Canceled, unfinished PSP Saints Row game released for free

Volition, the game developer behind the popular open-world action series Saints Row, is now offering fans an inside look at one of their unfinished projects from long ago: the PlayStation Portable (PSP) title Saints Row: Undercover. Except, Volition is not only sharing footage and development stories from the unfinished handheld entry in the series, they're posting the game online for anyone to download for free and play on a PSP or emulator.

As Volition reveals in a video for their fan community, the story goes that the game was almost lost forever, but luckily an employee discovered a PSP development kit abandoned in a back room. Inside was a disc that contained the game in its incomplete state. It took some convincing, but eventually the studio decided to share the old work, with the idea that it would be interesting to fans of the Saints Row series.

Saints Row: Undercover first began life as a PSP port of Saints Row 2, but as the developer says, it quickly became its own title and another studio was brought in to help with development, as Volition didn't have the experience in making games for portable systems. The PSP game features locations and characters that players would recognize from the first and second Saints Row titles, but as is the case with game development, the project wasn't meeting standards and was canceled.

What was completed on Saints Row: Undercover is now available to download from the site Unseen64 as an .ISO file. Players shouldn't expect anything close to resembling a polished, completed product. The game is filled with bugs and is broken in a number of conditions, but fans can at least look around different areas, as well as experience what it's like to work with something still in development.

SOURCE Unseen64 1, 2