I know I am a bit late to the party so I am gonna try to catch up real quick. I had played some of the Saints Row expansions but never a full retail release so this game was a first for me. Right off the bat, You can notice the similarities between Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto but at the same time, you can also see how different they are. Visually speaking, It's not as defined as a GTA. That is a given and I also noticed that bugs happen at a very similar rate to GTA. I've lagged a little bit, I have glitched through stuff and basic things like that. Nothing game breaking though and since I fully expect something along those lines from an open world game, I don't think it's a big deal.
There are a ton of upgrade and customization options to help your Saints Row experience along. Some of it is helpful but I noticed that most of them are not. There's a lot of filler upgrades that don't really suite players well IMO. And a big reason for it is that it doesn't take long to complete this game at all. I've played it for 9 hours and beat every story mission plus bought every property and crib. That also includes about 40-50% of the upgrades as well and as I said before, Most of them I didn't even need.
I found the Homie and Vehicle-related stuff was quite pointless. I never once called on a homie to help me during normal gameplay nor did I have any issues with vehicles either. I just stole whatever I could and it suited my purpose just fine. Same applies to the weapons as well. I think I only bought 2-3 weapons in the game, Maybe did 4-5 upgrades and that was that. You don't need to buy new weapons or upgrade the weapons you already have because the game is so easy to beat. You can run right through it with no problems at all.
The challenges or activities, on the other hand, are more of an annoyance if anything. They're just there for some quick cash and to help you take over neighbourhoods (something you can pay to do but it's more time-consuming). And they are not all that fun either. Sure, There's a wide variety of activities to do but they're boring to play through. Unless you are a completionist, You honestly have no need to play them, There simply is no need to play them. And that's where the flaw of Saints Row: The Third comes into play.
They didn't do enough to mix the story missions and the side activities. That lack of balance meant you could easily blow through one (the campaign) and ignore the other (the activities) and not miss a beat. You can just bang out one mission after another and ignore everything else and that is a big flaw for an open world game. Maybe they could have had missions on an unlocked basis where you had to take over a certain percentage of the city to unlock it. That would have tempted the player to explore more, to buy more upgrades and do more activities. Instead, We got a very one-sided experience that just wasn't fun. The campaign story was terrible and not even worth paying attention to. For a game that was supposed to be this comedic take on GTA, I didn't find it funny in the least bit and I found the characters to be mostly ignorable and not the least bit memorable.
Overall: 6/10
After finishing out the campaign in 9 hours, I decided to delete Saints Row: The Third from my hard drive. I experience no real fun playing it. It felt like I was just grinding through stuff and not truly experiencing it and that is a major flaw in the game.
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