I'm RatRace123 and this is The RatCage, where I may review random things once in a while in an extremely unprofessional and casual manner. After all, I love my opinions, so everyone else must love my opinions too. (Note: That might not be an actual fact.)
On the chopping block today is:
I waited a while after I played this one to review it, partly so the initial buzz I got from the game could die down and I could give a more objective review, and partly because I wanted to go back and play the other two games again to see how Saints Row The Third stacks up to its predecessors.
The direction the Saints Row series has taken is an interesting one. It began life as, essentially a GTA San Andreas clone. It had the advantage of coming out a time when there was no competition for it from its most obvious rival. For the most part, it was a pretty decent game with a good story, likable characters and solid gameplay; it was nothing to write home about though.
The second game came out around the same time as the newest GTA did, and while GTA began to take a more serious route, Saints Row took the opposite direction. There was more over the top violence, destruction and feces shooting. Combined with a no longer mute protagonist, a new cast of characters and another, surprisingly deep story, Saints Row 2 was a big success.
Now here we are at the third installment; an upping of the wacky, the destructive and the over the top.
After reviewing my thoughts on The Third I have to say that my overall opinion of the game has been lowered from what I originally thought of it. While a good game and the best in the series I'd say; it does have a few issues that keep it from being truly great, but I'll touch on those in a bit.
Saints Row The Third takes place after the events of Saints Row 2. (Duh) The 3rd Street Saints have risen from a lowly street gang to the hottest brand on the planet. The saints themselves are celebrities, and people are buying licensed Saints crap left and right... and still nobody cares about Pierce.
During a botched robbery attempt, The Protagonist, leader of the Saints; Johnny Gat and Shaundi find themselves the mercy of the international crime syndicate known as... well, The Syndicate. (Not a creative bunch when it comes to names, are they?)
The Syndicate has plans to expand into Stilwater, base of operations for the Saints; and they give the Saints a chance to join them in exchange for a severely cut profit, naturally they refuse and through a series of events, find themselves in the new city of Steelport, stomping ground for The Syndicate. This sets up the main storyline for the game: new city, three new gangs, giant dildo bats; time to go wreak havoc anew in the name of claiming Steelport for yourself.
On the whole the story may seem similarly structured to the first and second Saints Row games, that's what we're initially led to believe but...
(Here's where the spoiler warning comes into effect.)
The story is actually pretty linear. Instead of the typical formula of "Prologue> 3 gangs>Epilogue", we're instead treated to a three act fare; the setup for facing all three gangs doesn't even enter the picture until the second act.
For some I can understand this being a flaw as it takes away from the freedom of choice present in the first two games but I personally don't mind it. With a linear story path, the devs are free to tell a much tighter story and, in my opinion they do an admirable job.
The writing in Saints Row The Third is pretty good, the characters are enjoyable, the dialogue is witty, and it's often hilarious how deadpan and serious the characters are when faced with some of things that happen. Though not everything about it works, some of the jokes fall flat but that's always been par for the course for the series, and it seems to lack the more "emotional" depth that first two games had.
Among the new Saints are: Oleg Kirlov, a giant Russian hulk of a man who's very intelligent and enjoys the occasional chess match; Kinzie Kenzington, an ex FBI hacker; Zimos, basically T-Pain if he were an old pimp; and Angel De La Muerte, a Luchadore voiced by Hulk Hogan, that in itself is pretty awesome.
The new gangs the Saints are up against are decent, but after using almost every "realistic" gang type they could in the previous two games Volition seems to be abandoning the concept of realism. We've now got a Tron inspired biker/hacker/emo gang and Mexican wrestlers who drive large trucks.
"But enough about the story, what about the actual gameplay aspect?" I hear you say. Well, the game is fun, really fun. For sheer open world craziness, this game is hard to top. It's fun to just go around the city and do random stuff, as it should be for an open world game.
Jumping into story missions no longer involve you heading to map markers, you can now summon them, and additional side missions like assassinations and car jackings, from your in-game phone menu. From the phone you can also enter the character upgrade screen and spend all that sweet sweet moolah you earned on upgrades for your character, weapons, your gang and even your vehicles. The addition of this RPG like aspect is a great one for the series.
