The reception to the Saints Row reboot has been rather mixed, with the game plagued by a myriad of game-breaking bugs that prevented players from even completing the campaign, but the recently launched Version 1.2 promises to alleviate a great deal of these issues. When it was initially announced in August last year, Saints Row was met with a lot of apprehension from its fans, who felt that the game's tone and humor did not mesh with its predecessors, but were excited by the gameplay changes coming to the franchise.Ultimately, the product that dropped a few months ago ended up releasing too early. All the promise that the new Saints Row showed was muddled by glitches and performance issues that easily rivaled the messy launch of Cyberpunk 2077. Despite this, the underlying game was still fun to a lot of players – featuring many ludicrous moments that evoked the spirit of the previous Saints Row games, such as Eli's live-action role-play missions putting the Boss at the head of a play-pretend post-apocalyptic gang inspired by Mad Max. The key problem ended up being that the game barely worked most of the time for a lot of people. The path ahead for the developers at Volition is simple – to deliver on polishing up the game they promised to their fans – and it would seem that Version 1.2 (dubbed The Bright Future) is the culmination of all their efforts in the past few months. The patch size is well over 7 GB on the Epic Game Store, providing over two hundred improvements to the Saints Row reboot, and even introducing the oft-requested voice pitch slider for the protagonist.
Fans in the Saints Row community are surely asking themselves if this version of the game is worth coming back to, and the short answer is that it depends. While it's true that the new update has fixed a great deal of bugs present at launch, many of its players are reporting that they're still suffering from issues they had in the past, with subtitles still being out-of-sync in the Saints Row prologue mission or the weapon customization still inexplicably resetting.
There is no sugarcoating it: Saints Row will still need a lot of work in another update similar to The Bright Future released today before the game can truly live up to that subtitle. That being said, this has nonetheless been a tremendous first step made by the developers at Volition in fixing the Saints Row reboot, and their efforts should be commended. Redemption stories in the video game industry seem to be rather trendy nowadays, and Saints Row undoubtedly has what it takes to join the club.
Saints Row is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.