[REVIEW] Saints Row: The Third

Here is my review of SAINTS ROW: THE THIRD

Scroll down for tl;dr

What makes a game great? The experience does. You need to forget your playing a game and simply just feel you are interacting with a world and that nothing else matters at the moment but what you are doing within that world. Saints Row: The Third strives to fix a lot of things wrong with the genre/series, but fails to deliver on most fronts.

Graphics
Going from SR2 to The Third was an impressive change. This game looks gorgeous maxed out on the PC @ Direct X 11. I have zero complaints here, and did not experience any graphical glitches what-so-ever. The game looks stunning and performs beautifully, and is EXTREMELY optimized. It ran flawlessly on my wife's laptop maxed out as well.

Gameplay
This is where they improved on everything, minus the mission structure (more on that in a bit). Gun-play is really smooth on the PC, and is pin-point accurate... I don't think I have *EVER* had this much fun shooting in an open-world game and not complained about the shooting. I did have a few shots that should have registered, but the hit detection overall was great.

Driving was the next big overhaul. Some people have said it is extremely sloppy, and Oxide in our X360 review said it was crap. Well, on PC I had an extremely different look at the driving. To cut to the chase, it felt great. Drifting, driving, and flying air-crafts worked flawlessly. The only complaint I have in this category is that I did not feel there was a huge difference between vehicles. I felt there were slow cars, and fast cars... and that is it. The car customization was OK, but it wasn't anything to gawk at.

Character customization is great, but I feel they could do a ton more work on their outfit customization. While it is pretty good the way it is, they could definitely let you make custom symbols and put more clothes in.

Story & Multiplayer
Fucking fail. That's pretty much all I have to say here. SR2 let you choose which gangs to take down. It was pretty great to say, I wanna go do this and not have a linear game experience. SR: The Third throws this out the window and goes MAIN STREAM by doing a completely linear game where your decisions, save one, mean nothing. The biggest problem I have with this section of the game? Welp. Don't click this if you don't know but wow.

Spoiler:

. How could they even do that? Dumb decision and thats all I have to say about that. I think they were purposely trying to piss in Saints Row fan's mouths by pulling that shit. And you know what... if it would've happened and been you know... better written, it might have been ok. Everyone kind of shrugs off this event like it doesn't even matter. There is almost zero remorse, and while this is a huge event, and the game should've been more about vengeance for what happened, they completely disregard it even happens save a cutscene midway through the game. Seriously? Fuck that.

Missions are linear, you get a choice sometimes between up to 4 missions to do, but you won't really "progress" until you do them all and then do a boss. Repeat 35+ missions later and credits roll. The endings suck, hands down. The ending song is absolutely hilarious, but thats it.

Co-Op worked flawlessly via STEAM and I had no problems with the way it worked. I'm glad they ditched gamespy and went this route... very smooth.

Closing
I was fucking PUMPED for this game. Great advertising hyped me up immensely... They did a great job with that. This game failed on all fronts for me. Pirate this game or rent it for a console, and thats all I got to say. Saints Row 4? You could've been an instant buy for me, but now I think I will be more cautious or perhaps not even look in the Row's direction again.

Final Score
6/10 "Just OK"

- Z

The graphics were a huge improvement.
I could even tell that when playing on the 360, but it was just a major let down on all fronts as you have said.
The game gets a lot of glitches at times, too.
Cars will be absorbed into the environment, notoriety becomes ridiculous when attempting to steal cars, and the AI is completely oblivious to almost everything.