Alright, so the dicking around aspect is good, but what about the actual campaign? Well, I'm not gonna lie, this is where it falls short.
The opening few missions, and really the first act in general, is FRAKKIN' AWESOME! In the first hour of the game you will have done: A skydiving fire fight, an assault on a guard armory, a penthouse attack set to the song Power by Kanye West. All of it is tons of fun, but unfortunately the rest of the game can't quite match up to the precedent set by the first act.
The first half of the second act in particular can be a slog as you're not even doing missions. The first half of the second act consists almost entirely of performing activities, the little minigames the series is well known for, it's a bit of a disappointment really.
Placing these activity missions in lieu of actual missions give the impression that Volition really couldn't think of many missions so they just said "Screw it, put in one of those minigames instead".
And, I'm gonna admit something here, that may make me seem a little prudish or easily offended but one of the missions actually left a bad taste in my mouth. At about the halfway point there's a mission where you take over the human trafficking ring in Steelport and I guess it was supposed to be one of the examples of the over the top, crass humor but I didn't find myself laughing I was actually kind of disgusted with myself and my character.
Though the game itself seems to be in agreement if the Achievement/Trophy description is anything to go by, so maybe my reaction was the intended one.
Speaking of intended reactions, there's the "shocking" plot point that's become tradition for the series now. It happens fairly early on and, hoo boy the fans are probaby pissed about it, I know I was.
Let's talk about customization now, if that's alright. In Saints Row: The Third it's sort of a mixed bag, some aspects of the game get more customization, like the RPG aspects I mentioned and some aspects get less.
The character creation system gets hit with this too, you now decide on your character's body type with a slider/pyramid type thing. Instead of choosing to say, make a character both really muscular and really fat, you can now only choose one extreme or the other. The clothing options are also more limited, you can now only choose preset outfit pieces, like a coat/shirt/tie combo, instead of buying the individual parts.
Neither of these things is really a deal breaker for me, but people looking for pinpoint customization options or to recreate their Saints Row 2 character down to the tiniest detail may find themselves lacking certain bits and bobs.
Carrying on the tradition from the second game, you can still pick one of seven different voices for your character, including a Zombie voice. All of the voice actors do a great job with their lines (or grunts, in the Zombie's case) and they all manage to make each variation of the player character unique.
Interesting Sidenote: The Cockney voice in SR3 is done by Robin Atkin Downes, who gamers might know better as Travis Touchdown or The Medic.
All the voice actors in the game give strong performances actually and when backed by the script, it serves to really give the game character. The radio stations make a triumphant return, including an [adult swim] one which I personally enjoyed. I was a little disappointed that there didn't seem to be as many of them though, and that "The Mix" radio station was no longer primarily 80s pop songs; this is an extremely minor nitpick though.
Now for the gameplay itself: It's well polished, controls are tight, they've made it easier to fly aerial vehicles while ground ones feel a lot more "weighty", making all those inevitable crashes you're bound to get into all the more satisfying.
My reception to the combat is... mixed. The shooting feels good, and the addition of combat rolls is a good one, but combat can get very frustrating sometimes, especially in the later stages of the game. You might think that it's just the normal thing to do for the game to get more difficult and I should man up and grow a pair; that may be true, but my point's still valid.
The enemies are way too accurate; they end up hitting you most of the time and your health decreases far too quickly, and the exclusion of healing items like food leaves regenerating health as your only option. The game's method of challenging the player is to throw wave after wave of guys after you; I know this is par for the course with the series, but the regular street gangs didn't get helicopters and trained specialists as backup in the first two games.
More often than not, I found that a lot of my times in combat was just me sitting behind a wall waiting for my health to recover while the enemies zerg rushed me.
Worse still are the Brutes, big guys that are tough to kill, whose favorite tactics involve charging headfirst at you, and who are often equipped with chain guns or flamethrowers. These guys become increasingly common alongside the regular, already scarily accurate mooks.
Despite my griping it is still fun, occasionally frustrating, but fun.
On the technical side of things; Saints Row The Third uses a different engine than the previous two games and it looks better for the switch. Character models are crisp and detailed, and the skyline of Steelport looks rather lovely overall. Head groundside though and some minor issues occur, building popup is frequent and can be a bit jarring, but nothing that really took me out of the experience.
