Working as Intended

I've been sitting here for a good while trying to figure out if it's possible to write something about Saints Row: The Third without massively spoiling the good moments (which is all of them) while also avoiding coming off as being obscenely boring. It's like I've reverted back to my six year-old self, who's just seen Jurassic Park for the first time. I want to tell everyone everything about it because ohmygodohmygodohmygodsocoooool, but at the same time I know if I do that I'll be ruining the best moments for them in some way.

However, like my six year-old self, I'm just going to say nuts to it and spoil away. At least here you get a warning.

Aren't I just the nicest?

Before The Third, Saints Row was a very weird series for me. I started at the second game and worked backwards, so imagine my surprise when the first game was honestly pretty dang bland. It was this bizarre parody/not-parody/maybe-parody-again take on urban gang warfare, and the gameplay could be summed up as Grand Theft Auto Except With.... No, Wait, I Got Nothin'. Though with Grand Theft Auto IV still being constantly delayed to the horizon and back, Saints Row filled the gap very nicely, and that's all I have to say about that because I can't remember anything else about the game except that Gat was awesome.

I bought Saints Row 2 shortly after release at the recommendation of a friend, who had the same general opinion as I on Grand Theft Auto IV, which'd come out earlier that year. GTAIV was a very atmospheric game, but it had basically sacrificed fun over the metaphorical pyre to try and gain the favour of the pretentious-gods. It had an Important Message (which was kind of at ends with the gameplay) and most of the game was spent doing not very fun things in the name of either realism or Rockstar trying to show how DEEP and MATURE they've become since the, in my opinion, vastly superior San Andreas.

While I enjoyed Niko Bellic's Angsty Adventures With His Fat Cousin more than my friend (even if did take some time to warm up to it), we both agreed that we thought Saints Row 2 was the vastly superior game. SR2 let you create basically any character you wanted and set you loose in a massive city full of wonderful toys to either break or break other things with. The fact that the story was surprisingly engaging and enjoyable too was just a nice bonus on the maniacal fun. In the three years since Saints Row 2 was released I think I've played it through somewhere around nine times now. Eight of those being co-op.

So, yeah, big fan. While everyone else was anticipating their Skyrims or Modern Warfares or Zeldas, I was almost beside myself in anticipation for Saints Row: The Third. "Oh, what fun we shall have", I thought as I scrolled through the images of jetbikes and explosions and explosions inside other explosions which in themselves were exploding.

So, is Saints Row: The Third any good?

Well, go re-read the first paragraph, silly.







One thing should probably be made clear, just in case you haven't played this series before. Saints Row has a very juvenile sense of humour. There's no poop jokes, but the vast majority of the funny comes from either sex jokes, nerdy references or just how flat-out ridiculous the game can be at times. This is not a bad thing by any means, unless you're some haughty aristocrat who can only laugh at jokes about Rembrandt while whipping an urchin boy, it's just how the game rolls, so you best be on-board with that, yo.

Saints Row: The Third spares absolutely no time in showing off how insanely awesome it can be. The first two missions are respectively stealing a vault via helicopter from a multinational crime organization while you shoot down enemy troops and helicopters while standing on top of said vault; and then escaping from a moving plane while dodging cargo and other general debris and then going through the plane as it tries to ram you. Oh, and you're shooting free-falling bad guys the entire time.

Just another day in Saints Row. Seriously.

Thankfully however, unlike the recent Call of Duty games, Saints Row actually knows when to let the player have a breather. Explosions and general insanity is all very well and good, but unless you give the player some time in between events for their brain to process it and then go all "What the hell happened?" they're just going to be tired out by it all. So the game is insane, it's just not too insane. Even the 'normal' missions have something noteworthy about them, even if it's just simply being funny.

Like previous Saints Row games, and unlike Grand Theft Auto, the entire city is unlocked from the start. You can go whereever, start whatever you want and, well, do whatever you want. Some of the game's nicer toys are 'hidden' away by unlocking them as the story progresses, but for the most part Saints Row is just happy letting you do whatever the hell you want to do. There's no X Hour long tutorial where you have to learn how to use a phone or drive a car just so you can unlock The First Gun (regular ol' pistol); the game kind of assumes you have a functioning brain and can figure that stuff out yourself.

Speaking of gameplay, for me Saints Row: The Third easily has the best in the series, if not the best of any open world game I've played. Not just in the aspect of player freedom, as much and as great as it is, but also in how everything progresses and feels. Aiming and firing weapons, even from a vehicle moving at nigh terminal velocity, is incredibly easy, and the Weapon Selection Wheel returning from SR2 still makes picking the weapon/s you need second nature.

