There are two different ways to look at the Switch port of Saints Row: The Third'. From a glass half full perspective, what you're getting an exceptionally close conversion of the PS3 original, closer still if you play in handheld mode. But viewed in a glass half empty way, all of the failings of the last-gen console versions remain in full effect on this new release: let's make no bones about it, performance is poor and the controls have severe input lag issues. Let's focus initially on the positives. Playing Saints Row: The Third in Switch's handheld mode is definitely the best way to experience the game. It renders at a full 720p - making it a pin-sharp native experience on Switch's six-inch screen, while performance seems to be more consistent than the docked mode. As usual, the smaller screen does a good job of hiding some of the cut-backs and compromises and to all intents and purposes, it is indeed the PS3 version in the palm of your hand. And to be clear, this game has always been hilarious fun - and this was the main reason why we were so looking forward to the Switch port, and most likely why we've had so many requests to look at it. Much of the charm wears off when playing docked, as despite migrating Saints Row: The Third to full 1080p resolution, it feels like a step too far for the Switch's mobile hardware. Blown up on a big living room display, the extra resolution is welcome, but just about any major use of alpha transparency effects clearly reveals ugly sawtooth edges - a sign of lower resolution buffers in play. These were already cut back on the last-gen consoles versions, but the compromise is even more pronounced on Switch with even lower resolution artefacts. There's also an impact to performance: the frame-rate lows feel worse than they do in handheld mode - making the experience feel even more uneven. And this leads us on to what is undoubtedly the biggest disappointment with this conversion - it doesn't address what is by far the most unsatisfactory aspect of the original release: the frame-rate. Saints Row: The Third's history here is a real issue. The Xbox 360 version played relatively consistently, but did so accompanied by some hideous screen-tearing. Curiously, v-sync could be forced on within the options, but performance could plummet as a consequence. Its PlayStation 3 counterpart used a triple-buffer v-sync to remove the tearing, but swapped in wobbly frame-times as a consequence. Back in the day, there was no satisfactory way to play this game on consoles - only the PC version was capable of delivering smooth gameplay. Everything you need to know about the Switch port of Saints Row: The Third - and how adding a little ray tracing magic to the PC original? There are further options in the here and now, though. Saints Row: The Third always ran on consoles with an unlocked frame-rate, meaning that running the original game on Xbox One back-compat sees a welcome lift to performance, with all of the tearing banished. Indeed, run the game on Xbox One X and the frame-rate usually settles between 50 to 60 frames per second, with the odd deviation into the 40s. It's not ideal, but it's still a night and day improvement over every other console rendition (though given the choice, PC is still the preferred option for revisiting the game). For Switch users, the combination of an unlocked frame-rate with performance lows well below 20fps produces an excessively jarring experience - illustrated perfectly in the game's opening moments, taking you through a series of set-piece action scenes where the refresh can careen from a jerky slideshow to nigh-on 60fps depending on where the camera's pointing. Handheld does seem to feel more consistent - possibly because mobile mode has 50 per cent of the GPU power driving 44 per cent of the pixels rendered in the docked configuration. Interestingly though, using an exploited Switch, upping CPU power by 75 per cent and increasing GPU and memory bandwidth by 20 per cent didn't produce a game-changing experience. The prevalance of low resolution buffers may hint at a bandwidth-bound experience. Our understanding is that a new patch for Saints Row: The Third is incoming, which may or may not boost performance - but to be frank, any improvement to the game's frame-rate lows would be very welcome indeed. However, with that said, addressing the input lag situation is also of crucial importance in getting this port into shape. The analogue sticks are exceptionally heavy to the point where pulling off headshots is very difficult indeed, with general play feeling cumbersome. Meanwhile, the same tests in the same situations on the PlayStation 3 version reveal a much tighter response. Right now, the only to get any kind of improvement at all on Switch is to increase horizontal and vertical stick sensitivity all the way up to 100 per cent - but even then, control remains muggy and not a patch on the game's original release. Unfortunately, the poor controller response paired with dodgy frame-rates actually means that the game is less enjoyable to play than it was on the last-gen console systems - and overall, there's the sense that this conversion is a missed opportunity. Docked resolution boost aside, there's little more to differentiate the experience from what came before - shadow dithering tweaks and lower resolution alpha buffers aside, the game looks much the same as it always did. Even the level of detail pop-in travelling at speed through the city is a match for the PS3 version of the game. That's not necessarily a bad thing on a title with a stylised look like this, but addressing the key issues with the older releases is fundamentally the main reason for this port to exist - and it doesn't deliver in its current state. It's a disappointment, then. In fact, perhaps more so because bringing Saints Row: The Third to Switch was an inspired choice by Deep Silver - the original delivered so much hilarity, but the console versions were let down on the technical side, stifling some of the fun factor. Based on what we've seen from other Switch conversions of last-gen games, we were looking for a genuine improvement here, but to be served up the same compromised experience with extra issues almost eight years on is a let-down. Can the developers continuing to work on the game and releasing a new patch address these problems? I hope so - but in the meantime, the PC rendition and Xbox One back-compat are our picks for playing Saints Row: The Third at its best.