you shoot a load of people in the rooftop pool.

If it sounds like I'm struggling to describe any standout hilarious bits, or muster much excitement, that's because I am. For all the bravado and bombast, playing Saints Row The Third in 2020 felt dated. Not in an "Ooh, you couldn't get away with that now! Political correctness gone mad!" way. The explosions, the tits, the hilarious dildo... all of it just washed passed me. I felt like a teacher staring wearily into space as, around her, her charges throttled each other and shat on the desks. It was weirdly anaemic. The guns all felt the same, the missions all blurred into one. Exploding a bunch of alien spaceships seemed no different to punching a pedestrian in the face.

In fairness, that isn't really the remasters fault. And the remaster bit of the remaster is more than decent, especially with the improvements to lighting and the frequent explosions (I am told that particle systems have even more particles for example). Attention has also been lavished on the character models for the main NPCs. All in all, Saints Row The Third: Remastered looks exactly how you remember the original looking, which is to say way better than the original actually was.

It's just the content, I suppose, that doesn't charm me any more. It was like playing the FPS version of a top down ARPG like Diablo or Wolcen. Yeah, I'll shoot the waves of oncoming enemies. No, I don't particularly need to know why. I'll do it again in another mission in a minute. Blah blah blah, strip club, blah blah blah, chop shop. Oh Saints Row. It is not you that have changed, but I.

Saints Row: The Third originally released in 2011, and a couple years later I reviewed it, ahead of the release of its sequel. As it is a game I enjoyed playing and previously reviewed, I put it on my list of future Let's Play+ titles, which are games I have reviewed but lack playthrough videos of, so I use that as an excuse to replay them. That plan changed a bit with the announcement of this game, Saints Row: The Third Remastered, as instead of replaying the original for the videos, I would capture a playthrough of this new version.

Having finished a complete playthrough, including the three expansions this remaster includes, I can say that the gameplay is just as I remember. This is very convenient as it means the review I wrote years ago can still apply for everything, except the graphics and performance, but I now have these performance analyses so I do have a way to look at both outside of a review, and include information for more graphics cards as well.

To quickly summarize my original review, Saints Row: The Third is a fun game and that is I think the best way to describe it. The game is designed to be fun and so lacks some of the trappings of other games of the same open-world, action-adventure genre. You can drive around throwing grenades out of the car, if you want, or use a tank instead. There are repeatable missions where the only goal is to cause chaos on foot, in a tank, or with a well-armed helicopter. There are also missions that involve being hit by cars for insurance fraud, racing through a virtual world, and assisting your homies while they try to sell one thing or another. Its campaign is not the longest, and even this new playthrough that includes the three expansions came to only 19 hours and 52 minutes (22 hours and 22 minutes for the Ley's Play+, and I am unsure what would cause the discrepancy), but as the game also supports co-operative play, it could be extended by playing with a friend.

Unfortunately, there is an important complication here concerning media capture. For some reason, I was not able to get OBS Studio to hook into the game by any means but playing in a window and capturing the window. As Saints Row: The Third Remastered is an Epic Games Store title, and lacks a way to capture screenshots, I had to make the choice between capturing videos or screenshots. I decided on the former, because I can potentially go back and grab screenshots after the playthrough. This does mean I do not have as many screenshots as I would normally prefer, but I do have some, and I even went back to look at screenshots from the original review to get some with similar content. I selected four of these to compare with the remaster and will share them shortly.

While these screenshots I do not think contain any specifically sensitive material, it does need to be noted the game has an M rating for the ESRB with descriptors of Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, and Strong Language. To put it simply, it definitely deserves that rating and because some of the content does get explicit, I enabled YouTube's age-gate for those videos with that content. (If it involves Zimos, it typically calls for an age-gate.)

Also important is the key for Saints Row: The Third Remastered was provided by Tinsley PR for Deep Silver and Sperasoft, which did the development for this version of the game. Volition is the developer of the original game. Besides having the key provided, I also had early access, so some of the graphics and performance data in this article may differ from the release-day version. If you watch the Let's Play+ videos, you may notice some issues captured in it, but none were serious by any stretch and I find it completely reasonable to believe they will be fixed even before this article goes live.

These screenshots come from the beginning of the game and as you can see, the graphics are significantly different between them. There is much more lighting and this lighting is reflecting off of the Johnny Gat masks much better in the new version than before. The glasses now appear to be colored glass instead of a material almost opaque. Also, we can see the hair on the top of the masks has actual shape to it, instead of just different colors within the texture to suggest more than a flat, solid shape.

There is also a lot more than the hair that is different here as the body paint for Jenny is now more complex than just solid purple, especially on her face. It looks like the materials used for her costume have also changed. It is interesting to notice the lights on the back of her hands are not glowing nearly as brightly in the remaster, but with the additional detail to the rest of her model, that might have been distracting.

Jenny is far from the only character whose model appears significantly different than it did before. Oleg and the brutes cloned from him are examples, as they have more hair on them now, and Pierce also looks rather different. It was also kind of weird to see the new Johnny Gat as he has stubble now, giving his face more color than I recall.

As these screenshots come from gameplay instead of a cutscene, it is effectively impossible to perfectly align them, but I still think they do a decent job showing the differences. It is important to note that the original screenshot was taken during a Gangstas In Space mission, and those have the visible letterboxing and film grain applied to them, while the remaster screenshot is from just normal gameplay. Still, we can see how the Aegean, the aircraft I am flying looks markedly different now as the majority of its body now uses a material that resembles a brushed metal, while before it was more reflective. There are almost mirror-like surfaces on the new model, but they are harder to see from this camera angle.

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