Monday 23 April 2012

Saints Row: The Third Review


Saints Row: The Third is Volition’s latest offering in the increasingly madcap Saints Row series, developed with aims to bring the world of sandbox crime games to a new level of freedom.

The final result certainly accomplishes that goal to a certain extent, and really makes the series stand out on its own, for better and for worse. The first Saints Row - despite an impressive number of sales and numbers from reviews sat firmly somewhere in the 80s – could never really shake the comparisons to Rockstar’s behemoth of the genre: Grand Theft Auto. But the games really seem to be travelling in different directions, since Saints Row and GTA: Vice City Stories Rockstar has come out with steadily more mature and gritty stories, whereas Volition has let you take off all of your clothes and jump out of a plane.

It’s a common complaint, but the amount of grit and actual substance taken away from the story and gameplay of Saints Row: The Third. Saints Row 2 was, at the end of the day, grounded with some vague semblance of realism that made the extraordinary things you could do stand out all that more. You see Rockstar doing this all the time. They don’t need to let you sit in your depressing flat you share with your annoying cousin and watch ultra-macho chat shows, or spend virtual hours in a saloon in Red Dead Redemption, knocking back shot after shot until you stagger out into the street and fall into the dirt. They do it to create a benign, everyday atmosphere so that going out and having a knife fight with a bear or driving a supercar through the Liberty City equivalent of Times Square feels that much more special by comparison.

Saints Row: The Third, however, really doesn’t break up the action with anything. The most banal things I can think of doing in the time I played for, and it is a ridiculous amount of time, is posing for pictures. The Saints are international celebrities, after all, and the game at least manages to convey that well. There are twenty fans to find in the city that want to take your picture, fans occasionally gasp in amazement at your passing or run up to ask for an autograph. Pictures of the Saints’ lieutenants are on billboards in every street and all but three of the clothing shops in the game’s setting of Steelport are dedicated to selling Saints clothing and merchandise.

It’s not that Saints Row: The Third isn’t a good game; it’s more a case that a lot of the dirtier side of things has been lost. It almost seems to mirror the happenings of the game. The Saints, formerly feared, vicious gang members have become pampered international celebrities, and the game seems to have toned down the violence to people being swallowed in a big cloud of bright red, at the very worst. There were parts of Saints Row 2 that were genuinely harrowing, or worthy of flinching at, at least, Johnny Gat breaking a rival gang leaders legs and burying him alive, Carlos being dragged behind a speeding truck until your only option is euthanize him, it really made you feel like you were in a violent and inhospitable world. The characters in Saints Row: The Third don’t die aged 90 in their own beds, but everything happens so suddenly and is over so quickly that it’s robbed of its weight.

The story isn’t spectacular but it’s not terrible by any means, everything ties together, no matter which order you pick your available missions in, and characters are well voiced, colourful and make good additions to the world around you. The cutscenes and dialogue are really the best feature of the game as far as story goes. The protagonist is no longer the straight man to the rest of the world’s insanity and now leans towards comic relief. Each of the seven different personalities you can pick is beautifully voiced, with individual dialogue and idle one-liners. Without much effort I’ve been able to pick out a personality that I find suits the character I’ve made. It really misses out on all the awkwardness that comes from having a customisable voiced protagonist.

The extent you’re able to customise your character at is hit and miss, to say the least. Facial and body customisation is a lot better than it was in Saints Row 2, though there really isn’t much to say for most of the male body types, the extremes being either athletic, a potato monster or a gears of war character. Customisation of clothing takes a dive too. The selection is a lot bigger and has some great variation, but it comes at the expense of being able to dress your character in individual layers of clothing. You’ll be able to make a great looking character regardless, but it could have been so much better if they’d expanded on the system from Saints Row 2 and brought in more items. Especially useless is the individual clothing slot for masks, which contains one item. There are other items that could go in the mask slot, but apparently this didn’t occur to Volition who decided they should all be hats.

Speaking of characters, it’s worth saying that the animation is great. Characters run, jump and reload fluidly and realistically. I’d often take the long way to a destination just so I could see my character scurrying over a mesh fence like Spider-Man, or vaulting across someone’s garden. Clipping is practically non-existent, though characters with large hats or hair may find them cropped when they get into a vehicle.

Vehicle customisation has had a few cutbacks since the last game; you can no longer bounce around on hydraulics, which wasn’t a particularly interesting feature in the first place. It would be nice to be able to customise vehicles like the Bear APC and the multitude of helicopters you’re going to collect throughout the game, but it’s no major issue that you can’t.

When you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, Saints Row: The Third is all about the gameplay and freedom, and there are really no faults there I can point out. The core gameplay works well enough that I haven’t noticed anything that particularly stands out about it. You charge or drive around as fast as you can and lots of things die. It’s plain dumb fun, and there are about as many different ways to do this as you’ll feel like. You can strafe with a helicopter gunship, call down a precision airstrike, launch Call of Duty style guided missiles, embark on a chainsaw massacre or literally burst people with a gigantic pair of ‘Apoca-Fists.’

Once you’ve started your rampage it probably won’t be long until you’ve attracted the attention of the authorities or other gangs, and it’s a shame to say that the nature of Saints Row doesn’t quite make these pursuits as thrilling as trying to evade the police in Grand Theft Auto. A character about midway through the ranking system isn’t going to have any trouble until tanks start chasing them, which means that until then, police chases are more of a nuisance than anything more threatening.

It’s pretty safe to say that no-one’s going to really be challenged by Saints Row: The Third unless they crank the difficulty way up. It’s rare that you’ll ever be killed directly by anyone you’re fighting, most of the time deaths come from being caught in the explosion of whatever vehicle you might be driving, which is annoying to say the least, especially if you’ve just attempted to bail out of said vehicle and die anyway.

At the end of the day, anything I can criticise about Saints Row: The Third is offset by the fact that I’ve put over one-hundred man hours into it, finding everything it has to offer and then some. It’s a great game for a lark, but it really doesn’t advance anything other than the increasingly ridiculous storyline of Saints Row. Fans of sandbox crime games, or open world games in general, should really give it a try, you won’t find anything particularly new or amazing, but you’ll probably have a ton of fun blasting your way through Steelport.

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