A GTA Clone?

The wrong way to look at Saints Row is as a Grand Theft Auto clone. The first Saints Row might have been considered a GTA clone when it came out after San Andreas, but the sandbox genre has evolved to the point where we can safely stop calling any crime-themed, open world game a GTA clone, just as we didn’t call Half Life a DOOM clone.

Saints Row provides something different than what GTA is offering. The most recent Grand Theft Autos have provided players with stories, settings, and action that more closely resemble what you would find in a crime novel. Characters like Niko wouldn’t be out of place in a story by Elmore Leonard or Jim Thompson.

Saints Row The Third is pure comic book, through and through.

Everything is over the top. The kills are big, splattery gorefests where GTA IV presents death in a more grim, realistic manner. The vehicular action is larger than life where GTA IV had cars that would slowly break down and sputter to a stop. The characters are big, broad crime bosses and thugs where GTA IV’s characters were more like real people. We only make these comparisons to point out how pointless they are. Saints Row is its own game.

The Introduction

Taking you from Stilwater, the city used in the previous games, to Steelport, the game has you design your own character, and it’s not often that you see a character creation feature this in depth. In fact, the character creation engine was released for free on Steam prior to the game’s release to give players a taste of what to expect.

Some players might choose to make the character look more like themselves, but being that this game is so over the top, most will probably choose to create an over the top character, and there’s a lot you can do in that direction. You can create just about anyone from Hulk Hogan to Ronald McDonald to play through the campaign with and the game will have every feature you’re looking for or the next best thing.

In fact, it’s safe to say that you could spend hours playing this game without ever getting past the character creation stage, it’s just that in-depth.

Realism? We Don’t Need no Stinkin’ Realism!

Let’s list a few of the things you’ll see in Saints Row: The Third…

• A Tron-inspired virtual world

• Babysitting a tiger

• Octopus-controlled gangsters

• Mexican wrestlers in a chainsaw battle royale

• The lead character getting a sex change

We don’t want to spoil anymore surprises, this should only give you an idea of the tone that the game sets. It really seems designed to appease each and every fantasy for violence, sex, and the absurd. If Grand Theft Auto is the Peter Paul Reubens of crime games, this is Salvador Dali. It keeps piling weird on top of weird and it really does let you get away with just about anything you might have ever wanted to do in a video game from charging through downtown in a military jet to hucking cops off of a roof and watching them bounce off cars below.

Sidequests

The main plotline in the game is pretty straightforward for all its bizarre twists and turns: Take over the streets and earn cred and respect by any means necessary. The sidequests are where you can have a lot of fun with some zany missions, though, like the Insurance Fraud jobs.

These were first seen in Saints Row 2: Missions where you job is to run into the street and do as much damage to yourself as quickly as possible in order to collect a big cash payoff. If you’ve ever played an open world crime sim, you’ve spent a lot of time throwing yourself into traffic and jumping out of cars and planes just to watch the ragdoll physics at work. Well now there’s a game that rewards you for that kind of self-destructive behavior.

Vehicles, Features, Weapons and Costumes

We could write a hundred pages here and not begin to scratch the surface of the content that you’ll find in Saints Row: The Third. As an idea of what you get in terms of vehicles, you’ll see everything from hover jets to pixellated military tanks that look just like they came out of an Atari game. As an idea of the weapons that you’ll use, you get everything from the traditional guns and knives to chainsaws and sex toys. There’s really just too much to list here, so just assume that if you ever wanted to drive it, shoot it, hit someone with it or wear it, Saints Row: The Third lets you. That assumption is right more often than it’s wrong.

The Visuals

All of this and we haven’t even touched on the visuals.

The game is really something to look at. Taking place in a totally fictional city rather than the more realistic New York and LA inspired locales of most crime sims, the game offers up neon lit buildings in a pseudo-futuristic setting. Steel, glass and city lights combine to create the kind of skylines you only see in flashy music videos.

There are some unfortunate details such as bad draw distance. If you build up enough speed, you’ll wind up crashing into cars that appear out of nowhere and textures will disappear. This is just a matter of the game letting you push the limits as hard as you can, of course, and it’s something that many gamers are used to, but we still look forward to an open world game that lets us get in a jet and shoot through the skies at 300 MPH without crashing into an invisible tree.

The Music

When you play an open world crime sim, the music is a big part of the soundtrack. This tradition for licensed music that began in GTA3 has carried over across dozens of other games and it’s always welcome. Where many crime sims use lesser known music and tunes that are really nothing to write home about, Saints Row: The Third features everything from classical music for those dramatic chase sequences to independent rock like The Aquabats, and rap music like Ghostface Killah. The choices are perhaps the most eclectic yet put to one of these games. Nowhere else will you find Mozart, Biz Markie, Iggy Pop, and Art Brut all on the same soundtrack.

Final Verdict

Saints Row is a smashing success because it’s so self-aware. It knows that it’s not a serious game, that it’s just here for fun, for laughs, and it capitalizes on that. Where some games seem to be confused as to whether or not they’re trying to be funny, Saints Row: The Third knows it’s all pretty silly and it revels in it. If you’re looking for a game that lets you just plain have some dumb fun now and then, it’s very hard to beat Saints Row: The Third.