Saints Row: The Third - The Full Package

Saints Row: The Third was a masterpiece of its time when released in November 2011. It reinvigorated what gaming meant and what to expect from open-world / acti

Saints Row The Third is the same riotous good time it's always been, except now you can take it anywhere. Some performance issues hold the experience back, but with any luck the instability will get patched out.

So, if you’ve never played Saints Row: The Third before and can’t imagine playing a game on anything other than the Switch, The Full Package is a must-buy despite its technical issues. To be fair, when docked, the Switch version probably falls in line with the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions anyway. It’s also a must-buy if you use your Switch pretty much exclusively as a handheld device. Only those who have played it to death or are sensitive to framerate issues should give it a miss. Rude and crude, that’s what Saints Row: The Third – The Full Package is. Rude and Crude.

The Saints Row series is one of the most interesting case studies from the previous generation of gaming. What started off as a game people bought solely because there wasn’t another GTA clone available for the Xbox 360, after a time it slowly but masterfully morphed into a parody of itself. A game so ridiculously hilarious and self-aware that I could barely care about Grand Theft Auto V‘s release in 2013 because I was having way too much fun with the absolute insanity that was Saints Row...

That means my recommendation is decidedly mixed and conditional on how you like to play. If you plan on playing in handheld, you’re pretty safe. But if you want to play on the TV from the couch, you’d be better off breaking out your last-gen console to revisit the best Saints Row game. The Third is still a bonkers experience that revels in being FUN above all else. It's just too bad that it struggles so mightily on Nintendo's latest console, which has shown ample ability to handle a game like this in other cases.