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When you consider the fact that you can actually play through the entire game in co-op with a friend as well, then you’ve got an awful lot of value in this package. There are tons of activities like this scattered across the city, and taking part in them and trying to get the best score possible in each is excellent fun. The aim here is to take as much damage as possible, and what starts with you simply ragdolling into a car, will be far more profitable if you can hit a truck at the right angle to get launched into the atmosphere before raggedly cartwheeling down a motorway into oncoming traffic. Take, for example, the mini-game where you try to commit insurance fraud by throwing yourself into traffic. While the missions are all fairly enjoyable, you’ll often find yourself taking part in the sidequests and distractions instead. So, I think it’s probably fair to say that the point of Saints Row: The Third Remastered is still the same as it ever was, and that’s to have fun. I say “as the game goes on”, but you unlock a UAV missile drone almost immediately.
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As you do so, you unlock new weapons, more money, nicer clothes, vehicle upgrades and a host of other things that become more and more over-the-top as the game goes on. The gameplay, for those who are new to the series, is like a caricature of Grand Theft Auto: you run around doing crimes, progressing a story and completing missions. Of course, the main worry for many will be whether or not the gameplay will hold up. There’s also the matter of the entirely new gun and vehicle models, all of which help to make the game look a little more modern than it’s nine-year-old self would suggest. The main improvements are all visual, and most of those come in the form of the lighting, which helps to make every vista within Steelport substantially prettier.
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Not everything has been tweaked and touched, but it didn’t really need it. It’s still the same tale of the Third Street Saints’ ascent from a street gang with movie deals to being in charge of the US, but it all looks so much better now that it ever has. It’s non-stop carnage in everything it does, and the remaster holds onto this feeling perfectly. Saints Row: The Third Remastered is the equivalent of a 10-page action/romance/comedy book you find on a website for 50 pence. Of course, the pinnacle of absurdity in the series is in Saints Row IV, where you get to have superpowers, but The Third is still a wonderfully unhinged game. It took itself seriously, and it suffered because of it, while things started changing in the second entry, it was only really in Saints Row: The Third that things really started to get going. S aints Row started off as a Grand Theft Auto clone.
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