No, wait, Saints Row is filled with bizarre bugs after all
Also suffering Steam Deck launcher problems
I feel a bit deceived by Saints Row at the moment. Although I spent the latter half of last week playing and performance testing it, the worst I saw in terms of bugs, glitches and unintentional chicanery was one temporarily floating pedestrian and a few de-synced execution animations. Only after I committed this clean(ish) bill of health to writing did the game’s wider playerbase discover that it is, in fact, riddled with issues: some benign and hilarious, others irritating and game-breaking. Well fine then, game.
Some of these bug reports have come from inside the house, namely Liam and Rebecca, whose respective characters have a) involuntarily shot out their own windscreen immediately upon entering every single car and b) fallen through the world when attempting to mount a motorcycle. Then there’s former vid bud Colm (RPS in peace), who has found his feet pinned to a car roof before fading away like Marty McFly if his parents split up.
Elsewhere, redditor Bathcalves put a musical spin on some thorough broken yet perfectly choreographed character animations, while YouTube channel Skill Up discovered technical mishaps ranging from disappearing breakfasts to a catastrophic model glitch during a climactic story moment (spoilers in the video, obviously, though they’re well marked).
Deary me. Again, I saw literally none of this, and Alice Bee tells me Saints Row appeared stable while she was reviewing it, so if you’re playing it yourself you may have better luck in the bugs lottery. Even so, hopefully a patch or three is in the works, as clearly not all of these issues are as harmless as Liam capping his own windows.
Speaking of Liam, one techy problem the two of us have shared is an inability to get Saints Row running on the Steam Deck. Right now it’s only available via the Epic Games Launcher, which I have installed on SteamOS via this method and Liam uses through the Heroic Games Launcher, but neither of us can get past the DirectX version selection screen on the game’s own launcher. The game invariably thinks for a moment before quietly closing itself down.
You could consider this less of an outright failing than all the bugs and glitches, since Saints Row was never intended to run on the Linux-based SteamOS in the first place (and a lot of games that are actually on Steam, and thus don’t require any further tweaking with launchers, are incompatible with the Deck as well). Still, consider yourself warned if you were thinking of trying the game on Valve’s handheld PC. Or just on any PC, I suppose.