Review: Saint’s Row: The Third
By Dustin Mendel | November 22, 2011 | Reviews | 2 comments | Share
When Saints Row 2 was released in 2008, it marked a new era in open world sandbox games. Just a few months earlier, Grand Theft Auto IV had been released, and its focus on realism and storytelling had polarized fans of the series. Gamers longed for the jetpacks, Hot Coffee mods and bizarre characters from previous GTAs, and when Saints Row 2 came along, it was like a breath of sleazy, wonderful air.
The Saints Row series has now become synonymous with over the top violence, adult content that would make Duke Nukem blush, and hours of mindless entertainment, and Saints Row: The Third looked to raise the bar in every way. After playing through the game, I can safely say that if you’re one of those people who still pops in their copy of GTA: San Andreas just to see how much chaos you can cause, Saints Row: The Third may become your new favorite game, but for others, it may not be long before the novelty wears off.
Story
It goes without saying that the story is likely the last thing people are worried about in a game like Saints Row 3, but let me just give you a few bullet points. The game begins with the Saints gang at the top of their gang, until a tragedy befalls one of their members at the hands of a syndicate made up of smaller gangs who all want to take the Saints’ place at the top of the organized crime food chain. As a result, the remaining characters from the previous game relocate to Steelport, and begin taking it over, meeting a host of ridiculous allies along the way.
Like I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if most people skip through the story entirely to get right to the naked skydiving, but the story does get a lot of things right. For starters, the writing at times is laugh out loud funny, with Pierce and Zimos, the pimp who speaks using an auto-tuned voice box through a hole in his throat, standing out. The plot begins to take itself a little too seriously as the game goes on, but early on, the character interaction is top notch.
My biggest issue with the story is that it felt at times like developers Volition Inc. didn’t want me to bother paying attention to the story. The plot is driven both through cutscenes and through phone calls you receive during the game, but it’s incredibly easy to skip both of these. Throughout the game, objectives are marked in the world with blue checkpoints, but scenes will begin long before you actually reach the spot you’re being asked to go. What that means is if you’re being asked to get into an elevator and your phone rings, the conversation, which could be crucial to the plot, will cut off long before you actually reach the elevator, and a cutscene will begin which usually has nothing to do with the scene you just played through.
There was a huge chunk of time in the middle of the game where I had absolutely no idea what was happening in the story, and while that may not matter to most people, and the plot itself is admittedly irrelevant to one’s enjoyment of the gameplay, Volition obviously went to some trouble casting Hulk Hogan, Sasha Grey and a certain Smokey and the Bandit star in significant roles, so it’s not like they didn’t want people to watch and enjoy the game’s story.
The plot itself didn’t blow me away, and the last third of the game when the paramilitary occupies Steelport takes itself a little too seriously, but some of the missions that make up the main story are some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a sandbox game. Defeating the leader of the Luchadore gang involves an epic pro wrestling match, and there is a mission early on that features a long skydiving sequence that had my frantically texting my friends telling them that Saints Row 3 was the greatest game of all time. Obviously that isn’t the case, but it should give you an idea of how cool some of the missions are. Several of the missions have multiple endings, each with their own perks, although the last mission in the game is the only one with any consequences to the plot.
The World is Yours
When you aren’t working on the main story, you have the city of Steelport to play around in, as well as a handful of different side missions, challenges and diversions to complete. Side missions consist of things like Tank Mayhem, which is exactly what it sounds like, and Professor Genki’s Ethical Reality Climax, a demented game show that has you blowing away mascots for money and prizes. The side missions were a bit of a mixed bag for me: the more enjoyable ones like Genki’s game show or the helicopter missions have six different “levels,” but each one is identical to the next, making them a bit repetitive. Other missions, like driving at high speeds with a tiger in the passenger seat, sounded hilarious on paper but became frustrating almost immediately.
Professor Genki gives a new meaning to the Lightning Round.
