Meet Saints Row: Undercover, the canned PSP sequel suddenly released for free

For years, Saints Row: Undercover lay on a PSP developer kit in the corner of an office.

Now, Saints Row studio Volition has posted the full unreleased game online so anyone can discover and play the previously-lost handheld title.

Undercover came to life when Volition was experimenting with a PSP port of Saints Row 2. It brought in Mass Media Games, with whom it had worked on Saints Row 2 for PS3, and then Savage Entertainment, who had ported Star Wars Battlefront 2 to PSP, to help finish the job.

But Saints Row 2 just couldn't be compressed for PSP. So a new game was born, a sequel to Saints Row 2, designed exclusively for Sony's handheld.

Undercover included locations from Saints Row 1 and 2, along with a number of familiar characters. The player would start as a cop in a police training facility in an opening sequence which doubled as a tutorial.

Once out on the streets, players would then meet Saints Row regular Johnny Gat and join up as a member of his gang.

Some of the city would have been reverted back to its simpler Saints Row 1 designs while a couple of other districts would have been locked off. But the game's map would still have been sizable, with a couple of new areas added too.

Four cribs would be featured: a hotel, junkie's apartment, inside a sewer and on a yacht.

An arsenal of guns and melee weapons would also be usable, including a garden gnome and hooker's stiletto.

It all sounds fairly promising, but the project was cancelled for not being up to scratch.

Last night, Volition decided to release the game's .iso file via Unseen64.net, where you can also read through the game's design documentation and a fully illustrated walkthrough.

The studio followed this up with a lengthy Twitch stream of the game. Watch it all below: