What's the Word? The Third!
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Saints Row has been a surprisingly interesting game franchise to follow, even though I haven’t spent significant time playing either of the previous Saints Row games. The first game came out at a time when I wasn’t able to buy Mature games at will, and the second was far from the most enticing game to come out in the last quarter of 2008. A sign of the third game’s quality is that I made a point to buy and play Saints Row: The Third, even though I have yet to check out many other blockbusters of last fall. This is due to the buzz that has been surrounding the game. Many websites and game reviews have come out surprisingly strong in support of this game. The original Saints Row had a reputation of being a Grand Theft Auto clone, and Saints Row 2 was noted for going in a more goofy direction than it’s open-world crime counterpart. Saints Row The Third has taken the basic idea of an open-world crime game and created something really special. It has decided to take the genre back to a goofier state and evolve it more from there, showing us a Grand Theft Auto that might have been had Rockstar decided to take the franchise into this direction. Surely the quality and personality of Saints Row the Third matches its counter parts, becoming by itself a must-play game.
The easiest thing to recognize about Saints Row, The Third is it’s sense of humor, as it sticks it in your face like a giant purple dildo. In fact it does so with a giant purple dildo, a weapon available in the game. While the wild range of events and characters presented are worth a laugh, it is not all there is to the game’s personality. Within the first 30 minutes of gameplay you are robbing a bank wearing masks of your own gang, having a gunfight while falling from a plane and raiding a Military Armory for a UAV drone. While that may seem like a lot of flash up front, the game is able to sustain its insanity for a 20 plus hour experience. While playing, you will come to realize at any decision making point the option they went with was to make it crazier, and by extension making it more fun.
Which leads one to have to question the (value of the?) side missions. Some of them can be really fun, for sure, but at the same time many will feel boring and monotonous in comparison to the main story line. While the “Tank Mayhem” missions will stay fun, the escort missions will start to feel repetitive fairly quickly. This is balanced somewhat by the fact that the rest of the game stays consistently fun. Not only in the mechanics of the driving and shooting, but just as a result of what you are doing in general. The amount and range of vehicles is so extreme that you are bound to find something that you enjoy cruising around the city with. Whether that’s a car, helicopter, VTOL Jet or Rocket Motorcycle is totally up to the player, I found all of these to be fun to drive. The last thing that you can say about Saints Row The Third is that it doesn’t give you options. The wide variety, not only represented by a variety of vehicles and tasks, but also in it’s bodacious amount of character customization options.
Saints Row The Third has more heart than any other big budget title to come out in years. The game’s sense of humor and dedication to a format of game that now seems lost: Gaming for the sake of fun. There is no other game out now that cares so much about every single moment of it being alive, humorous and silly. It gives you the controller in order to live moments that are so insane that they come back around and become extraordinary. My initial response to any game is to say “It’s not for everyone,” even if I think the game is fantastic. Saying this about Saints Row The Third, however, would be a lie, for if you don’t enjoy the thought of working for Mayor Burt Reynolds to stop a zombie invasion, free-falling gunfights and Rocket Motorcycles then there is something wrong with you, not the game. In a year of some fantastic games, Skyrim, Bastion and Portal 2, Saints Row The Third manages to hold its own and match up with those titles. Check it out!
