Saints Row: The Third

The first Saints Row game was seen by many as a blatant rip-off of the Grand Theft Auto series. Volition took the open-world format that was made popular by the PS2 Grand Theft Autos and created a fairly decent clone. Sure, it was heavily inspired by the series but it played well enough to satisfy gamers waiting for the next GTA game. Grand Theft Auto IV and Saints Row 2 came out in the same year and it was at this point that a difference could be seen. While Volition had chosen to carry on with the crazy, Rockstar had opted for a more serious, character-driven story. Each game did what it did well but the two series didn’t quite do the same things anymore.

When Volition went to the drawing board for ideas for the third game in their series, they must have realized this new disparity. Someone must have said “Well, we have the over-the-top open world series now. Why don’t we just go as nuts as we can with it?” before the room exploded with ideas like giant purple dildo bats and auto-tuned pimps. Saints Row the Third is the product of Volition going completely off-the-rails with the tone and content in its game and it couldn’t make for a more enjoyable experience.

Saints Row the Third once again follows the Saints, top gang of Stilwater, and brings back familiar faces such as Shaundi and Johnny Gat. After their takeover of Stilwater in Saints Row II, they have become the most famous gang in the world, signing autographs as they rob banks and businesses. Perhaps finding crime in Stilwater too easy, they travel to nearby Steelport to rob a bank. Things don’t go the way they are used to and they soon end up in custody. It turns out that crime in Steelport is run by the Syndicate, a group that doesn’t take too kindly to the Saints’ actions against one of their banks. They offer the Saints a place in their organization – for most of their profits. Your character, leader of the Saints, doesn’t take too kindly to that and decides to fight back against the Syndicate and take control of Steelport.

The meat of the game is your standard open-world fare, with main missions to lead you through the story and side activities galore to keep you entertained should the need arise. Your cell phone is the key to starting any story mission, allowing you to begin one at any time without having to first drive to a specific point. As much as I would like to tell you some of the things you will do during the story, I won’t. Why? From my own experience, I shouldn’t. Each thing you don’t see coming will be that much crazier and hilarious if I don’t even hint at them. Trust me – go in blind.

Side activities are started by driving to various points on the map. Old favorites like Insurance Fraud have returned along with some others that are hit-or-miss. My personal pick is the Professor Genki activity, where you run through a gauntlet of enemies and try to kill as many as you can in a short period of time. Combos and shooting billboards will earn you more cash. It’s like The Club, only good. Of course, there are a couple stinkers, particularly the escort ones. Luckily, there is enough variety to always give you something to do.

Your cell phone is also used for the robust upgrade system where you can spend your hard earned cash from missions and owning property (works like in Fable 2 and 3, where you accrue money from property every so often). These upgrades range from simple health boosts to the option to call a homie to bring you a VTOL jet. Most of these upgrades have multiple ranks and this is where things get insane. Near the end of the game, you can start unlocking immunity to any type of damage and unlimited ammo for each class of weapons. These upgrades are essentially cheats that Volition encourages you to use. You are practically unkillable when you finish the upgrades (except in a car for some reason) and it makes the endgame remarkably fun.

If you’re like me, you never quite enjoyed the feel of Grand Theft Auto IV. Sure, Niko’s animations were extremely realistic and the cars drove much more like they are supposed to but I never had fun with that. Saints Row the Third is the complete opposite of that. On foot, things move quickly with a liberal sprint meter. Adding to the fun, holding the sprint button (rightfully named the awesome button by the developers) down modifies your actions. Jacking a car? You will jump through the window or windshield and kick the driver right out. Attacking a pedestrian? You might just drop kick them. It adds a bunch of pep to the game that makes being on foot tolerable. As for the vehicles, they are much looser too. Some of the larger vehicles are still slow but the mid-range and up cars all turn very loosely, allowing you to powerslide around corners and cover huge amounts of ground quickly. Much more fun than the stiff controls of GTAIV.

I did have a few problems with Saints Row the Third. On the Xbox 360 version, it gets framey regularly. On a few occasions, I had a guy (a boss, on one occasion) disappear and leave me unable to finish a mission. During one mission where I was escorting a friendly car from a helicopter, I shot a rocket at a chasing vehicle and had the smoking husk fly up and flip my helicopter over, forcing me to restart. Amusing as all hell but somewhat annoying. The biggest problems were the hard locks I had on no fewer than five separate occasions. I played this game long after the patch that was supposed to fix hard locks and still managed to encounter several. To its credit, the game checkpoints and autosaves rather liberally, so I didn’t ever lose much progress. I also found myself not caring and jumping right back in after the crash to play more, something I rarely do when my Xbox locks up.

On more than one occasion in Saints Row the Third, I found myself laughing simply at the absurdity the game had gone to. Sure, the characters are really well-written (Kinzie is a favorite) and the dialogue is often laugh-out loud funny but the truly memorable moments are when a character you just can’t believe comes along or your own character does something completely f***ed and no one blinks at how crazy it really is. I can easily understand why some people may be offended by it or put off by its seemingly juvenile sense of humor. I wish I could convince those people to give it a chance. Lucky for Volition, those people seem to be in the minority. Let’s hope they keep making these games crazier and crazier as the years go on.