<doc-sep>Saints Row: The Third revels in absurdity. It rewards ridiculousness. It’s the open world crime game for those who like to strip naked and ride their bikes around punching people in GTA V. It is designed, from the ground up, to get you to act as foolishly as possible in a video game world, loving every single second of it. If you have a love for silliness, slapstick, and crude humour, this game will put a smile on your face. The Saints have grown somewhat popular since the events of Saints Row 2. They sell energy drinks. Hang with movie stars. They also apparently infuriate gangs of luchadors and hi-tech hackers, causing no end of trouble for themselves when they refuse to play nice with the Syndicate, a major crime group that wants a large piece of town. While the Saints may be hobnobbing with celebrities and adult film stars, they’re not beyond laying a city-wide beat down the Syndicate won’t soon forget. That’s assuming you ever really get around to fighting the Syndicate, as Saints Row: The Third is all about diversions. There’s a large variety of minigames to take part in, from throwing yourself into traffic to make money from insurance fraud, blasting through the streets in a tank to see how much damage you can cause, to taking part in murderous game shows. Each has several levels of difficulty to keep you challenged, as well as to encourage you to keep coming back for more silly mayhem. Saints Row: The Third – Review Screenshot Provided by Deep Silver These varied minigames all want you to give in to your silly side. The Insurance Fraud game might be the king among them, as you will be hurling yourself at cars, hitting a ragdoll button to just go limp. This adds some extra bounce to getting run over, which you can use to ping about like a human pinball, building up more momentum with each car. See how many times you can hit the same vehicle. See if you can build enough momentum to cross a lake (you can). Each game pushes you to just savour in the game’s absurdities and your own destructive nature. You don’t even have to start up a minigame to goof off, as the game rewards you with Respect (experience, essentially) for taking part in all manner of dumb activities. You can try to surf on cars. You can drive down the wrong lane. You can take someone hostage if you steal a car with someone in it (you can also jump straight through the front window to steal a car faster, which is fun in and of itself). It feels like the developers thought of every way you might screw around, and programmed some sort of reward or tiny game mechanic around it. The money and Respect you earn from all this messing around can be funnelled into even more silliness. With the game’s character customization, you can mould your own silly gang leader with all manner of voices, shapes, and personalities. And you can do it at will at any plastic surgeon’s office, so don’t ever feel stuck on a character. You can also funnel it into making your character stronger, giving them resistance to certain types of damage, increase their strength, or make your handguns fire explosive rounds. It all leads back into making you tougher or unlocking sillier things, continually growing your character so that you can cause more trouble around town. Saints Row: The Third – Review Screenshot Provided by Deep Silver While you can easily goof off in most open-world games, Saints Row: The Third seems determined to reward you for it. Instead of using the nature of the open world to allow for silliness, the game uses in-game currencies to push you to do it. It’s daring you to let go and be silly, creating a ridiculous, enjoyable experience. The main missions, should you ever get around to them, only add to this. You’ll be facing down strange gangs in stranger worlds, dealing with zombie attacks, wrestling showdowns, and uprisings from space (sort of). The game utterly refuses to be serious, instead throwing the player into increasingly silly situations even as it pushes the player with its challenging action. That said, the difficulty can be a little wonky, depending on what you want from this experience. The Normal difficulty can be a stiff challenge if you don’t do a lot of extra sidequests for money and Respect, as you can die quite quickly due to the game’s clunky controls. Its silly nature almost seems better suited to its easier difficulty, as enemies go down quite quickly (and you can still die from carelessness), although it can feel a bit too forgiving (although, it IS easy mode). You’ll have to play with this to find your own comfort level. Saints Row: The Third – Review Screenshot Provided by Deep Silver All of it looks sharp on the Switch, especially since the game is eight years old. Handheld mode is where it’s at, as bringing this game on the road is delightful, plus the game looks best in this mode. Putting it on the dock shows a game that’s definitely displaying its age, with some jaggy visuals taking away from the visual presentation. The Switch control scheme feels a little unwieldy, which may tie into the clunky feelings of its controls. It has an odd button layout for some of its interaction commands, and the tiny shoulder buttons can be a bit of a nuisance if you have big fingers. A Pro controller is definitely recommended, although the base controls do the job with a bit of practice. If you’re in the mood for some crude humour and silly, over-the-top action, Saints Row: The Third is still an undisputed king of ridiculousness. It rewards the player for giving in to their desire to smash cars, blow up stuff, and hit folks with a giant purple dildo (which is an oddly-specific desire). It gives you near-endless stages to be ridiculous in with its reams of content, diversions and included DLC. It’s still THE game for blowing off steam as a silly, murderous troublemaker.