Thanks to the Giant Bombcast, I ended up playing Saints Row: The Third about a year ago during my usual “end of the year week off to play games and eat pizza and generally do nothing productive” winter break. The guys on the bombcast had really talked it up – so much so that I was sure it could never live up to the hype. As it turns out, it was everything they had said it was and it quickly rocketed to my favorite games of all time list.

Saints Row IV is coming out on August 20, and from the looks of it they’re bringing back a number of characters that were either not in Saints Row: The Third or were only there for a few minutes (I’m looking at you, Johnny Gat). While Saints Row isn’t *huge* on the story, I thought it’d be interesting to go back and play Saints Row 1 & 2 prior to IV coming out (yes, the official name of IV uses roman numerals, where 1 and 2 did not). Read on for my impressions…

Saints Row 1 came out very early in the Xbox 360’s lifecycle. Compared to Saints Row: The Third, it’s obviously going to be a bit rough around the edges. The graphics aren’t that great, the textures are pretty low res, the animations are a little stiff and the writing feels a lot like “HAY THIS IS A NEW GENERATION AND WE’RE SO HARDCORE LISTEN TO US USE FOUL LANGUAGE AND ALL THESE CRAZY SITUATIONS WITH HOOKERS AND PIMPS AND HAHAHA ISN’T THAT SO FUNNY!” That said, it was still pretty fun to play it through and take in the roots of a game that I love so much.

The basic gameplay mechanics are pretty similar to Saints Row: The Third. You play a few missions to get oriented to the environment, and then the world opens up. There are several different kinds of activities that earn you reputation with the Saints. Enough reputation will grant you access to another story mission. Many of the activities from Saints Row: The Third actually started here, though they each play at least a little differently.

Story missions are split up into three groups, one for each of the three gangs competing with the Saints for control of Stillwater. You can do these in any order and jump back and forth between the storylines at will. It’s a decent system and each of the storylines is interesting in their own right.

While I’m certainly not an expert at shooters with a controller since I greatly prefer the PC, it seems like Saints Row 1 is quite a bit harder than Saints Row: The Third. There are a few missions (the final Los Carnales mission is a great example) where you need to be spot on and super fast with your targeting to have a chance, and even then it takes quite a bit of luck. The final levels of some of the activities are brutal as well. In Saints Row: The Third, I completed all levels of all the activities without much trouble – in Saints Row 1 I only fully completed 3 or 4. Completing the activities are certainly not necessary to complete the game, but I was surprised at just how much harder they were.

Overall, it was a fun experiment to go back to Saints Row’s roots. If you’re in the same boat as me – having played and loved Saints Row: The Third but none of the others – it’s probably worth looking for a used copy of Saints Row 1 somewhere. It’s cheapish (I think I paid $12.50 for my copy) and was close enough to Saints Row: The Third to scratch that particular itch. It took me a little over 25 hours to get through the game, doing a bit more side stuff than was absolutely required.