Port Reports are a series of quick first impressions of the technical aspects of a PC game. For an up to date account of Saints Row IV’s fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article.
Saints Row 2 was an infamously bad PC port that suffered from random massive frame rate drops, buggy gameplay, frequent crashes, low sound quality and lacked any of the DLC released on Xbox 360. By contrast, Saints Row: The Third was a more well-rounded PC port, although it did not escape its share of issues. This included poor performance on AMD or ATI based systems (somewhat ironic given that the game’s title credits were plastered with the AMD logo).
When I approached Saints Row IV, I was slightly fearful that we’d see a return to the game-breaking Saint’s Row 2 bugs – largely because the developers Volition have moved home to Deep Silver, a publisher with a history of producing notoriously buggy PC ports like Dead Island and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. However, many of these fears can be put to rest because the game feels relatively polished – largely thanks to the fact that it uses virtually the same engine as Saints Row: The Third. In fact, they are so similar to each other that they look virtually identical in places, and even the same field of view hacks work in Saint’s Row IV as well.
