Game Review – Saint’s Row: The Third Remastered

It’s one of my biggest pop culture pet peeves when someone holds up a game, movie or TV show and quips “you wouldn’t get away with that these days!” It’s even worse when what they’re talking about is something incredibly tame, like when Steve Carell said it of The Office. They get away with It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia these days; a show which features blackface, molestation jokes and an exercise bike with a dildo attached to fist the user into exercising harder. They get away with South Park. They get away with GTA V.

So when news of the Saint’s Row: The Third’s remastering emerged, my rolled almost out of my skull hearing people hot take that “ooh, this won’t have aged well.” Playing it though, I found that in fact it had not aged particularly well, just not for the reasons I – or anybody else -would have thought.

The game is wacky. That’s it’s whole deal. It has explicit, gross out humour; it’s the kind of game Dane Cook would comb out of his armpit hair. But these are all huge positives for the game, and while you could argue it’s presentation of women isn’t perfect, it features highly charged sexual imagery of men almost as often, allows your player character to be female and places several powerful women front and centre. So while I get that parts might seem distasteful, I don’t think that’s any more true now than it was at release.

However, its position in the Saint’s Row universe has changed drastically since it first came out, and that’s why revisiting it wasn’t as much of a blast as I’d hoped. Initially, the game spun away from the ‘GTA but a bit silly’ identity of SR1 & SR2 and established itself as an open world carnage simulator. Saint’s Row 4 picked up that mantle and ran with it, adding aliens, superpowers and sex with Kinzie into the mix. Now, especially so hot on the heels of the SR4 Switch port, you don’t notice everything that got so much bigger from Saint’s Row 2, you notice everything that’s so much smaller than Saint’s Row 4.

Perhaps this is a tad unfair. The game might exist in a wider series, but should mostly be judged on its own merit. With Saint’s Row: The Third, what it boils down to is very simple. It’s a very fun, easy going game that lets you go wild and blow shit up. But far too often, this flow comes and goes as the game struggles to struggles to organise the chaos.

Saints Row®: The Third™ Remastered_20200516141320

The side quests come in three main difficulties; easy, long, and hard. While that’s suggestive enough to sound like Saint’s Row’s dialect, they’re actually called easy, medium, and hard, thought long is more appropriate. The side quests are supposed to twist the madness up even further, but the easy ones have no challenge, the medium ones have no challenge but ask you to, say, bomb the streets with a tank for literally six unbroken minutes, and the hard challenges as the same, but there’s a decent chance you’ll fail and have to try again.

The mechanics are all just a bit too fiddly to put up with in a game that’s supposed to be about running wild, and the remaster hasn’t fixed the niggles that we excused in the original.

If you just play the main storyline, however, you’ll notice this far less often. It’s jam packed with marquee moments, and teaches the side quests how its done. Within the first ten minutes, you’ve robbed a bank while wearing a mask of your own merch, literally stolen the whole vault because you couldn’t break into it, jumped out of a plane, machine gunned goons while skydiving, and jumped back through the windshield of the same plane. Your first big raid on another gang’s turf is all set to the soundtrack of Kayne West’s Power, and despite the lack of superpowers, the main missions do everything they can to make you feel like you’re a superhero.

The only real issue the main quests have at all comes between the transition of Act 1 and Act 2. Act 1’s finale is meaty enough, but that’s fairly fitting as a bookend to the game’s intro. The problem is that Act 2 begins with three separate missions (recruiting Kinzie, Zimos and Angel) which must be completed immediately, with no chance of running off to have some side quest fun in the middle. You’ve already unlocked a sizeable chunk of them by that point, so it just seems like a strange, deflating direction to take the game in.

As for the characters themselves, you might not have remembered Angel, but that’s because he’s so flat and lifeless you had no reason to. As for Zimos, he’s memorable in all the wrong ways, with his throat microphone, autotuned voice shtick getting old incredibly quickly. Kinzie is the highlight, be doesn’t really come into her own until you take on Matt Miller’s simulation towards the two-thirds point of the game. Most of the characters are like a 10p mixup. They’re fun and colourful while they last, but not particularly memorable.

All in all, it’s a pretty fun game with some great bursts of humour, but it’s difficult to recommend this when Saint’s Row 4 exists. It’s a new gloss of paint for the fans to enjoy, but as a starting point, it includes parts 2 does better and parts 4 does better. While the original was exciting, the remaster feels like a forgotten middle child.

SCORE: 7.5/10

Animation Review – Maggie Simpson In “Playdate With Destiny”

After debuting in selected screening of Pixar’s Onward, the latest Simpsons’ short recently hit Disney+, demonstrating that, when it really wants to, The Simpsons can still put on a show. It centres around Maggie Simpson and her crush on a baby she meets at the playpark, Hudson. Featuring zero dialogue, the five minute short is chock full of brilliant animation and no dialogue, and highlights everything that’s great about modern Simpsons, as well as a little bit of what’s wrong about it.