What did occasionally take me out of the experience were several glitches; more than once my character was riding thin air for a few seconds, or wouldn't get into the car like I instructed him to, enemies would sometimes get stuck on the scenery, and your AI partners can be really stupid at times; I'd sometimes catch my buddy just standing there doing nothing while getting his ass shot off.
I'm sure some of these issues will be fixed in a patch though, and whenever these little annoyances did happen it wasn't for very long; some players might not even have experienced them at all.
Another point not in the game's favor is its overall length. Counting the story missions, and most of the sidequests, it took me only fifteen hours to beat Saints Row The Third. The game was padded by forced activities during the storyline, and it still took me only fifteen hours to beat. Compared to the thirty hours each I spent beating the first and second games, it doesn't quite measure up.
So, if I spent a lot of the review not heaping praise on Saints Row The Third, why do I still claim to like it? Simply because, the fun moments are really really fun and the awesome moments are really really awesome!
The game doesn't always "click", there are missteps in almost every aspect of it but that doesn't take away from the sheer amounts of fun I had with it, and at the end of the day having fun is the reason I play a Saints Row game.
Saints Row The Third is a worthy addition to the series, taking its escalating over the top nature to an all-time high. While it may not be to everyone's tastes, and there are certain aspects that fans of the other installments might not like about this one; there's still tons of fun to be had with it if you're in the right mindset.
In my humble opinion, it's the best installment in the series, though not by much, and it gets a few things wrong that the other installments got right.
If you've never played a Saints Row game I would suggest playing Saints Row 2 before this one, if only to get a feel for the story and the characters, you may even find that you like the second one better than the third if you compare them, it really comes down to a matter of opinion.
I give Saints Row The Third a rating of "Recommended", check it out if you're looking for some good ol' fashioned, purple dildo smashin', airstrikin', ball bustin' fun!
On the chopping block today is:
[HEADING=1]WARNING: SOME SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW[/HEADING]
For the most part I'm going to keep this review as spoiler free as I can, but there are a few aspects about the structure of the story that I want to touch on as well as a brief mention of a few missions and the gameplay, so consider this your warning.
I waited a while after I played this one to review it, partly so the initial buzz I got from the game could die down and I could give a more objective review, and partly because I wanted to go back and play the other two games again to see how Saints Row The Third stacks up to its predecessors.
The direction the Saints Row series has taken is an interesting one. It began life as, essentially a GTA San Andreas clone. It had the advantage of coming out a time when there was no competition for it from its most obvious rival. For the most part, it was a pretty decent game with a good story, likable characters and solid gameplay; it was nothing to write home about though.
The second game came out around the same time as the newest GTA did, and while GTA began to take a more serious route, Saints Row took the opposite direction. There was more over the top violence, destruction and feces shooting. Combined with a no longer mute protagonist, a new cast of characters and another, surprisingly deep story, Saints Row 2 was a big success.
Now here we are at the third installment; an upping of the wacky, the destructive and the over the top.
After reviewing my thoughts on The Third I have to say that my overall opinion of the game has been lowered from what I originally thought of it. While a good game and the best in the series I'd say; it does have a few issues that keep it from being truly great, but I'll touch on those in a bit.
Saints Row The Third takes place after the events of Saints Row 2. (Duh) The 3rd Street Saints have risen from a lowly street gang to the hottest brand on the planet. The saints themselves are celebrities, and people are buying licensed Saints crap left and right... and still nobody cares about Pierce.
Don't feel too bad Pierce, I like you.
During a botched robbery attempt, The Protagonist, leader of the Saints; Johnny Gat and Shaundi find themselves the mercy of the international crime syndicate known as... well, The Syndicate. (Not a creative bunch when it comes to names, are they?)
The Syndicate has plans to expand into Stilwater, base of operations for the Saints; and they give the Saints a chance to join them in exchange for a severely cut profit, naturally they refuse and through a series of events, find themselves in the new city of Steelport, stomping ground for The Syndicate. This sets up the main storyline for the game: new city, three new gangs, giant dildo bats; time to go wreak havoc anew in the name of claiming Steelport for yourself.
FOR ASGARD!
On the whole the story may seem similarly structured to the first and second Saints Row games, that's what we're initially led to believe but...
