Saints Row: The Third continues the franchise's trend of joyously inventive bad taste. I've raced gimp-pulled pony-carts, I've fired pedestrians out of Dr Genki's Manapult, and I've beaten more hookers to death in Whored Mode than I'd like to admit. Whatever Saints Row: The Third is, whatever it does, I'm sure of this: it'll never be tasteful, and I'll never be bored playing it.
Nor will it be polished. The Third's game world itself is polished -- it has huge draw distances that look handsome when cranked up to maximum settings -- but the PC review copy I played still had those wonderful dropping-through-scenery flaws that inspired the original Buggy Saints Row song. It's far better than the Saints Row II straight console port and runs well on mid-range PCs, but it's still troubling Volition is having the same problems. But I can forgive the bugs because of the game's relentless energy.
The Third's premise is reliably ludicrous, as we've come to expect from Volition. The Saints Row gang, headed up by your anonymous character, has become globally-famous, complete with its own mascots and a line of energy drinks. The game opens with the crew running a bank job while disguised, of course, as themselves to allow a method actor playing in the movie about their lives a chance to understand criminality. It's all B-grade satire, and no game has done it better.
Customization is near limitless, and geared toward the ridiculous.
The heist goes horribly wrong when the Saints discover that an international crime syndicate (yup, The Syndicate) owns the bank. You end up exiled from your hometown of Stilwater and set out to conquer The Syndicate's backyard -- a sick little city called Steelport. And you enter Steelport from the sky, plummeting from a mile high, surrounded by boxes, cars, and machine-gun equipped goons (who rapidly become goon corpses).
The spectacular aerial sequence outdoes Just Cause 2 in terms of chutzpah, and somewhere in the middle of it you get to make your avatar. No game, aside from maybe City of Heroes, allows you to customize your character so completely. You can select just about any size and shape, and you're encouraged towards extremes (I couldn't imagine playing the game without my gargantuan, panda-eyed hippy). There are also six voices to choose from for your character (all impeccably acted), another sign of Volition's audacity.
Once you're in Steelport, the game opens up (and up and up...). Like Arkham City in the latest Batman, Steelport is open from the word go, and you can explore it all in the game's wide range of vehicles. Both driving and shooting are arcade-style, so you can take hundreds of bullets whilst you wipe out small armies, swinging any car in a perfect handbrake turn just by tapping the space bar. Unfortunately, it can be too arcadey, and the enemy AI never got past junior high. Basic enemies either run directly at you shooting wildly or hide behind cars where you can clearly see them.
Yes, that is what you think it is. This is a Saints Row game, through and through.
A couple of the oft-repeated activities are also turgid and slow. The light cycle game is primitive, and sniping is far too easy. The game's standard enemies do little more than absorb bullets, and even when they do dodge and hide from your crosshairs, their movements are so predictable that it hardly affects your aim. I didn't miss a shot whilst taking them down, even from a digital mile away.
Thankfully, as you fight and kill grunt gang-members and cops your notoriety meter fills, and tougher enemies are dispatched to deal with you. Notably, each gang has special troops who are tough, fast and deadly. The Morningstar gang has snipers, often in helicopters, whilst Luchadores have grenade-spamming toughs and, toughest of all, the Deckers have super-fast ninja schoolgirls. I found the four star notoriety level was my limit, as it tended to combine these with the ludicrously tough Ogre Clones, who can simply punch your car out of the way if you try to run them down. These sections of total chaos involving super-powered enemies are where Saints Row passes GTA and heads straight into Crackdown territory.
With all these activities at your disposal (Insurance Fraud also makes its return, and it's brilliant), the main plot doesn't need to be anything more than nonsense -- and it isn't. It's mostly filler there to justify the fun you're having, but it's written and acted with great energy. Whether you're defending your penthouse against an army of ho assassins or setting a very large bomb at the bottom of a skyscraper before you go up inside it, the characters chatter away endlessly, quipping and bitching at each other, while your enemies quarrel amongst themselves. The final third of the game does change the pace a little and the enemy a lot. Without spoiling too much, the plot isn't as predictable as you'd expect and The Syndicate is not, ultimately, the worst of your worries.
In the end, Saints Row: The Third is junk food; it's camp; it's a girl you wouldn't want your friends to catch you with. It's also fun, crude without being stupid, fast-paced without feeling empty, and solidly made (aside from the aforementioned bugs). It might seem amazingly suicidal to release it now, while everyone's still playing Skyrim and Modern Warfare, but Saints Row always goes for the longest odds. I hope they come off.