<doc-sep>The next week for Nintendo’s eShop will deliver a couple dozen more games, starting with Saints Row: The Third — The Full Package, which is the first Saints Row to release on a Nintendo platform. The Full Package updates the now eight-year-old game with a set of new features for the Switch, as well as all of the original game’s add-on content. That’s available beginning tomorrow, May 10. Sniper Elite V2 Remastered, one of two Sniper Elites getting the Switch treatment, also arrives on May 14. 2014’s Sniper Elite 3 is also set to launch on Switch sometime later this year. Additionally, three NES classics will be added to the library available to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers: Clu Clu Land, Donkey Kong, Jr., and Vs. Excitebike, which has features different from the more familiar Excitebike counterpart. The rest of the titles going up on Nintendo eShop between now and May 15 are:<doc-sep>
Saints Row: The Third – Full Package Review The Saints, Stilwater’s notorious purple-clad crew are back on a home console after almost 8 years of being MIA, and while I am quite happy to get familiar with these rowdy bunch once more, there are a number of issues that have me reluctant on recommending you turn back to a life of crime. The wacky gameplay and larger than life characters of Saints Row The Third are still very much intact, but a myriad of performance issues left me with a poor taste in my mouth Even after all these years, there really isn’t quite anything like the Saints Row series, and Saints Row The Third is no exception. What started as a charmingly campy story about gangbangers trying to make it big has the motley crew setting their sights on bigger pursuits, becoming a household name in the process. The progression in this game is especially smooth, with you gaining experience doing almost anything,. It’s a refreshing approach, allowing you to purchase the myriad of unlocks of upgrades that are available. Saints Row 3 is also a standout even among the franchise, featuring some totally ridiculous weaponry ranging from mind-controlling explosive octopus launchers to gargantuan dildo bats and fists that make people explode at the slightest touch. There’s a ton of tools to mess around with, and going on rampages in Steelport is still as memorable as it was back in 2011. There’s also no compromise in content, but my issues with the game lay more in how sluggish it feels, with this port feeling like it was plucked directly out of 2011, without any polish added to it. I don’t want to get overly technical, but the Switch should definitely not have issues running a game as old as Saints Row The Third. The game runs ok for the most part, but over the entirety of my time with the game, I couldn’t shake the floaty controls. Even after copious amounts of tweaking, the game still felt barely playable, with my aim seeming to drift past where I wanted to shoot which made some missions feeling much tougher than they had any right to be. At multiple points I was fighting my aim more than I was fighting the various gangs, which is very frustrating. I also noticed the driving felt particularly slippery and that I was crashing into other cars and people more often than I had intended. This isn’t to say that the game is a total blunder, as it runs well enough. Saints Row the Third definitely feels like it could have done with a little more time in the oven though. My main gripe is that for a game that’s this old and with its surprisingly steep price tag, I’d hoped that it was given a new coat of paint and some quality of life adjustments in the process to warrant that. It’s simply an okay port, not a great one. Doing Hard Time Despite the performance issues I seemed to run in to, there are still plenty of moments where I’m reminded of why I enjoyed this series so much. Saints Row The Third is genuinely fun, featuring creative activities that Grand Theft Auto wishes they thought of. Insurance Fraud is still an absolute riot, and sending myself flying down highways for thousands of dollars is still as satisfying as I remember. Saints Row The Third is also quite indeed a full package, featuring every bit of downloadable content that the game received over its lifetime, including the maniacally fun Genki missions and vehicles/weaponry that came with it. There’s also the surprisingly robust customization, allowing you to create all sorts of characters. Be it a hardened gangster, a femme fatale, or a Simpsons knock off, you can make some pretty crazy stuff. This also extends to the vehicles, with every vehicle being customizable to a surprising degree. It’s a shame that the character sharing service isn’t making a return or featured in some capacity, but there is still plenty for you to work with, without a doubt. It’s also nice to see that for the first time with this title, you are able to play the game in both local-wireless and online. This covers both the “whored mode”, a wave-based game mode that has you taking on all sorts of enemies from various gang-members to S&M Clad gimps and guys in soda pop costumes.