Saints Row: The Third Hands-On Preview
It wouldn't be a Saints Row-themed PR event without a legitimate, star-studded Hollywood party, would it? While I got to attend this little event and see quite a few notable people, the event earlier that day was much more intriguing for a shut-in like me. We got the chance to play Saints Row: The Third for over five hours in any way we wanted, through all of the included modes. Even now, nearly a week after the event concluded, my mind is still filled with the hilarity and fun that Saints Row 3 delivers. If you're looking for a damn fun game this fall, there are a lot of games with a "3" at the end you can choose from, but my dark horse candidate is definitely this twisted, outrageous creation from developer Volition and publisher THQ.
The campaign starts off with the Saints robbing a bank and quickly finding out that the place is actually owned by a large crime syndicate that has moved into Steelport. Cue a very intense firefight on the ground and in the air, and Player - the generic name given to the protagonist in this series - winds up getting sent to the hospital (yep, again) after a particularly rough beating, and that's where character creation begins as you reconstruct a face and body. As in past games, Saints Row 3 gives players a massive amount of options from crazy makeup and facial features down to ridiculous body types and silly voices (including a surprisingly funny zombie voice). Later, you start to buy and customize your outfits and can run to the tattoo shop and get inked up from head to toe, as well.
Player's not going to take this trespass into Steelport lightly, though, so he/she/it takes the rest of the gang and starts off a war across the city that involves some very colorful characters as both friends and enemies. Your missions will start out consisting of some pretty basic GTA-feeling errands where you drive to a location and shoot enemies in a small building before seeing a "mission complete" screen, but very shortly after that things get completely insane. This is where Volition's creativity really shines, as the missions have you doing some of the silliest of things, but they're still engaging and challenging. From chariots being pulled by dudes in gimp suits to stumbling around drugged and naked (complete with censor pixellation) while trying to use an assault rifle, you'll find yourself laughing at both the scripted and unscripted situations you get yourself into. The supporting cast can be at times brooding, other times business-like, and other times just fun-loving, but they all love violence. My favorite character in all of this was Zimos, the pimp with the auto-tuned voice who almost always had a solid one-liner for every silly situation.
The biggest, most notable, and I'm sure most difficult-to-implement feature to implement in Saints Row 3 has got to be the full online or system-link capable cooperative mode for two players, which works throughout the whole game, including the entire campaign. (Split screen is not supported, but it's important to point out that each player can be at opposite sides of the game's new city of Steelport at any time, and from a technical viewpoint, that kind of freedom would be impossible in split-screen mode.) My time spent with the game was done entirely in cooperative mode with fellow journalist Brandon Hofer from Totally Gaming Network, and we had a blast. Jumping into cooperative missions together was very easy from the game's built-in cell phone interface, where I could use level-up points to purchase upgrades for my character (increased health, dual-wield ability, new moves, and dozens of other useful perks), check out available missions, see the map, and create my own music playlist with cherry-picked tracks taken from the game's selection of radio stations.
From the smartphone, it was trivial to start up a mission, have the other player press A to accept, and immediately have both players set on a GPS path towards the mission. We could take our own routes there or just get in the same car, taking turns on who drives and who rides shotgun. Passengers get to properly aim their weapons out of the windows when doing drive-bys, so we got into a lot of unnecessary trouble shooting at cops and other gangs on the way to some missions. If someone was behind in getting to the mission start spot, the game simply moved them to where they needed to be to start the mission. It couldn't be any easier or more accessible to play online (or on a LAN) and have fun together, and if we wanted to split up to different sides of the city, the game still runs at a solid 30fps at pretty much all times.
Steelport gives Volition a fresh perspective on applying the attitude of the Third Street Saints to the game - along with the many new factions and gangs roaming the streets - yet the city still maintains that same feel of Stillwater where the residents have no idea what's about to hit them. It's new, but it's familiar, and it's much more vertical, now too. And that's a good thing, because you'll be flying higher than ever in this new sequel, what with the choppers, planes, and an amazingly powerful VTOL aircraft that eventually becomes available near the end-game. You can visit one of your cribs - conveniently placed on the top floor of a skyscraper - and hop off, although it helps if you have a parachute equipped so that you can survive the fall, and there is even a basejumping activity!
Before going into this Hollywood event to see the game, I had planned on just spending most of my time goofing around, especially since that seemed somehow to be more Saints Row than any other playstyle. But once we got into the game, Brandon and I got hooked on its hilariously fun story missions. We made it farther into the story than most of the journalists at the event, and we had no regrets since so many of the missions actually started us off on side activities (classics like Insurance Fraud, Mayhem, or Trailblazing, along with new ones as well) and then gave us the choice to complete harder versions of those activities or get back to the story missions if we wanted. We'd run around the city separately, buy up properties to gain a perpetual income stream, and explore areas of the city here and there in a range of vehicles, but each time we did that, we kept coming back to the missions after a few minutes because they were so fun.
As you can probably expect, most of the missions revolve around driving and combat, with lots of turret-mounted minigun or infinite-rocket-firing sessions, hilariously fun melee fights, and standard third person shooter gameplay mixed in with it all. There was even a good chunk of tactics involved, as many of the indoor areas were more open with loopback paths and other level design ideas that meant that no two playthroughs of a given mission were alike. Enemies might be coming in from all sides, but if you can find a good vantage point or just a really tight choke point, you can gun down enemy thugs all day. Or you can just bash them with your fists, as Saints Row 3 has a full range of hugely entertaining melee attacks, about half of which target the enemy's crotch. (And yes, that massive purple dildo you might have seen being used to batter enemies in promotional videos is just as fun as you might imagine, if not more.)
What I think is helping Volition and THQ with this game right now is the fact that there hasn't been another Grand Theft Auto game since the release of Saints Row 2 a few years back; now, we can safely compare this game to its own predecessor instead of that more serious game by those other guys. Saints Row: The Third combines a huge variety of gameplay ideas with a ton of jokes, and none of the goofy gimmicks I saw ever outstayed their welcome; right around the time I started to get sick of them, the game moved me on to something else. I can't say that this latest Saints Row is my most anticipated game of the still-coming fall lineup, but after several hours of the game, it's move up quite a few notches for me. SR3 is set for release on PC, PS3, and 360 on November 15th.
