Want infinite money? Go to the Downtown Chop Shop and get a 5-star wanted level with the police. Then just keep turning in FBI vans for as long as you please at $5000 a pop.
Or, steal an armored car, park it in your garage, take it out again, destroy it, collect the $10,000+ that spills out, get a new armored car from your garage for $500, repeat.
Genius Bonus: Those who wish to become a member of the 3rd Street Saints have to be "canonized". Canonization in the real world is the act of a Christian church declaring a deceased person to be a saint.
Hilarious in Hindsight: A caller on The Faction FM 99.8 asks for a song by Europe, only to be given a different song. Come the second game, and "The Final Countdown" is in, albeit on a different station in the form of The Mix 107.77.
Moral Event Horizon: William Sharp, the uncle of Westside Rollerz leader Joseph Price and the implied brains behind the gang, crosses the Horizon when he kidnaps and murders Lin in front of not only you but Donnie, a Rollerz member who considered her his girlfriend (even if she didn't return the affection). Luckily, you teach him a lesson he'll never forget almost immediately afterward.
Narm: Numerous fans consider the "hood" motif to be more embarrassing than cool, believing that the developers went overboard in making the game look "gangsta".
During the introduction, a Vice Kings member attempts to kill the Playa, an innocent bystander, simply for being in the wrong place at the right time.
Playa and Lin getting kidnapped by Sharp in "Liberation". He then asks Donnie for help pushing Lin's car into the water, only to open the trunk up and shoot both Playa and Lin before she can explain anything. While the Playa is able to escape, Lin ends up drowning as a result from the gunshot.
Sharp: Take a deep breath and count to 10, Donnie.
Donnie: Count to 10!? You just shot my girl!
Near the end of their confrontation, Alderman Hughes decides to kill Playa to continue with his plans... only for a bomb to immediately go off before he can. And as Saints Row 2 reveals, it was Julius himself who did so.
One of the Chop Shop clients mentions having been beat up so badly by the police that he's now wheelchair-bound.
Polished Port: While there are still graphical and gameplay glitches, the game's performance is improved when it's played on the Xbox One or the Xbox Series X/S.
Being busted by the cops, which happens when you're knocked prone next to a cop. Two common ways to end up prone? Getting pistol whipped or pulled out of a car. You are given no chance to recover from the prone position. You are immediately busted upon hitting the ground. The sequel improves matters by requiring you to be below 30% health before you get busted, though.
Shops closing up at night, due to the somewhat lengthy day/night cycle. All stores remain closed until morning, which means no shopping until they decide to open back up. This can range from annoying (barber shops and clothing stores) to outright frustrating (gun stores and car mechanics) especially since ammo is a lot harder to come by in this game. Oh, and its entirely likely that the player will accidentally kick in the door at least once thinking that the store is open or even outright forgetting that they close due to playing a later game in the series that removes this feature, which will get the cops on their ass.
You get no checkpoints during ANY mission. This isn't bad at shorter missions but at any longer missions, ESPECIALLY last ones, you really need to be careful to not die quickly or screw up main objective.
So Okay, It's Average: While far from a bad game, it tends to be seen as a lesser entry in the series due to its design quirks, its various technical issues, the later games building on the foundation it laid out, and a healthy dose of Early-Installment Weirdness.
That One Achievement: "Contract Killer". You thought clearing just one Hitman list was a pain in the ass? Try clearing all three of them. The 50% discount for Friendly Fire means little when you have four of the best weapons in the Weapon Cache and no real reason to use any other pistol, any other SMG, any other shotgun, or the RPG Launcher.
"What Goes Up..." (the Carnales finale) opens with a five-minute, completely uneventful drive from the Church to the Airport, before turning into an insane Rail Shooter, as Dex cuts a path through the airfield that, somehow, makes it easier for RPG-wielding Carnales and, simultaneously, harder for you to aim at them. And you'll need to aim fast and accurately, because when you reach Angelo's plane, you will have to focus all your fire on it before it takes off — meaning that if your own car isn't in pristine condition, Angelo's henchmen will blow it up before you can do enough damage to the plane. And, of course, if your car suffers critical damage at any point or if the plane gets away, it's back to the five-minute Church-to-Airport drive for you.
"All The King's Men" (the VC finale) has you kidnap a guy named Stefan and drive around at high speed, evading the police, while Benjamin King dangles him out of the window. This wouldn't be so bad if the police — ostensibly in an attempt to save Stefan — wouldn't employ their standard tactic for stopping you by ramming your car at every opportunity. All in all, however, this is the most palatable of the final missions.
"Semi-Charmed Life" (the Rollerz finale) sees you chasing down Price's Goliath truck down a highway, while dodging other cars, Price's pipe bombs, and the Rollerz' smaller vehicles attacking, while simultaneously firing at the Goliath. Now, in later games, this wouldn't have been a problem, but with the default controls of the first game, it is exceedingly difficult to steer your car and aim accurately at the same time, making an already tough mission outright frustrating.
The Hitman missions are a complete chore to do. Not only does the player have to use certain weapons for the kill to count, but either due to a bug or programming oversight, some of the targets won't appear anywhere near to where the profile says they will. It can easily take an hour or more for the player to take out a single person with some really bad luck and the game expects them to complete eight of them per list. The sidequest can be made easier by finding out other locations that the targets typically spawn around, but even then there is no guarantee that they will spawn there all the time, and some targets aren't actually programmed to spawn around the areas the game lists them in.
Some of the racing activities are a huge pain to win, as the AI racers will sometimes act very aggressively and bully you off the road. Doesn't help that the cars you drive seem to spin out very easily.
The final level of the Rollerz and Vice Kings Drug Trafficking sidequests become this. Unlike the Carnales sidequest, which has the player fend off the Carnales' Elite Mooks, the former two has them protect the dealer while the FBI attack. What veers this into this trope is the fact that the FBI can easily wipe through any vehicle the dealer drives, either killing the dealer by getting caught in an explosion or forcing them to find a new car while they are being attacked. Even worse is that the FBI cars themselves aren't much better either and are easily destroyed by a few bullets as well.
