Saints Row: The Third is coming to Nintendo Switch
Boss.
Saints Row is coming to Nintendo Switch! But it's not Saints Row: Gat out of Hell, the most recent game, nor is it series high-point Saints Row 4, from 2013. It is Saints Row: The Third, for some reason, a 2011 PS3 and Xbox 360 game.
There isn't much but a Deep Silver announcement tweet to go on at the moment. IGN reports the game will be released next year and is being ported by Deep Silver's Fishlabs studio, but it's not clear where the information comes from. I'm trying to find out.
Saints Row began as a Grand Theft Auto copycat but the series began pulling an audience when it settled into its subtle-as-a-fart-in-a-church niche, exaggerating every aspect of the open-world gangs in the city formula to create a carnival of metropolitan mayhem.
But Saints Row: The Third wasn't quite the leap beyond Saints Row 2 it promised to be. "The biggest disappointment with Saints Row: The Third isn't that it gets anything terribly wrong," wrote Dan Whitehead in his Saints Row: The Third review, "but that it doesn't do more to distinguish itself from the genre it so brazenly copied to begin with.
"There's so much that can be done with the open-world idea, and there was an opportunity here to ditch the tired old gangster tropes and twist the freedom that a virtual city offers into something truly memorable and weird. Instead, we get another game defined by its adherence to the GTA formula, distinguished mainly by its funny costumes and enjoyably daft toys. Amusing, but hardly the mind-boggling insanity we were promised."
Saints Row was on the ropes in 2011 when publisher THQ collapsed, but Deep Silver (a label of Koch Media) rescued both the Saints Row licence and developer Volition in an acquisition in 2013. The circle was completed earlier this year when THQ Nordic - a rebranded Nordic Games - bought Koch Media and therefore Deep Silver and everything it owned.
Saints Row developer Volition was a 150-person studio at the time of the THQ Nordic acquisition, and apparently there is an as yet unnamed triple-A game in development there. I wonder what it could be...