(Here's where the spoiler warning comes into effect.)
The story is actually pretty linear. Instead of the typical formula of "Prologue> 3 gangs>Epilogue", we're instead treated to a three act fare; the setup for facing all three gangs doesn't even enter the picture until the second act.
For some I can understand this being a flaw as it takes away from the freedom of choice present in the first two games but I personally don't mind it. With a linear story path, the devs are free to tell a much tighter story and, in my opinion they do an admirable job.
The writing in Saints Row The Third is pretty good, the characters are enjoyable, the dialogue is witty, and it's often hilarious how deadpan and serious the characters are when faced with some of things that happen. Though not everything about it works, some of the jokes fall flat but that's always been par for the course for the series, and it seems to lack the more "emotional" depth that first two games had.
Among the new Saints are: Oleg Kirlov, a giant Russian hulk of a man who's very intelligent and enjoys the occasional chess match; Kinzie Kenzington, an ex FBI hacker; Zimos, basically T-Pain if he were an old pimp; and Angel De La Muerte, a Luchadore voiced by Hulk Hogan, that in itself is pretty awesome.
The new gangs the Saints are up against are decent, but after using almost every "realistic" gang type they could in the previous two games Volition seems to be abandoning the concept of realism. We've now got a Tron inspired biker/hacker/emo gang and Mexican wrestlers who drive large trucks.
The Deckers, aforementioned Tron-emo gang. They kinda remind me of the Ronin from the second game if they all went to a rave.
"But enough about the story, what about the actual gameplay aspect?" I hear you say. Well, the game is fun, really fun. For sheer open world craziness, this game is hard to top. It's fun to just go around the city and do random stuff, as it should be for an open world game.
Jumping into story missions no longer involve you heading to map markers, you can now summon them, and additional side missions like assassinations and car jackings, from your in-game phone menu. From the phone you can also enter the character upgrade screen and spend all that sweet sweet moolah you earned on upgrades for your character, weapons, your gang and even your vehicles. The addition of this RPG like aspect is a great one for the series.
Alright, so the dicking around aspect is good, but what about the actual campaign? Well, I'm not gonna lie, this is where it falls short.
The opening few missions, and really the first act in general, is FRAKKIN' AWESOME! In the first hour of the game you will have done: A skydiving fire fight, an assault on a guard armory, a penthouse attack set to the song Power by Kanye West. All of it is tons of fun, but unfortunately the rest of the game can't quite match up to the precedent set by the first act.
The first half of the second act in particular can be a slog as you're not even doing missions. The first half of the second act consists almost entirely of performing activities, the little minigames the series is well known for, it's a bit of a disappointment really.
Placing these activity missions in lieu of actual missions give the impression that Volition really couldn't think of many missions so they just said "Screw it, put in one of those minigames instead".
The first few hours of the game are insanely fun, but the rest of the experience doesn't deliver on the same level.
And, I'm gonna admit something here, that may make me seem a little prudish or easily offended but one of the missions actually left a bad taste in my mouth. At about the halfway point there's a mission where you take over the human trafficking ring in Steelport and I guess it was supposed to be one of the examples of the over the top, crass humor but I didn't find myself laughing I was actually kind of disgusted with myself and my character.
Though the game itself seems to be in agreement if the Achievement/Trophy description is anything to go by, so maybe my reaction was the intended one.
Speaking of intended reactions, there's the "shocking" plot point that's become tradition for the series now. It happens fairly early on and, hoo boy the fans are probaby pissed about it, I know I was.
Let's talk about customization now, if that's alright. In Saints Row: The Third it's sort of a mixed bag, some aspects of the game get more customization, like the RPG aspects I mentioned and some aspects get less.
The character creation system gets hit with this too, you now decide on your character's body type with a slider/pyramid type thing. Instead of choosing to say, make a character both really muscular and really fat, you can now only choose one extreme or the other. The clothing options are also more limited, you can now only choose preset outfit pieces, like a coat/shirt/tie combo, instead of buying the individual parts.
Neither of these things is really a deal breaker for me, but people looking for pinpoint customization options or to recreate their Saints Row 2 character down to the tiniest detail may find themselves lacking certain bits and bobs.
