The third installment of the Saints Row franchise is so over the top and so contemptuous of anything resembling consistency or coherence, it’s hard to decide whether to love it or hate it. I mean the previous games were always pretty crazy, this is after all the series that let you vandalize buildings by spraying excrement on them and earn money by letting cars ram into you. But this installment really turns the craziness dial up to eleven. It doesn’t just throw realism out of the window, it takes an everything including the kitchen sink approach, ignoring genres. Plus it never lets up on the excitement. Just when you think things can’t get any crazier, the game escalates again and then escalates some more. By the end of the game, the entire city becomes a total war zone.
- The game starts with an extended action scene that ends with the player falling from an aircraft. While you’re falling through the air, you’re expected to fight off multiple enemies, catch and drop a homie, intercept and wreck an aircraft and catch that same homie again. The protagonist even wonders idly, “Is the ground even close yet?” Yeah, it’s that kind of game.
- The protagonist starts out at a power level pretty similar to any character in a standard Grand Theft Auto game, save that you can instantly hijack almost any vehicle by jumping straight into the driver’s seat. But the upgrade system lets you spend cash to buy permanent ability improvements. With enough money, you can make the protagonist invulnerable to most forms of damage, have infinite weapon ammunition and equip every vehicle with a nitrous boost system. Again, it’s that kind of game.
- You’ll need those upgrades though. As usual in this games, the ferocity of your in-game enemies goes up in proportion to your notoriety. And in this game, you can be wanted by both the police and enemy gangs. At low notoriety levels, you get cops or gangsters arriving in cars. But at higher levels, the cops send SWAT teams, APCs and tanks while the gangsters send Brutes, massive hulks who take a ridiculous amount of punishment, and specialists. Each of the three gangs have different specialist, with the Decker one being my favorite. She can’t take much damage, but dashes around so fast it’s hard to hit and fills the air with bullets from dual-wielded guns.
- After a while, the protagonist is upgraded enough that you can shrug off even the enemies who come at you in maxed out notoriety. But then the game ups the ante by having the military drop in to Steelport. They wear powerful body armor, strong enough that even a single headshot might not kill them, wield laser guns and have access to some seriously cool vehicles including the Crusader tank and a VTOL jet fighter, all of which are usable in-game by the player. They’re such a deadly adversary that I found the optional activities very difficult to complete while they were in town. I found it very cool to find myself suddenly wary of being hunted down by these guys in the city after a long while of killing and running people down with impunity.
- Viewed on a scenario by scenario basis, the story doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it does go to some interesting places. In addition to full on martial law in the city, the story somehow manages to fit in a zombie invasion, a mission on another planet and an incursion into cyberspace. That’s without mentioning the zany stuff, like a race with chariots pulled by gimps, drunkenly stumbling through a brothel stark naked, pulling out a chainsaw and other crazy weapons while in a wrestling match.
- I am disappointed that this iteration doesn’t have anything new in terms of side activities, except the Genki reality show thing and Guardian Angel. And the latter only has two missions. All the rest are recycled from previous versions of the game. It’s as if they’ve run out of ideas for cool new things to do and all the effort went into the main storyline missions. In meantime, cool stuff from the previous game like Crowd Control and Demolition Derby don’t make a return.
Overall the gameplay here really isn’t that great or interesting. It’s especially frustrating that many of your special abilities, including homies etc. don’t matter at all during the side missions. It’s more about being entertained by whatever the developers are going to throw at you next. That’s one sure thing about this game that you can certainly say: this is no longer in any way, shape or form a clone of Grand Theft Auto. It’s very much it’s own beast now.
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