Saints Row: The Third Remastered Review

"Brand Revamped"

Campaign

May 30, 2020 at 8:02pm
By Jason Stettner

I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed the Saints Row franchise, from its humble grounded beginnings to the over the top action we’ve seen in recent entries. This third main release in the series was where things started to go wild, and it teetered along that edge well.

Being something insane, while still largely being somewhat set in the realms of reality. Zombies, and tank flying aside that is. As your custom created leader of the Saints you’ve built up the crew to have a strong brand awareness. You see this in the streets, and in your growing global presence.

An enemy faction called the Syndicate doesn’t like this, and during a small disagreement the crew finds themselves stuck in a new place. This is the city of Steelport that you’re working to take over and convert. It’s interesting to work from the ground up, while still feeling as though you have your past progress being carried forward.

You get to work through this city on foot, in regular land vehicles and with some aerial options. With this being a remastered effort you do get the piles of extra DLC that released for the game over time, so some wild vehicles are available right from the get go which was nice.

So in general you’re getting this great core game, a good selection of extra story based content and wild other smaller DLC items to enjoy. That’s nice, and takes away some of the bite of starting from scratch. The core narrative is relatively lengthy, and there are a number of side activities to take part in. Fun mini games, and general activities within the city of Steelport.

The campaign missions do feel of their time however, being almost small tastes of action that comes across as being cut just a tad short of what they could have been if they were realized today. I did also notice some audio issues during my playthrough, and other small bugs. These weren’t the worst, but something I felt was noteworthy.

Gameplay

With this remaster they seriously did some stellar work on upgrading the visuals. We’re seeing a push towards a 4k resolution on Xbox One X at 30fps cap with HDR support. You can also toggle to an uncapped frame rate that largely does hit the 60fps mark which is nice. It’s a great future proofing mechanic, and I’m grateful that they included the option as many remastering efforts neglect future proofing work. Other advancements include asset texture improvements on essentially everything.

From the weapons, to the vehicles and even general environmental aspects. It looks fantastic, and I appreciate those efforts a lot. There are also better shadows with improved lighting. It plays better than ever, and looks fantastic. The game in general handles well, whether you’re walking about or driving. It features numerous upgrades to improve your character, and tons of customization. Change how you look, your clothing and the squad you roll around with.

During combat you can in assistance, though for the most part you’re always with a member of the team. It does feature some rather zany missions too, and these are fun to take part in. The world feels largely dense with population and vehicles on the roads. That being said, I would have liked to see pop-in handled better. It’s an improvement, yet at the same time I still see vehicles and some objects appearing as I’m going about. That hurts the immersion in my opinion, but again it’s much better this time around.

The Conclusion

Saints Row: The Third Remastered is a great effort in bringing back this excellent entry in the series and they performed some serious work to make it shiny. It really does look great, and there’s some fine polishing with this one. It still has a number of bugs to it, but it’s a cleaner time than I recall from that original release.

This game is also stuffed with extra content, additional missions and lots to do in general. It’s the full offering, it runs well and comes across as being something that released today. I still thought it was a ton of fun to play, being an exciting playthrough once again. The story is unique, still somewhat grounded and the characters are quite interesting.

I loved their interactions, and the general attitude of the crew. Now that I’m older I do find them to be somewhat psychopathic in nature, but that’s half the fun of the role you’re filling here. They future proofed this well, and I was shocked to see the level of care that went into bringing this one back properly.

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Saints Row: The Third Remastered Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by Tinsley PR

Rating Overall: 7.7