On the progression side of things, The Third is very, very different to its predecessors. In Saints Row 2, for example, to unlock certain weapons or bonuses (reduced damage, increased sprint, ect) you had to complete side-activities. While these were pretty fun, the activities were also the only truly viable way you could unlock missions for the main story as well, since you needed a certain amount of Respect Points before you could proceed. It was the one big flaw in an otherwise amazing game.

In The Third, Respect is now basically your character's level. The rule generally goes the higher your respect, the more nice things you can unlock and upgrade for your character, which is then purchased with money. So while in SR2 you might have to reach the fifth level in a side-activity to unlock, say, increased health or a new gun, in The Third you just go to the Upgrades Menu on your handy-dandy phone and unlock the health increase from there, provided you have the moolah and required Respect Level. The new system makes the game feel oddly more like an RPG at times, but I think it works really well. Hell, it probably works better than Mass Effect does at times, which is really sad when you think about it.

But, of course, one of the more important gameplay elements that's returning is the character creation. Saints Row 2 had a, quite frankly, stonkingly insane level of customization for your character. You could make almost any sort of character you wanted, given the tools and clothes at your disposal. Saints Row: The Third isn't as in-depth as the second, but it makes up for that in style. Previously static clothes now move about and flow as you run/dive/swim/skip/explode your way around the city, and the new graphical style makes everything just pop, y'know? Not to say that The Third lacks customization options to any significant degree, it just uses them in different ways. After spending more time than I'd like to admit attempting to make a non-derpy looking character in SR2, it's quite a relief to come to The Third and discover its harder now to actually make a character that doesn't look good.







The main storyline for The Third is roughly 15-18 hours, give or take a few for the general faffing about you're sure to do between missions. While it's a bit short for a sandbox game, the sheer quality of the missions more than makes up for it, and the game's about as long as Saints Row 2 would have been if you didn't need to stop every 2-3 missions to gain more Respect, so it all works out.

If you're not doing missions or creating as many corpseplosions as possible, chances are you'll be running around like an idiot doing the various new and returning activities. At least that's what you better be doing. You better not being trying to call your cousin to go bowling! I could probably write some extended blurb about what's new and what's old and what they involve and how fun they are and so on and so forth, but I think it'd be better if I just gave you the gist and let your brain figure out how they worked.


Returning Activities.

1. Insurance Fraud: Dive out in front of on-coming traffic and do your best impersonation of Team Rocket as you try to fling yourself across the sky in order to make money.
2. Trail Blazing: Drive around the city in a fire-hazard suit while strapped on top of a fire-soaked ATV to find checkpoints and make as many things burst into flames as humanly possible.
3. Heli Assault: Protect one of your gang members in a missile-spewing helicopter as they drive around the city for some increasingly silly reason.
4. Escort: Player #1 drives around the city while picking up customers for the prostitute in the back of the car. You must avoid the paparazzi and complete various tasks in order to make your customer... er, satisfied. If you're in co-op, Player #2 is the prostitute and must do some QTEs for... uh... yeah.
5. Snatch: You must race around the city to pick up and drop off prostitutes, all while avoiding increasingly belligerent gang members. It's like Crazy Taxi. Except with pimps and hos.
6. Mayhem: You've gotta destroy stuff and do so in a certain mount of time. Get crackin'!
7. Hitman: You're given a list of people to whack, and each has their own specific requirement in order to lure them out. Some are pretty mundane, while others are very much entrenched in What The Hell territory.
8. Vehicle Theft: Guess.
9. Trafficking: Drive around town performing morally ambiguous deals with various citizens, all while shooting and exploding any rival gangs that have the sheer gall to try and stop you or be anywhere within a mile radius of you.

New Activities.

1. Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax: Navigate a series of increasingly difficult mazes full of traps and prizes as you shoot your way to victory. Just don't shoot the cutout of a baby panda, as that would be UNETHICAL.
2. Tank Mayhem: Like Mayhem, but in a tank. Whoda thunk?
3. Guardian Angel: Leap off the side of the building while being harnessed by some wire and protect a gang member waaaay out in the distance with a high velocity sniper rifle.
4. Tiger Escort: Like regular escort, except less sleeping with creepy people and more someone put a tiger in your car and you must make sure not to hit anything or it'll claw your face off and make you crash, which just pisses it off even more.

Diversions.

1. Base Jumping: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-*splat*
2. Streaking/Flashing: HAWT!1
3. Barnstorming: Doesn't involve a barn or a storm, sadly. Just flying through/underneath various objects and buildings while trying not to horrifically crash or combust.

So, yeah, no shortage of things to do in Steelport.

Or things to kill you.








If nothing else be said for Saints Row: The Third, Volition clearly knows the playerbase not only of their own series but of pretty much the entire sandbox genre. If you're in an open environment, your first thought is almost immediately going to be, "Alright, what can I break?" Everything in this game, from the activities to the mission structure to the very structure of the city itself is designed for Maximum Fun Potential. There's very rarely any spot in the city that is just there. Open parks often have gang members just ripe of the picking or some insane ramp to launch yourself off. The city has stores to plunder, bridges to, again, launch yourself off, or just things that make for the good kabooms.

