Saints Row the Third is an ambitious and often very weird creature that has some truly incredible creativity behind it and will have you doing things you’ve never done in an open world gangster game or well, any game before. In terms of raw content however, it can get quite divisive and often feels like it could have been so much bigger and better.
Sticking to the core story focused portions of SR3 is how best to play but being an open world title you are naturally inclined to want to explore, to experience areas and things that aren't in the linear portion of the game so it is a shame that when you do things get less interesting.
No matter how you chose to play, between the dildo bats, hover bikes, BDSM clubs, transforming VTOLs, brain controlling octopus guns and mutant clones its very clear Volition had a ton of crazy ideas and crammed as many as they possibly could into as much of the game as possible. It's quite jarring then to realize the world of SR3 itself is small and almost bland at times; lacking the depth required to keep a player interested outside of the primary experience. While this is typical of all open world titles (no one expects optional content to be as good as the central), the Third promotes its craziness so well that you can’t help but feel disconnected between the main game and everything around it. It's almost as if the people who designed and worked on the story missions weren't involved with the various side missions and activities.
The main reason I have this complaint is that I love so much about this game, everything from its writing to its attitude and copious amounts of self awareness to how it plays and feels. Saints Row the Third is crazy from top to bottom in as many ways as it can be so when you come across anything normal or plain that isn't ramped up to 11 it stands out and seems to be the weird part of a game that takes weird and practically redefines it.
While it certainly does more individual things per unique set piece, overall the Third feels smaller in scope than Saints Row 2. The shooting and melee attacks are simple and fun, some of the best a game of this type has ever seen. So playing is less about challenge and complexity and more about how you want to go about doing what you want to do.
Like the game world itself however the arsenal of weapons also has the same situation where most of them aren't new or different and feel pretty standard for open world action games that focus on shooting. Only once you upgrade a weapon to full does it become interesting but these upgrades are so pricey it will take you some time to do so unless you chose to ignore spending money on other perhaps more worthwhile elements of the game.
Speaking of which a very cool feature is the over-arching upgrade and unlockable system. You earn cash and respect from doing a great number of varying things, from the mundane; shooting five enemies in a row, to the bizarre; completing a story mission clearly inspired by Tron, in which you become a character literally made of glowing polygons and fight a dragon demon.
The two resources funnel in to absolutely every facet of how you play. Say you just finished a mission, the cash reward from that can then be used to upgrade your favorite weapon, increase your health regeneration or increase the number of followers who show up when you get in a big gun fight. While the ability to choose how your gameplay evolves and changes isn’t new to open world title's, it’s nice that a system usually reserved for more traditional RPGs is so well implemented here.
Customization is very important to the Saints Row franchise and it’s a big part of what I loved about Saints Row 2. It is a shame, however, that in terms of the sheer number of options, the Third feels lacking. There are less items of clothing to choose from, less cars to drive and your character's appearance and voice is more limited. This is somewhat balanced out with a much more technologically advanced animation and graphics system, but it was disappointing to discover that most of what was available wasn’t to my liking and so what I could be and look like seemed far more limited than I was hoping for. Nonetheless, I’ve now created characters that could be accurately labelled as Jason Strathom’s evil clone and GI Joe’s The Baroness, but purple and really, what other game has allowed this? None, that’s for sure.
Yes every time I think about the elements that the Third is lacking I do remember that when the game is good, when it is showing me something new and different, it really is amazing. The writing is done especially well, every character is perfectly cast and although the story gets slow in places, when it picks up it really picks up, often with you ending a mission thinking “did that just happen?”
While 15 hours with single player provided much enjoyment for me, it wasn’t until I jumped into co-op with a friend that things truly got awesome. The entire campaign and everything in it can be played with two people and is a particularly wonderful experience when you have a second person you can share it with. Whether you're blowing each other up with rockets or being run down by tanks, as Giant Bomb themselves have proved it can be a very special kind of dumb fun.
Lastly, there is the Whored Mode, which is exactly what you think it is: a co-op based wave survival mode where you and some friends can gun down groups of enemies who for the most part are prostitutes but eventually become all kinds of weird things like zombies or various sizes of mascots. Not a mode anyone will spend much time with but a decent distraction from the rest of the game.
Overall, I’ve had so much fun with the Third, I would easily place it on my list of the year's best releases and eagerly look forward to spending more hours with it, but I am hoping the DLC makes up for where it is lacking.
PC specific details:
Very well optimized and ran perfectly for me, has great keyboard and mouse controls and fully supports steam and DX11 and has full graphical settings . The menus and interface could have been tweaked a little better but they are manageable.