Carrying on the tradition from the second game, you can still pick one of seven different voices for your character, including a Zombie voice. All of the voice actors do a great job with their lines (or grunts, in the Zombie's case) and they all manage to make each variation of the player character unique.
Interesting Sidenote: The Cockney voice in SR3 is done by Robin Atkin Downes, who gamers might know better as Travis Touchdown or The Medic.
You, in Saints Row The Third... possibly.
All the voice actors in the game give strong performances actually and when backed by the script, it serves to really give the game character. The radio stations make a triumphant return, including an [adult swim] one which I personally enjoyed. I was a little disappointed that there didn't seem to be as many of them though, and that "The Mix" radio station was no longer primarily 80s pop songs; this is an extremely minor nitpick though.
Now for the gameplay itself: It's well polished, controls are tight, they've made it easier to fly aerial vehicles while ground ones feel a lot more "weighty", making all those inevitable crashes you're bound to get into all the more satisfying.
My reception to the combat is... mixed. The shooting feels good, and the addition of combat rolls is a good one, but combat can get very frustrating sometimes, especially in the later stages of the game. You might think that it's just the normal thing to do for the game to get more difficult and I should man up and grow a pair; that may be true, but my point's still valid.
The enemies are way too accurate; they end up hitting you most of the time and your health decreases far too quickly, and the exclusion of healing items like food leaves regenerating health as your only option. The game's method of challenging the player is to throw wave after wave of guys after you; I know this is par for the course with the series, but the regular street gangs didn't get helicopters and trained specialists as backup in the first two games.
More often than not, I found that a lot of my times in combat was just me sitting behind a wall waiting for my health to recover while the enemies zerg rushed me.
Worse still are the Brutes, big guys that are tough to kill, whose favorite tactics involve charging headfirst at you, and who are often equipped with chain guns or flamethrowers. These guys become increasingly common alongside the regular, already scarily accurate mooks.
Combat can get very frustrating at times and occasionally feels cheap.
Despite my griping it is still fun, occasionally frustrating, but fun.
On the technical side of things; Saints Row The Third uses a different engine than the previous two games and it looks better for the switch. Character models are crisp and detailed, and the skyline of Steelport looks rather lovely overall. Head groundside though and some minor issues occur, building popup is frequent and can be a bit jarring, but nothing that really took me out of the experience.
What did occasionally take me out of the experience were several glitches; more than once my character was riding thin air for a few seconds, or wouldn't get into the car like I instructed him to, enemies would sometimes get stuck on the scenery, and your AI partners can be really stupid at times; I'd sometimes catch my buddy just standing there doing nothing while getting his ass shot off.
I'm sure some of these issues will be fixed in a patch though, and whenever these little annoyances did happen it wasn't for very long; some players might not even have experienced them at all.
Another point not in the game's favor is its overall length. Counting the story missions, and most of the sidequests, it took me only fifteen hours to beat Saints Row The Third. The game was padded by forced activities during the storyline, and it still took me only fifteen hours to beat. Compared to the thirty hours each I spent beating the first and second games, it doesn't quite measure up.
So, if I spent a lot of the review not heaping praise on Saints Row The Third, why do I still claim to like it? Simply because, the fun moments are really really fun and the awesome moments are really really awesome!
The game doesn't always "click", there are missteps in almost every aspect of it but that doesn't take away from the sheer amounts of fun I had with it, and at the end of the day having fun is the reason I play a Saints Row game.
Saints Row The Third: Uneven, Immature, Fun as all hell!
Saints Row The Third is a worthy addition to the series, taking its escalating over the top nature to an all-time high. While it may not be to everyone's tastes, and there are certain aspects that fans of the other installments might not like about this one; there's still tons of fun to be had with it if you're in the right mindset.
In my humble opinion, it's the best installment in the series, though not by much, and it gets a few things wrong that the other installments got right.
If you've never played a Saints Row game I would suggest playing Saints Row 2 before this one, if only to get a feel for the story and the characters, you may even find that you like the second one better than the third if you compare them, it really comes down to a matter of opinion.
I give Saints Row The Third a rating of "Recommended", check it out if you're looking for some good ol' fashioned, purple dildo smashin', airstrikin', ball bustin' fun!