Saints Row: The Third isn’t for everyone. After all, this anarchic Grand Theft Auto-alike has been heavily marketed as prurient, violent and immature and if you’re buying in, there’s an assumption that you’re down with that. The question here is more of taste. It can’t match the polish or borrowed gravitas of its closest competitor’s composite personality of film references. But nor does it really want to. Saints Row: The Third is a celebration of personal agency and if you’re after a game that doesn’t lead you by the hand like you’re watching a 40-hour movie, then you’re going to dig on it in a big way.
Within the Grand Theft Auto framework of being a bad person in a big city, you can pretty much do anything you want here, be rewarded for it, and empowered to take it to ridiculous extremes.
Want to do run-of-the-mill car theft game things like run people over or shoot it out with cops? Go for it. Will this fighter jet, orbital airstrikes and novelty oversized sex toy baseball bat help? Want to dress up your character and make them your own? How about a ludicrously granular character editor that fully encourages making your protagonist a freak, a world that rewards dressing the part or going naked, and a still-respectful tone when your in-game underlings talk to you? Want to suck passing pedestrians up in a giant cat-themed vacuum cleaner and shoot them out across the city as Joe Esposito’s ‘You’re the Best Around’ from The Karate Kid plays in the background. You got it.
Saints Row: The Third isn’t perfect — the main story, though well written and incessantly creative, doesn’t sneak in the emotional heft of predecessor Saints Row 2, and the occasional grating celebrity cameo or zombie section betray brief falters in confidence, but compared to the drudgery most high-profile games have become, this right here is wonderfully repugnant and remarkably alive.
Saints Row: The Third is a crude yet loving celebration of what video games are inherently good at.
