Saints Row: The Third Review

(to be updated with screenshots and edited.)


Saints Row: The Third's story begins as you and a few of your compadres are setting up to rob a bank, the reason exactly why is never explained, the story is almost non-existent as you progress through the game there isn't a whole lot of reason as to why you are doing this or that. But thankfully the cinematics are laced with a good sense of comedy and ridiculous action scenes as you are not allowed to skip them. But if anyone has told you Saints row games are fun because they have a great story, then they clearly must have been on a abundant of drugs.

While the story suffers from not existing the characters are still fairy entertaining to watch, they each have their own personality you will grow to like or dislike the characters as time goes on, which is great because you will be spending a lot of time around them, and if you couldn't even remember their name it'd be pretty bad. For instance Pierce and his annoying autotune voice makes you want to hit him over the head, perhaps steal his microphone and shove it up his various appendages.

As well as despite the story surprisingly the missions are a lot of fun, in some of the main missions you will be forced to make choices, these choices won't exactly affect the story all that much but they will affect your character. Some choices will give you respect, while others you will be rewarded with a income or a lump sum of cash. These missions you will be done a lot of different things in you may be infiltrating a skyscraper to bring down a gang, or perhaps going to steal hoes from a ship, but the creators even in the missions put some hilarious things like when you are searching for the hoes you will come across some BDSM play equipment or a arsenal of guns.

Aside from the main missions there is activities and gang operations, while these aren't nearly as fun as the main missions they still provide some entertainment value for the first couple times, some are more fun then others but you will probably find a few you like. There is also gang operations around the place where you had to kill a bunch of gangsters in a certain zone to gain control of that zone, these are located around randomly as you drive around. As well as sometime you will get a phone call where you can drive to a place to do little side missions which can be like survivals or killing certain people. Needless to say there is loads of things to do in Steelport you won't run out anytime soon, I've played for almost 30 hours and I'm only 28% done.

CO-OP

The Co-op is implemented almost flawlessly, with minimal lag, there is occasional warping when driving around in cars but this is true with any multiplayer game you will play, really they handled the lag fairly well that even if you got 100ms you can still headshot the enemies and they will respond instantly, there does not feel like there is much lag.

There is various co-op achievements you can get by playing the entire together, among various little challenges you can play against each other, it is all a lot of fun, unfortunately there is no text chat to be found in it by pressing “T” it will just open the steam overlay so you can talk to the person, there is mic chat which works really well, and the steam overlay isn't bad though it makes it a bit hard to type while driving.

However if you are going to play co-op it should be with someone you enjoy playing games with, as it is only a 2 person co-op, it really is a couple game, or a game for best friends, since the game is only as fun as the person you are playing with as a forewarning.

But moving onto gameplay, customization is a very large thing in Saints Row: The Third from making your character, dressing them up, customizing your crib, or your car, even your gang. There is hundreds of things to just customize and a large portion of your time will spent here so thankfully the interface for it all is great and intuitive.

There is currently 4 clothing stores in the game; Planet Saints – selling your normal clothes and saints affiliated clothes, No body loves me – these people sell emo clothes and perhaps a few clothes considered more goth, Let's pretend – This store sells a lot of cosplay things, unfortunately they are missing a lot of good things, and you can't even get a tail or ears which is fairly depressing, and lastly, Leather and Lace – which is basically a biker/BDSM shop. As you play more and progress in the story you will not unlock more clothes for customization as a forewarning so don't bother continuing to check back.

There is also guns stores, car upgrade shops, tattoo parlors, and cosmetic surgeons located around, there is only 1 of each so they will all sell the same things, In the gun store you can upgrade your guns, buy ammo, but guns, and you will have a constant need for ammo so you will be stopping here a lot. The car upgrade shops are useless as you can upgrade your car in your crib but you can repair your car on the fly at these shops. Tattoo parlors sell a variety of tattoos and you can have a ton of tattoos if that is your thing. Lastly the cosmetic surgeon will help you “enchance” certain things if you aren't happy with your character.

Combat can feel a tad clumsy at times in co-op especially due to lag things might warp around when you are trying to shoot them, but the problem mostly exist due to the game being third person, and the bullets going to your crosshair exactly even if a character is point blank infront of you unless your crosshair is over them they won't hit. You also will be forced to equip guns everytime you walk over someone's body who has a gun laying there, so if you prefer to melee then this can be real pain. While the combat does have some problems it still is really fun, blowing up cars, mowing down people with chainguns, flamethrowers, or even just the pure simple joy of shooting people in the heads with pistols.

