Hello People. I know I haven't blogged in a very long time, but I wanted ot place my thoughts out there about Saints Row the Third. I know it's kind of late to be talking about a game that his been out for nearly four months now, but I still want to explain some of the things I liked and disliked about the game.
First let's talk about the storyline. Most games don't have very good storylines, mainly because the developers spend so much time and money on the gameplay and graphics that they come up with a storyline quicker than some other developers do. I personally don't have a problem with underwhelming storylines in games, but with SR3, the gameplay surrounds it. Basically your character is robbing a bank with his gang in Stillwater, seeming like no big deal, until this larger group called the Syndicate takes you on an airplane ride and tries to force your gang to share profits with this organization. Your character says no and jumps out of the plane landing into a new city called Steelport. Steelport is about the same size as Stillwater, but it seems like the structure of the story missions would cause you to end up doing something similar to Saints Row 2; you would be taking out each gang and then a boss in order to take over their territory. Unfortunately, the story missions are so disconjucted that this is unable to happen, and as a result the game suffers as a whole.
What I mean by that is that the gangs you would be taking out all feed into the leader of the Syndicate, who dies a few missions in. This sort of ruins the whole structure of the game in terms of its story. Instead of taking out a boss for each gang, one of the gangs doesn't even have a leader. How would that work? And you take out one of the bosses before you even finish taking out that gang. It all feels disconnected. Then, without giving away any spoilers, another group comes in and starts trying to take out your gang, which has nothing to do with the main portion of the story. It's hard to know sometimes whether the members of Volition were talking to each other while creating this game. Anyway, the storyline and story missions are not very good in summary.
In terms of actual gameplay, the controls are changed on the PS3, which is a huge bummer for fans of this console version, because SR2's controls worked really well. You can't change them at all to fit your liking, which stinks, because it would have been nice to have the choice of whether I wanted R1 and L1 as my shoot and aim buttons or not. Also, the city feels very empty, and isn't as nearly random and chaotic as SR2. This is mainly because people don't walk around in the city. This makes messing around and trying to find entertainment other than some of the boring sidequests not as fun as it should be. Speaking of the side missions, I like some of them, like the Professor Ginki missions, but even those after the first time are boring. Volition seemed to have taken the worst side missions and put them into SR3, instead of taking the most interesting one's such as fight club, and bringing that with some sort of new twist. Also the customization, in some parts, is pretty new and exciting, but other parts limit you even more than SR2, which is a shame because every other reviewer for this game said that SR3 was trying to give you more. Quite honestly it doesn't seem that way to me. Again, everything looks better, at a cost of bad pop-in and the empty city. It seems like Volition was trying to fill the game with as much random stuff as they could, but they forgot to make sure the player didn't get bored.
Whenever I come back to this game, I fall asleep, because there's literally not much to do once you beat the silly story missions. While they are still addicting, it would have been nice to bring in some chaos that SR2 seemed to have. For example, in SR2 I could decide to shoot an old man driving his little car, and then randomly, a young woman runs me over while I'm trying to highjack the old man's car. Or I would walk by a set of cheerleaders at Stillwater University, and blow them up with a rocket launcher, then turn around to find a random dude streaking. That's the game I would have like to see being continued, rather than the goal of an "over-the-top" game. Sorry Volition, but SR2 seemed to be more over-the-top than SR2.
Remember, these are only my opinions. You can disagree with what I think, but please do it in a respectful manner. Calling me a moron shows that you are immature and don't like to admit to disagreement. Thank you for reading and I will eventually post my review of Battlefield 3, once the next patch comes out, and I will compare the game patched to it's original launch version. Have a nice day.
