Saints Row: The Third. (review)

Saints Row: The Third may feel a tad familiar to fans of the series, but when it comes to riotous fun and outlandish action, it carves its own identity. 

 

By Ashton Raze

Formats: 360 (tested), PS3, PC
Developer: Volition, Inc
Publisher: THQ
Age rating: BBFC 18
Released: 18 November 2011 

 

If games were scored based on 'best use of Bonnie Tyler', Saints Row: The Third would be getting top marks across the board. Replace Bonnie Tyler with Kanye West and the same thing applies. It's impossible to stress just how exhilarating it is to dive out of a helicopter onto the roof of a luxury condo, while 'The Power' plays from an unseen sound system. Saints Row 3 is filled with moments like this; over the top, bombastic setpieces that make other games look pedestrian, ramping up the action and the silliness to eleven. It can get away with it, after all. Saints Row isn't trying to tell a sensible crime story, nor is it grounded in any sort of reality. Its deliberately a video game. Saints Row knows that, in a game, sometimes you just want to let loose. It's a playground, and it revels in it.

The Saints have come a long way since Stillwater. The third outing sees the murderous gang as celebrities, endorsing products and signing movie deals. It's all very gloriously stupid. There's an element of cultural satire here, of course, but it's fleeting, brief knowing nods amidst the jet planes and tank shells and armies of luchadores. It begins with a bank heist in which the Saints, disguised as themselves, attempt to loot an entire vault. Within 15 minutes you're on a plane, then falling out a plane, then diving back through the plane as it crashes, shooting guys out the air and dodging falling cars. And this is just the introductory level.

However, after this section, you're brought back hard down to earth. Touching down in Steelport, the Saints' new home for the third outing, it's all a little too familiar initially. There are properties to buy, clothes to try on and Activities to complete. Activities, often the highlight of previous Saints Row titles, initially suggest the game might be a tad disappointing. Bar a couple of exceptions, they're the activities you've already seen before if you've played the other two games, either with minor variants (Escort now has you driving a tiger around, for example) or lifted entirely wholesale. A new activity in the form of Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax--a reality show in which you're tasked with killing mascots on a timer and with a combo meter--mixes things up a little but it's mostly rather familiar.

The main missions, too, proceed in a slightly misleading manner. For every explosive setpiece, there are a couple mandatory missions that make you play a familiar Activity; selling lunch boxes with Pierce, rescuing prostitutes for Limos, getting hit by as many cars as possible. It's easy to think, at first, that very little has changed. This isn't entirely untrue, but it's also a lot less of a problem than it initially appears.

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