Is Saints Row: The Third a Good Game?

When you compare Saints Rows 2 and 3, the differences are quite big. Although Saints Row 3 is a prettier game, it’s lacking a lot of features that Saints Row 2 had. There are missing minigames, the story isn’t as long and there’s only really one singular story path with only a handful of decisions that matter. Saints Row 2 lets you pick which gang you want to take out first, while Saints Row 3 has a specific order to start in forcing you to take out Morningstar first, Deckers second and Luchadors last.

There’s also a distinct tone shift between the two games. Saints Row 2 is a serious game with splashes of comedy, while Saints Row 3 is a funny game with splashes of seriousness. We also see complete U-turns with old characters, with Shaundi changing from a laid back weed girl into an angry, aggressive sharpshooter, and Johnny Gat, a fan favourite, changing from being alive to being dead. Unfortunately, we also don’t get a cast of memorable characters, with Kinzie being mostly very annoying, yet prevalent enough to become a main character in Saints Row 3 and 4, and a second protagonist in Gat Outta Hell, while we end up losing most of the new cast during Saints Row 4.

Compared to Saints Row 2, Saints Row 3 does miss out a lot. Missing weapons, missing mini games, missing cosmetics, it seems like not very much carried over into the newer game, once you look past surface level. There’s more places to go into and explore, more guns to shoot and also some weird things like being able to revive random NPCs. I suppose at least the driving is different in Saints Row 3, but it’s not always better.

But for a lot of people, Saints Row 3 was their introduction to the series. It’s what made the series popular enough to spawn multiple DLCs and Saints Row 4. Saints Row 3 set a specific tone which ended up appealing to a different type of player. While a Saints Row 2 fan may not like the “lol funneh for the sake of it” theme, they might not like the dildo bat or the change in characters or the zombies, it’s all a lot of fun for the average Joe. Heck, my introduction to the series was via Saints Row The Third, I didn’t play Saints Row 2 until later. I don’t even actually know what got me to play Saints Row 3 originally, I kinda just started playing it one day.

And let’s not forget that Saints Row 2 is hard to play on PC. The PC port is very bad, almost notoriously so, and requires a mod to work well on newer PCs. If you played the original console versions, that’s great, but I never really had consoles past the Playstation 2. So, as good as Saints Row 2 is, the accessibility simply isn’t there.

And then we have the reboot, which chucks all of this out of the window. It’s a game that’s so bad that it killed Volition, the developers behind the series overall. While corporate meddling is believed to be the reason why the reboot was so different from the original Saints Row series, it’s still insane just how far gone the reboot is. We don’t even get to see remakes of the characters that made Saints Row the series it is. The Saints Row reboot seems to forget that it’s a game about violent gangs and focuses on things like friendship, while also containing characters that no one would actually want to be friends with. Saints Row 4 and Gat Outta Hell don’t really have as many gang elements but you’re still in a gang, you’re still running the Saints, and the characters are slightly more bearable.

Going back to Saints Row The Third, is it a good game at the end of the day? I think, despite all its problems, yes, the game is pretty good. At the very least, it presents a great sandbox game and has a good gangster theme, even if it does get very stupid at times.