The driving in the game is fairly good, it's no simulator obviously, but they made it fun, each car has different handling, top speeds, acceleration, breaks, some cars such as the Raycaster and drift around corners while others like the Temptress will have no need to drift around corners with it's superior turning. Unfortunately in co-op the game doesn't always sync up and sometimes when you are driving your partner will go flying through the windshield despite you not actually hitting anything because in their game it seemed like you hit something.

But regardless there is a lot of vehicles to drive, and when I say a lot I mean a lot, many times you will have trouble finding the vehicle you want because there is just to many and each one has some unique customization options, like you can take a street sweeper and equip it with spinning saw blades and spikes.

You also have the ability to fly in the game through use of helicopters or tiny planes, even some jets and Harriers. However there isn't any customization for airplanes or helicopters which is a tad disappointing. But they are still a lot of fun to fly just not very practical since you can't take them into missions and if you want to land somewhere you will probably end up blowing up or having a hard time taking off.

As with every game of this nature you will have a notoriety bar, one with the cops and one with gangs, unfortunately the notoriety bar feels a bit sensitive, anytime you do anything slightly wrong you get some notoriety even punching your ally results in cops opening fire on you, with the cop cars rubberbanding to keep up with your car it's nearly impossible to lose the notoriety without returning to your crib, this is great if you enjoy cop fights and such but it gets annoying when you are just trying to shop and never ending waves of cops keep coming after you.

The interface feels fairly sleek and nice, most features in the game will be reached through your cellphone, where you can; use your GPS to get to where you need to be, call people to come assist you, bring you vehicles or even wipe your notoriety clean, collect your income you earn from buying buildings or beating certain quest, or even upgrade your character with a bunch of unique abilities, features and such.

Touching a bit more on upgrades as this is a large part of the game, there is various things you can upgrade about your character. From increased health and sprint, to recruiting more allies, dual wielding pistols and even reducing damage, as you gain reputation from doing pretty much anything in the game you will level up and be able to spend money to unlock these skills, as long as you have the money you can buy all the upgrades in the game.

The weaponry in the game is quite varied and unique, there is a lot of one of each type of weapon, which can be swapped out for other of the type, the types are; fist, melee, pistols, smgs, shotguns, rifles, explosives, and special, there is also 4 grenade types you can use, frags, flashbangs, moltovs and a sort of EMP of course you can upgrade all of these through 4 tiers of levels giving various effects; Increased accuracy, fire rate, increased mag size, explosive bullets, etc..

All in all the gameplay is what makes the game good, there is just really so much to do it's difficult to get bored, but really what pieces the game together I believe is the **B*Co-op** without the co-op I believe you could really just go play GTA or anything else and it'd be just as good.

The graphics are nothing impressive, you have seen them before hundreds of times, but the characters are fairly well done and cute so you won't be stuck with some horribly ugly character that you don't even want to look at, the animations can be a bit bad at times, and jumpy. But the graphics are easily passable and don't effect the gameplay.

There is nothing to say about the audio, the radio is annoying and there is only a few songs, you will most likely want to disable music in the game, and turn on your own music, the sound effects are decent none of them stand out but none of them are horrible.

There isn't a whole lot of replayability just playability, there isn't much of a reason to start over past having to if you want all the achievements in the game, you can always change your character ingame, and there's always something to do in the game, so there's really no point to start over at all.

However there is a mode called, “Whored Mode” which is Saints Row's version of Horde mode off of gears of war, where you will have to survive through waves of enemies this mode is really over the top, you will be fighting people off with dildos, and bunch of BDSM inspired stuff and such, it may be fun for a bit but the main draw comes from the main game and co-op.

Overall the game can be a lot of fun, if you are playing with a co-op partner, otherwise it's probably just a mediocre GTA clone.

Story

6 – Average forgettable story, but thankfully the characters and comedy keep it afloat.

Gamplay

(No co-op) 5 – The gameplay is nothing special without co-op you are better off sticking to GTA, unless you really like dress up.

(Co-op) 8.5 – With co-op the gameplay is amazingly fun, playing as a couple, will have a lot of fun doing various activities even just driving around, some bugs still hold it back and lack of customization still hold it back.

Graphics

7.5 – Above average graphics though there is some glitches bodys falling through floors and such, nothing game breaking though.

Audio

7 – Terrible selection of music but able to disable, and decent sound effects, as well as good voice acting.

Replayability

8 – There isn't a reason to restart but you won't really need to since there is so much to do, but it's not unlimited so it eventually will run out.

Overall

(No Co-op) 5.5

(Co-op) 7.5