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.

THQ & Vigil, Take note.

Things Dark Millennium Online must include.

Roleplay Servers - A good way to bring people in from other MMOs, as well as draw Dark Heresy players in. This does come with some extra work, interactive things in the environment, a mechanic for walking, an emote system with animations (which frankly, if you don't have a few of these anyway, you're doing wrong.)

Playable Sisters of Battle - Because girls can't be Space Marines, and they're my favourite race.

Playable Imperial Guard - Balancing this will be a bitch, but they're a staunch favourite. Who doesn't want to be a Commissar?

Playable everything-else-except Necrons and Tyranids - This might well upset players of these races, but I'm leaving them out because there's absolutely no social aspect to them, Tyranids are a hive mind who skitter around eating everything, and Necrons are long dead beings that don't do much except flay and destroy things. Neither of them are very talkative.

Unique Classes - Every race is different, after all. There are Librarians, Celestians, Stormtroopers, Raptors and more. Take note of this. The least you can do is give them different names, even if Raptors, Assault Marines and Seraphim all do the same thing.

Customisable Armour - Chances are you've already implemented something like this already, but whatever system you're going to use for armour, it's important you realise people want customisation, so include a (conservative) recolour system (to prevent such things as bright pink Imperial Guard) and transmog. Better yet, have an armour system like Space Marine's. Even Imperial Guard will need customisation, not everyone wants to be Cadian.

Don't make the same mistakes Relic does - Namely limiting everything to Blood Ravens, Orks and Eldar and making us pay for the rest.

And with any luck, decent balancing between Order and Destruction. It's not a great system for an MMO in the 41st Millenium, being able to split in three ways would most likely work better (Imperium, Xenos and Chaos) but however you do it, balance the game like its never been balanced before.

On Assassin's Creed

So, whilst I have nothing better to do, in that I've finished college and I'm sleeping in a messed up pattern that leaves me awake most of the night, I figure I'll get back to trying to do some sporadic updates for my blog.

So I figured I'll talk about something someone drew my attention to over on the Escapist. By which I mean: I read someone's post about it and found it interesting enough to warrant further thought, about the characterisation of the main characters (not Desmond, he sucks) in the Assassin's Creed games.

For a quick summary to get us started: At the beginning of Assassin's Creed, Altair is a cocky, high ranking and skilled assassin, so cocksure of himself that he ignores just about everything he's been taught, which leads to one of his comrades dying, and another losing an arm below the elbow. Because of this he's punished and reduced to the rank of a novice, and he starts out angered by this, arguing with the leaders of the Assassins Bureaus, and in time, through killing his targets he becomes wiser. He also questions his targets as to why they do what they do, which provides a philosophical element to the game similar to that in the original Deus Ex. His attitude generally remains quite cold, but lets remember that this is a guy who's been brought up by an Assassin order.

Now lets compare him to Ezio, who I'd take a guess that most people consider the 'better' character out of the two. He was brought up as a Florentine noble, so he's pretty cocky too, and then, throughout the story, he stays cocky. He's pretty much only interested in sex and revenge. He kills his targets and doesn't give a damn why they do what they do. All he'll give is a bit of condemnation and a Requiescat in Pace. Throughout Assassin's Creed 2 and Brotherhood the character never really changes at all.

My point can be summed up thusly. Ezio might be the more colourful character, in terms of how he acts, but is he necessarily the better one?

And as a final note, Ezio may be the charmer, but I know far more girls who melt over Altair's cold, blunt nature.
The women I know are strange.
And are going to kill me for writing that.

Would you believe me...

...If I said lack of updates was because I have absolutely no interest in most things that come out until March or so? I'll try and get this site back on track, no promises, some demo reviews may be upcoming, as well as whatever news I can get my grubby mitts on. 

In the meantime, a more serious piece of quasi-news. Just as a warning, there's a bit of nightmare fuel at the end. Damn slow-mo.

So much for bringing families closer together, eh, Microsoft? Kinect just causes child abuse.

I'm going to hell for laughing at this, aren't I?
Lets finish this off with a little quote.

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." - Mel Brooks.

Bulletstorm Demo Hands On

A glimmering city rose up in the distance as a calm, serene sunset brought twilight to the tropical landscape of Stygia. I was awestruck at the beauty that I beheld on this world, my senses astounded by the orchestral score that sounded around me.

I gripped the controller in my hands and selected the only available option 'Echoes' on the menu. The only available course to me being some sort of run down building. I pressed A, frightened of what was to come.

That's when I met Grayson Hunt. That's when he called me pasty.

When introductions were over I was given my guns, and that's when hell broke loose.

So, Bulletstorm. I want to get the bad things out of the way first, just so I can gush for the rest of the preview, the demo is stupidly easy. I don't know why, maybe it was stuck on the easy difficulty setting, maybe my muscled body turned aside bullets as easily as my boot heel turned away the foes, but I had no problem, even when enemies were attacking from all sides, and even when the screen starts flashing and instructing you to take cover, there's ample time to score a few kills whilst sliding your way home.

And it may just have been the fact that Echoes is basically a quick, story devoid mission, but the characters lacked much amusing to say, I spent at least five minutes kicking one of them to try and get a response, not even a stagger. Aside from that, the only other gripe I have is the dusty urban area you play through, rather than one of the more lush, and I'm sure more colourful areas that the game could provide to sell itself with.

That said, the game is definitely a good looking one, with fairly crisp graphics and good looking character models, as much as I could tell, at least, most people I encountered seemed intent on trying to tear my face off until they got a boot in theirs and a bullet up their ass.

Attacks have a nice and varied range of use, you can charge your telekinetic energy whip thing to clear out a room of bad guys easily, you can simply shoot their heads off, or you can kick them away to buy a little room for yourself, and it all works very well, with a good variation of attacks paying off, though kicking can sometimes feel a little off, feeling as if it's nowhere near connecting with the enemies.

And you might think it gets old to kick an enemy into a bunch of spikes, but it really, really doesn't. Power cables happen to be my favourite so far, and the game should be a bucket load of fun when it's released.

Castles in the Skyrim

More stuff from VGA, with Bethesda shocking everyone by announcing Elder Scrolls V, under the title of 'Skyrim' which, as anyone who's played The Elder Scrolls should know, is the harsh and desolate homeland of the Nords. What does this mean? Vikings.
And probably snow.

And another large surprise, if we look at this here teaser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRifj-2EEKs

Holy crap! Dragons!

Betcha weren't expecting that.

Brit Effect

So, that post I put out like, a month back.
Well, now the mystery has been uncovered, and the trailer was?
Mass Effect 3.
Bioware are idiots.

I mean really, Bioware, everyone was going to buy this game anyway, you only have two franchise at the moment and they're both pretty successful, you should release a mystery teaser if you're going to do something new.

Lets put aside Bioware's horrifyingly incompetent marketing department for now, anyway, and have a look at the trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WcQvjTcxY0

There appears to be some kind of futuristic British soldier guy, being all gritty and sniping some mysterious figures that vaguely resemble Geth from a window, he talks about how we're pretty much doomed if Shepard doesn't get a move on and, lo and behold, he's in London.

Which apparently hasn't changed a bit in the last 200 years.

So I suppose this means we finally get to go to Earth, and perhaps even to England, under it's new National Trust rule, if the look of the trailer is to be believed.

Will we be charged ten credits to get in?