Saint's Row 3 tries too hard to blow away Saint's Row 2, and it shows badly.
And boy do I feel let down.
First off, let's start with what SR3 tries to do. The entire game seems to be trying to outdo SR2. Every scene basically screams, "Hey remember that scene from the previous game? THIS ONE IS GONNA BLOW THAT OUT OF THE WATER!"
And that's the problem. It spends all it's time coming up with crazy scenes to do, and completely willing to stoop to immaturity to do so, but more on that in a little bit. In the first mission you'll participate in a bank robbery wearing your own gang's masks, shoot down helicopters, take on the SWAT teams on a bank vault in mid air, and jump out of an airplane, just to jump right back into it.
The problem is while doing all these things is pretty awesome, it has absolutely no lasting value, and apparently somebody forgot to actually make the overall game fun. The cars feel slightly better than SR2, but the customization is lessened, and there are far fewer cars. The city feels more variety, but it's small and there's nothing to do there.
Everything seems shallower, even right down to one of the hallmarks of Saint's Row-character customization. The actual body building is slightly lessened, but the real problem is the clothing. There is very little variety in the clothing available to you. In SR2 you could potentially create millions of people with the ability to put a hat on sideways or backwards and button up your shirt or not, and having over shirts and undershirts. All that is gone in 3, and it makes me sad.
The missions are all about flash, being cool while doing stuff. The game is completely unafraid to just get immature to be crazy-with sex-toy bats, magically flying bikes, and "hulk hands". And I don't really think I like it. SR2 had the craziness, but never really tried to be immature and had it's fair share of serious moments in it, making it more enjoyable overall.
Not only that, but your character is no longer the psychotic crazy murderer anymore, he (or her) has been toned down to be a simply anti-hero who ends up being the hero anyway, fighting people far more evil than him.
Another problem is the pacing. The game is so eager to show you all the awesome it can do, it forgets to put you in a sewer and make you slowly crawl out, so when you're on top it's all the more worthwhile. From the beginning of the game you'll have things like Reaper Drones and plenty of cash. Not only that, but the whole slowly wrestling the control from gangs thing is gone too, and you'll fine yourself fighting a boring military organization called STAG very quickly.
The enemies in the game like STAG are all generic, except for the few that aren't. There are brutes who only exist to annoy you, and zombies which force you to constantly do quick-time events. They aren't really a problem, as the game has a new kind of RPGish feature as a kind of answer to the whole pacing problem, and if you spend any time doing activities or just derping around in free roam you'll find yourself immune to all forms of damage before you've even done anything. Heli Assault is also back, but it's just as boring as before, simply aiming and firing missiles at countless cars gets old fast.
The activities are back, but more boring than ever. Some of the harder more luck based one have-not been removed. Insurance Fraud and Trail Blazing, the former being based too much on luck and the latter being just annoying, are back, along with Mayhem which is also luck-based. Although you can hardly call Mayhem an activity anymore, the only mayhem you'll be causing is destroying an incredible amount of fences.
The actually "fun" activities are nowhere to be, ones like fight club, Fuzz, and Septic Avenger. There are a few more new ones, like Tank Mayhem and this one sniper one, but the former is just a variant of old news, and the avenging one is required by the story so it can hardly be called an activity. There's also PG S.E.R.K., a Japanese parody-like show that has you running through an obstacle course shooting things to get paid, although they are short and there are only 6 of them, like all the activities now.
For multiplayer, the game has abandoned actual multiplayer and has 2 modes-CO-OP and whored mode. Co-Op is your standard free roam with 2 people, and you can do the missions together and the like. Whored Mode is yet another gears of war horde mode clone, only it's different in the fact that it's fun for all of two seconds before you get embarrassed for even seeing what it is.
Don't get me wrong, SR3 has it's moments. Moments like a truly awesome wrestling match with perfect music, commentary, and action.. But for every wrestling match, there's 20 long, boring things that are forced to do. Like the infuriating sex doll collectibles, which have somehow managed to turn a 64x64 minimap icon into a symbol more hated than a swastika. Or the countless boring missions which are simply escort variants with some of the dumbest AI around.
Not only that, the game looks very unimpressive and is short as hell, I finished the story in about 10 hours. After that there's nothing to do in the new city, nothing scripted happens, and it was likely held out because of the promise of a lot of DLC. Not only that, but it uses the online pass system, and doesn't even have dedicated servers for them. Plus it is quite buggy, likely just doing the "release now fix later" mentality that is so common with devs. That makes me automatically take off .5 points for being exactly what is wrong with the gaming industry today.
Overall, Saint's Row 3 is just unimpressive. It's got a few golden moments in it, and can be truly fun at times, but most of the time it's an infuriating, buggy, boring, short, immature and embarrassing mess.
Verdict: Forget it, get Saint's Row 2 instead.