Saints Row 5: The Third, Part 2 (2022)

Imagine - what if - after 2011's Saints Row: The Third, Volition had not pushed the franchise even further into zany crazy-pants town -- if instead, they'd kept doing the "San Andreas successor" thing, following a hyperviolent crime boss's rise to power.

Now imagine that their next try didn't just reboot its location, story, and characters; it re-iterated virtually all of the last game's features and activities, re-implemented the same loose aiming and floaty driving, and ended up being basically... the same game again.

You don't have to imagine hard: it's Saints Row (2022), the story of a new "boss" in a new city. You make friends with some gung-ho personalities, make enemies with three rival gangs, shoot your way through over-the-top heists and chases and rescues, earn money by running drugs and falling in front of cars (Insurance Fraud), claim criminal enterprises, grow territory, and collect outfits.

Y'know, just like in Saints Row 3.

After a few introductory missions establishing the cast, which could just as well have been cut, the reboot turns into that same crime-boss ascent story with the same structure and minigames we've seen before. It'd be a respectable "clone" of The Third, if it was from a different developer ... and wasn't more than ten years later.

What's strange is that Volition did embrace their wackier side, after SR3, in its alien-Matrix super-powered sequel and a spinoff in literal Hell. Then Agents of Mayhem, though not as bombastic as I'd have liked, built new strength-and-weakness mechanics around its superhero team premise. The Saints Row reboot, in contrast, is uncreative and unambitious; like it's not even trying to do anything Saints Row hasn't done before.

(Except pad the outer areas of the map with mostly-empty desert regions. Which suck.)

What's also strange is that Saints Row: The Third Remastered came out just before this reboot. I mean, it makes sense if Volition's business plan was to start cranking out yearly installments of the same formula, and oversaturate their own market, Assassin's Creed-style. But I digress.

Here's the upside: this Saints Row 3 re-skin isn't "bad," in pure gameplay and content terms. As a franchise addict, I happily - or at least, contentedly - sank hours and hours into the seen-this-done-that activities I've just been complaining about. Even the ultra-brief story DLCs The Heist & The Hazardous and A Song of Ice & Dust were, like Gangstas in Space and The Trouble with Clones before them, a fun-enough way to spend an hour or two.

But the reboot still isn't "as good as" Saints Row: The Third due to its technical infidelity. Frequent framerate stutters are sometimes violent enough to interfere with driving or aiming. You can see cars pop-in down any highway; I even noticed pop-out sometimes, a car next to me suddenly fading away! Occasionally reloading a gun plays the animation, but doesn't put any ammo in.

And non-critically, but very visibly, voiceover playback seems to always drift from video framerate -- resulting in subtitles and lipsync not matching audible dialog.

The in-game phone having an ad for the Murder Circus DLC is just a bitter-tasting cherry on top.

At its best, Saints Row (2022) is a more-modern re-do of Saints Rows past. But, it isn't always at its best.

Better than: Agents of Mayhem
Not as good as: Saints Row: The Third Remastered
Credit where it's due: the Mad Max-ian LARPing missions with Eli are legitimately hilarious. Play-fighting dudes in cardboard costumes is a delightful twist on normal combat.