Saints Row 3 is a sandbox full of fun, hilarious set pieces, witty character dialogue, and little coherent storyline.

User Rating: 7.5 | Saints Row: The Third PC
Saints Row 3 is a glorious sandbox full of riotous fun, hilarious and detailed set pieces, witty character dialogue, and very little in the way of coherent storyline.

The open world sandbox genre has only a few real stalwarts in it. The cost to development and design a sprawling world that has enough entertaining tasks and diversions in it to keep gamers interested is wildly prohibitive. Recently we have seen the worlds of Red Dead Redemption, LA Noire, GTAIV and GTAV, Skyrim and Saints Row. Between them, these games have cost in excess of $1 Billion dollars to develop and market, consuming decades of man hours to create. They all take different routes, with narrative heavy games like LA Noire and Red Dead Redemption counterpointed by the much less linear progression of titles like Skyrim.

Saints Row is the epitome of "open". While some games control the story tightly, allowing the player the option to ride off the beaten path and enjoy emergent gameplay elements – Saints Row 3 actively encourages gamers to generate as much chaos as possible in order to enjoy themselves and advance the overall game. Thinking back to the original GTA games, it was possible to move the story along by completing missions or simply lining up a stack of cars and blowing them up to get score multipliers (that would often result in cash bonuses of several million dollars). Saints Row 3 doesn't quite have the same level of ridiculousness, but within the confines of the city it offers a massive opportunity to engage in some truly interesting and memorable events.

These events include Insurance Fraud, where gamers are challenged to throw themselves into oncoming traffic to generate injuries and cash payouts. Early on in the game you gain access to a satellite guided missile weapon that allows you to create fiery death from above. You can attire your character in little more than jiggle-enhanced digital censorship blocks, and run around the streets performing high risk wrestling moves. Car surfing whilst naked is certainly an interesting way to spend 5 minutes, and you can definitely see the effort expanded on creating realistic censor block jiggles. There is a reality TV game which invites you to gun down people dressed in mascot suits, while hitting targets to gain points (avoiding the endangered Panda targets), again resulting in cash rewards. Mixed with all of this are car races, battling other gangs for territory, customizing your cars, fashion, hair and tattoos, and the general mayhem that results from head-butting a police officer and letting the chaos happen.

As a sandbox, Saints Row 3 achieves very well. There is enough fun and interesting activity to keep your busy for countless hours. As a story based Action Adventure game, unfortunately it falls far short of its peers.

The story takes an immediate swan dive into the absurd, casting the Saints as less of a gang and more of a media empire, spanning soft drinks, clothing, music and television. With an upcoming movie, the Saints take the chance to give one of the stars some "on job" training by robbing a bank. When it all goes terribly awry, they end up in the clutches of a rival gang leader, necessitating a daring escape from an airborne plane, a parachute battle that travels through the air and the front window of the plane, and ends with the apparent death of a lead character and the crew stranded in a hostile city, with no money and little support.

From here, the Saints are forced to rebuild their influence, challenge the 3 rival gangs in town, and eventually come into conflict with military based anti-crime and terrorism forces. The story feels forced and pointless, with little character development or attachment, and no sense of achievement when progressing. It is not helped by the lackluster difficulty, which is set far too easy even on higher levels. The saving grace comes from the dialogue between the lead characters, and the bigger set pieces that offer up the chance to experiment with how you tackle them.

The first 20 minutes of the game are fantastic, but it trends steadily downhill into boredom from there, and eventually the chaos and mayhem of roaming the streets, armed and dangerous, becomes the only truly interesting part of the game.

Graphically, Saints Row 3 is well done. Lots of bright colours hide some of the less detailed textures, but everything is designed in a very crisp and clean way. The contrasts between different city areas (suburban, urban, and industrial) are all done well, and the cars/trucks/planes and other transportation that cruises the streets are all modeled excellently. Character models are highly detailed, offering a vast array of customizations to every aspect of their appearance; from weight, to hair, to endowments, all can be pulled, pinched or tweaked to get the exact look you are after. Frame rate is generally good, as is draw distance. There is occasional pop-in and slow downs, which is usually expected, but nothing that truly detracts from the experience.

Sound design is high quality, with the dialogue and voices of nearly all the characters being one of the major stand outs. The verbal parry and thrust leans towards the witty and sarcastic, and the delivery of the lines works very well within the context. There are a few bum notes; one character speaks everything through an auto tune which I personally found annoying after a few minutes, and one particular gang leader managed to hit the disaffected computer nerd impression so well, I felt like strangling him. However, when getting this frustrations out, the weapons, explosions, and squealing of engines and tires all sound fantastic. While the machine gun and pistol noises lack a little punch, the shotgun sounds great and some of the more eclectic weapons (one in particular lets you launch mind controlling octopi at people) have a unique signature to them.

From a mechanic standpoint, Saints Row offers nothing new. The expanded melee moves that you can utilize when running through the city look excellent with an updated camera system that gives a little more cinema style to them, and the satellite view for the missile launcher is a very nice touch, but for those who have played a few open world games it will be very much pick up and play.

In the end, Saints Row 3 offers a lot of chances to express your pent up frustrations on the somewhat unsuspecting populace, but stumbles when trying to tell a coherent story that makes you care about the characters. The developers have said about this release that they have intended to 'out GTA' Rockstars classic series, and in a way they have. With GTAIV and GTAV moving towards more story driven content, Saints Row has moved backwards to the original top-down GTA games with their hectic, fast paced, highly insane chaos styling. It certainly does it better than the old 2d top down games from 1998, but unfortunately that's no longer a high bar to jump.

Saints Row 3 is great for a laugh, and you'll probably put in 20 or so hours covering off the story and getting your fill of pile driving unsuspecting grannies. Another 10 or so hours could be put into the online multiplayer, which offers a few twists on the usual modes. It is definite value for the money, and excellent for what it does well – but Saints Row 3 doesn't hit the high notes required to become a classic addition to the genre.