The Simpsons began in 1989 with incredibly janky animation, something which was initially part of the show’s charm. Since then, it has gone through a HD evolution, one which first left the show cold and sterile, before the show adopted to recover its animated flair, albeit in a much more polished fashion. This animated creativity is on full display here, most notably when Maggie wanders through the older kids’ playpark.

Modern episodes can be hit or miss, and around a third of the episodes in the last five years feature rebaked plots from better times. Homer and Marge can only have so much marital difficulty before it gets stale, and they that level a while ago now. The animation though has remained top notch, and is a big part of why fans have stuck around.

This fluid, fanciful animation is key to the characterisation, and Maggie has, strangely for a character with zero dialogue, never been short on characterisation. Episodes like A Streetcar Named Marge, Who Shot Mr Burns and Four Great Women And A Manicure have given her a wordless depth, as she’s already proven in her previous Oscar nominated outing, Maggie Simpson In “The Longest Daycare”. While fans can argue that characters like Lisa or Homer have been changed beyond recognition as the show has gone on, Maggie has remained consistent, and is perfect for a timeless short like this.

Hudson too is instantly given a personality, and the connection with the audience comes across clearly. While two babies being friends is low stakes, we feel the emotion and humanity of the story, and Playdate With Destiny manages to keep us hooked.

The animation is darling and while the story is wise not to over complicate things, you could argue it’s a little bit the middle. It sets up Maggie’s struggles well and provides a satisfying resolution, but there isn’t much between these two things. Running a total of five minutes, it has to make every second count, but it does feel slightly like a beginning followed immediately by an ending.

The Simpsons has relied on celebrity guests as a crutch far too often recently, but when they introduce actual guest characters and not just star vehicle walk ons, they can still nail it.

Hudson is cut from the same cloth, even if the show hasn’t had a Hank Scorpio or Frank Grimes level character for a decade. While Playdate With Destiny highlights that The Simpsons is much better than its given credit for right now, it also exposes its biggest flaw.

The show used to have a timeless quality mixed with its referential humour, which is a big part of its rewatchability. These days, it chases relevance far too often, and while using a podcast to frame Season 30’s The Clown Stays In The Picture was a masterstroke, episodes about YouTube influencing, e-sports, streaming sites, app development and the gig economy have fallen flat. Playdate With Destiny removes the dialogue, and while there’s definitely still some great lines in modern Simpsons, the silence of the short forces them to focus on storytelling and not just lazy gags or lowest common denominator references.

All things considered, Playdate With Destiny is a fantastic example of what The Simpsons is capable of on its a-game, reminds us of the importance of Maggie to the family and the importance of narrative to The Simpsons in general. Though the low stakes and slightly truncated middle are marks against it, Playdate With Destiny is still a clear win for modern Simpsons. Boy, did it need one.

Game Review – Saint’s Row IV: Nintendo Switch Port

What if there was a global disaster and we had an arrogant buffoon in the White House? That’s the question posed by reality in 2020 Saint’s Row: IV, after an alien invasion conquers humanity. You play through the game as Boss, leader of the Third Street Saints gang, who thanks to their exploits in the previous game is currently working for the government as a covert anti terrorist operative.

On the first mission, you disarm a missile by jumping on it as it launches, punching it a few times, then parachuting away. You crash into the Oval Office and apparently become President. Little known fact: Chester A. Arthur became President in the exact same way.

After a brief timeskip, you’re firmly established as Commander In Chief when the Zin aliens invade, and here’s where the real game begins. The Zin abduct you and all of your crew, and lock you inside of your own nightmare simulations. Thanks to everyone’s favourite computer hacker and bisexual BDSM enthusiast Kinzie Kensington, you’re able to break out of yours and set about wreaking havoc with superpowers to disrupt the simulation while taking breaks to spring your friends out of theirs whenever the opportunity arises.

The game originally released for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2013, before being ported to Xbox One and PS4 in 2015. As of March 27th 2020, it’s now also on the Nintendo Switch.

This review takes into account the game in its own right as well as how much it holds up on the Switch, but we need to make one thing clear from the start: this is not the definitive way to play Saint’s Row IV. The game is thoroughly enjoyable if you know what you’re getting yourself into, but does have its flaws in places. With a heavy use of the trigger buttons and consistent carnage on screen though, the Switch version doesn’t play as smooth as the Xbox One or the PS4 version. For newcomers though, it’s definitely worth checking out. Starting with Kinzie is necessary for the story the game wants to tell, but you get the feeling she’d have been first up whatever the weather. Debuting in the previous game, Kinzie has quickly established herself as one of the best characters in the franchise, and her dry sense of humour is the perfect foil for the game’s wacky sensibilities. She’s joined by Keith David playing himself, despite the fact David previously played Julius in earlier Saints games. He offers up some meta comedy, used only very slightly too much.