The game’s diversions were made for people who just like to do their own thing in sandbox games, taking things that were fun to do in the GTA games and awarding you points for doing them. Driving at high speeds and getting in a head-on collision, throwing you through the windshield of your car will net you points, and leaping onto the roof of a moving car will initiate a car surfing sequence. Discovering and completing goofy asides like this was fun and a nice way of levelling up your character beyond completing missions, but the game’s challenges suck the fun out of a lot of them. For example, there is a challenge for car surfing for ten minutes cumulatively. After thirty seconds of doing it, the novelty wore off. One could just as easily not bother with the challenges if they seem tedious, but I’ll explain why I felt compelled to finish them in a minute.
If you need a break from wanton destruction, Saint’s Row 3 allows you to customize your character, cars and hideouts to your heart’s content, which was one of the most enjoyable parts of the game for me. Players can choose from dozens of articles of clothing, ranging from kinky to cool, and nothing is gender exclusive. If, for whatever reason, you want to create a goth bodybuilder wearing a gimp suit and bow tie with green pigtails, you can, and a quick trip to the cosmetic surgeon can switch your character’s gender. Nearly every car in the game can be customized, although hydraulics were sadly nowhere to be found. Unfortunately, only three of the game’s hideouts can be altered, and your options are incredibly limited, but the cars alone took up hours, just tweaking rims and spoilers on smart cars and taxis.
Furries finally have a game that speaks to them.
Customization goes far beyond cosmetic changes, however. As I mentioned, the game features a levelling system that allows you to unlock upgrades to your weapons, the ability to call for backup during firefights, and eventually infinite ammo, stamina and complete invincibility. It was great being able to upgrade my stamina and ammo as the story progressed, although the enemies in the game are usually little more than fodder, even early on. Saint’s Row 3 isn’t the type of game where you want to be worrying about scrounging for ammo, and by the time you’re able to unlock infinite airstrikes or RPGs, it’s definitely entertaining blowing through waves of enemies, at least for a while.
The ability to max out your character comes with its drawbacks though, and the game quickly suffers from Superman syndrome. It sounds awesome to be completely invincible to gunfire, falls and vehicles, but after a while, the novelty wears off, and after leaping off the highest points in the game without a parachute a few times, you’re left wandering the streets of Steelport with nothing to do. Some of the side missions involve having to stay alive for a set amount of time as waves of enemies attack you, and when you’re able to just stand there and wait out the clock, you start thinking about other games you could be playing.
In terms of replay value, Saint’s Row: The Third either has zero or limitless depending on how you get your jollies. Completing the story, all of the side quests and challenges will take you around 30 hours, and beyond that, there isn’t much else to do. Like I said, for people who just like to blow stuff up, this game has endless possibilities, and I haven’t even touched on the hover bikes, dildo bats or streaking that you can play around with, and the game does feature co-op if you’re looking to cause mayhem with a friend. It’s the kind of game that some people will swear up and down is one of the most entertaining games they’ve ever played, but for me, once I was left to creating my own fun, I just went back to playing Skyrim.
It's definitely fun bombing around in this thing.
It seems like Volition spent so much time creating this raunchy, ridiculous game that they assumed people would be compelled to continue playing, but having blown through everything the game had to offer, I have no more interest in returning to Saint’s Row 3 than I do replaying Mafia II or any other sandbox game. A game like this could have desperately used more than 30 hours of content, and maybe the upcoming DLC will fix that, but at least my time with the Saints was well spent while it lasted.
Score: 8/10 | Read our Scoring Policy |
Amazing how many spoilers your reviews contain. I mean hell you gave away the ending in Uncharted 3. Here you speak about stuff in the 3rd part about the paramilitary, thanks for the spoilers.
If game of the year was based on fun alone, this game would be it for me. Hats off to the team for not spending too much time on graphics and putting more time into the craziness and fun. Driving around on a motorcycle as a toilet doing wheelies, jumping off shooting blood and guts on people only to have a shark come up from the pavement to eat them. Good luck Rockstar making GTA more fun than this. I sincerely hope you do.