Even the manner of hijacking cars has been made more fun, with the inclusion of a button that lets you literally fling yourself through the window of any car and send the poor owner of said car flying out the other side. Adversely, when a gang member pulls you out of a car, they'll rarely just do so normally; instead opting to slam the car door on your face and then let you flop out of the car onto the ground. It's the little touches.

But no game is perfect, and Saints Row: The Third definitely has few little things can could do with some ironing out. For me the biggest one, which actually speaks rather well of the game on the whole if this is my largest concern, is how they treated the death of long-lasting awesome-incarnate Johnny Gat. It's not so much that he died that bugs me, it's just how it happens basically off screen and isn't really handled that well afterwards. A few characters are definitely affected by it, but outside of an off-hand comment about a funeral we never see, they basically just drop a bridge on him. It's not even like The Third doesn't have its dramatic or quieter moments, they just handle Gat's death really weirdly. Maybe they have something in store for him in the future? Who knows.

Bridge dropping aside, I actually find myself struggling to find things I can say I honestly don't like about the game. Again, not to say it's perfect, but it just feels weird to nit-pick after having so much fun with it. I suppose the story can get a little disjointed at times and is definitely a case of making the missions first and then writing a story to try and justify them, but the story works just fine and is funny as all get-out, so whatever.

Actually, one thing I can mention is the PC version of the game. While nowhere near as bad as the porting abomination that was Saints Row 2, The Third is definitely having some trouble running on AMD graphics cards and some Nvidia ones too. Framerates can run from 60-90+ indoors, but then grind down to 20-30 while driving outdoors. A few fixes have come along that definitely improve things, and it's certainly easily playable now, but that's small consolation to certain players who can't even boot up the game without having it horribly implode.

Such is life as a PC gamer, I suppose.

One other nitpick is that while a few missions do involve making some choices (keep a building or blow it the hell up, ect) they don't really seem to do that much. Lines of dialogue change and one or two of the actually big choices can affect what happens to certain characters, but the smaller choices seem less like "This'll have consequences!" and more like "Here's a unusual way to choose your mission's reward!" Not really a bad thing, and it's a lot better than the usually static and linear mission progression that the Open World genre weirdly clings to, but I just thought it was worth noting.

Also, the day/night cycle here is kind of weird too, in that there may or may not be one. Since money you gain from owning property accumulates hourly, the way in which time passes has been changed from previous games. Nobody's too sure yet, as far as I've read, so either it only changes while loading, or the days are, like, really freakin' long. Yet again, more an oddity than a THIS RUINS THE GAME FOREVER, but it's one worth mentioning.

Also also, I'm not too keen on the 40 Weeks of DLC plan THQ has cooked up for this game. Not that I'm massively opposed to the idea of DLC or anything, but they can run the risk of the content feeling like it should've been in the game proper in the first place. But I suppose that's a 'Wait and See' sort of thing. DLC is the double-edged sword of gaming this generation, so I remain cautiously optimistic. One of the announced mission packs for next year is called Gangstas in Space, which I will be buying based on name alone.

Yes, I'm petty!







Maybe I am starting to become a fanboy of this series, since all my niggles with the game are being followed by backpeddling of "It's not that bad, really!" but that's how I honestly feel. Every time something about the game doesn't seem quite right, I'm always thrown onto a jetbike or into massive explosion/s or a zombie hunting mission (shown above) that involves helicopters, more explosions and watching Pierce get set on fire or be hit in the small of the back by an SUV Oleg just threw while Burt Reynolds looks on and laughs. If it's the game masking its flaws by going LOOK OVER THERE, then it's doing a damned impressive job of it.

If any gamer or developer can honestly climb onto a jetbike, fly through the city and perform dive-bombings on cars or pedestrians without feeling child-like pangs of joy and sheer glee, then they might want to sit in the corner and have a good, long think about what it is they're playing/making games for. Then watch as the rest of us ignore them and have fun!

I suppose it comes down to why you play the vidya for, though. Saints Row: The Third isn't thought-provoking. You wont come out of it with a brand new look on life and the universe, except maybe to ponder why everything around you now seems boring in comparison. It's not here to tell a message or shove some preachy, pretentious message down your throat while it sacrifices content and enjoyment to do so. It's just fun. Good, honest, sheer-bloody-minded fun. It's everything pundits and the media wished Grand Theft Auto was back in the day; violent, stupid, offensive. Fun!

Games like Saints Row: The Third are why I still play video games.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go fly a jetbike around the city for another hour or dozen.