As well as these two, you’re joined by big bad Zinyak, who frequently pokes his nose into your business. Modelled of Ian McKellen’s Magneto (or perhaps just Ian McKellen), the thespian villain is comedic and threatening in perfect balance, with his intellectual arrogance bouncing off the Boss’ boot the doors down bravado. Listening to an alien reciting MacBeth while you avoid Sega Saturn era tank cannons as you swerve through a virtual slalom course on a Tron style motorbike is right in the centre of Saint’s Row IV’s weirdness.

There’s something magical about the humour of Saint’s Row; it’s not afraid to make fun of itself, it pushes the envelope and it’s as crude as a sailor. The game’s patented testicular manslaughter takedown is reinvented here to incorporate the superpowers. Weapons include a dubstep gun, hentai inspired tentacle bat and inflato-ray, which causes enemies to expand until they explode. There’s not one piece of Saint’s Row IV that the humour doesn’t extend to. The best part about the sense of humour is how close it manages to skate to edgy without ever punching down… except on the alien you just clotheslined to the floor. It hasn’t aged a day because the humour is victimless.

This humour is meshed into the story missions, which include playing out a fan fiction fantasy (which Zinyak then rewrites on the fly), taking down a Godzilla sized energy drink and revisiting select missions from previous games to comment on how crappy everything was back then. The only drawback with these missions is that they’re few and far between. Most of the story just involves completing particular open world events which have already been available to you on the map. Often in the latter stages, you’ll be asked to complete a mission, only to find out you’ve already done most of it.

The game fully sells the open world experience, and apart from locking a few events behind certain yet to be unlocked superpowers, you can play them all whenever you want. None feel like they’re just there for the sake of it either; you can create carnage by blowing stuff up in Mayhem, throw yourself in front of traffic in Fraud, race through the city, climb towers, steal cars, assassinate certain targets and much more. In true Saint’s Row style, one of these targets is a sentient toilet armed with a machine gun.

Another big plus is the character creator. While not as sophisticated as the likes of Monster Hunter: World or Dragon Age Inquisition, it has a real sense of fun to it. Voices and outfits aren’t tied to a gender, there’s enough depth to make characters your own without neurotically obsessing over cheekbone height, and the dance moves inject your Boss with personality right from the off. The first mission and character creator start it off on the right foot, but after that it stumbles and struggles to get out of first gear for far too long.

The game was designed with superpowers in mind, but that means the early stages are bogged down as you pick up different powers in fits and starts. If you’re a returning player, you’ll be locked out of your favourite activities for a while. Professor Genki’s Mind Over Murder is the clear highlight of the mini games, yet it takes around 7 hours of regular play to unlock it. Super Power Fight Club takes 8. The feels too dark as well; not tonally but literally. The Boss’ simulation is in forever dusk, with gloomy alien reds and glowing blue. Compared to Ben King or Shaundi’s mission, the difference is night and day.

Despite the earlier praise for how well the game writes its characters, it takes far too long to use them. Kinzie is consistently brilliant and Keith David is, well, Keith David, but they shouldn’t be carrying the burden alone. It takes around 4 to 5 hours to even start unlocking the rest, and when you do it’s Matt freakin’ Miller. The game even makes a joke of it, highlighting what a ridiculous choice he is come aboard first. Saint’s Row has always been funny, but there’s too much commitment to the bit here. Shaundi comes next, which is the sensible choice, but by the time it finally gives you the choice of who you go after, you’re likely ten hours in. Considering it takes about 15-25 to beat the game depending on how desperate you are for 100%, it feels like the wrong call to keep the fan favourites on the sidelines for so long.

There’s a couple of other quibbles too; the default sound levels crank the explosions up but the speech down, making it feel wonky, and the game frequently has graphical quivers with so much going on. Certain missions have the subtitles all wrong too; not just a typo or a missing word here and there, some scenes have completely different dialogue, like the script was re-recorded after the subtitles were written. In one mission Pierce sets you up for a joke, and the subtitles have the punchline as ‘cabinet meetings’, while what the Boss actually says is ‘scuba sex’. Both lines actually work in context, but… maybe pick one? Perhaps it’s different if you don’t play as the Laura Bailey voice, but they’ve had seven years to fix this and just… haven’t. Even on the hardest setting, you won’t find much challenge either.

If you’re looking for good, dumb fun, Saint’s Row IV on the Switch certainly provides. Frequently hilarious, hyper aware of its own identity and packed with a variety of side quests, open world activities and a hugely colourful cast. It was so clearly never designed with the Switch in mind though, and if you have an Xbox or Playstation, might be better off picking it up for that instead.

SCORE: 8.5/10

PORT SCORE: 6/10