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Saints Row: The Third

When it comes to stupid fun, Saints Row: The Third has no equal this year. 

You may have scaled giant mountains and slain fire breathing dragons in Skyrim, you may have gone toe-to-toe with some of DC's biggest villains in Arkham City, and you may have fought modern day wars with cutting edge technology, online and offline. 

But I can personally guarantee, unless your life is far more interesting than mine, that you have not beaten a policeman to death with a giant purple sex toy, escaped from gangsters riding carriages pulled by saddled men on your own personal man-horse, or murdered hordes of prostitute assassins alongside a pimp only capable of speaking in autotune. 

This is pretty much as sane as the game gets. In between bursts of bizarre obscenity and crime game stereotypes, there are gloriously mental moments which had me staring open-mouthed at the screen in genuine what-the-fuckery. In fact, it wouldn't be over the top at all to say that the first, say, half hour of the game has more balls per second (Henceforth referred to as BPS) than any action movie I've watched in the past two years. There is no downtime in Saints Row, it takes the idea of serious sandboxes and then crams it full of toys, explosions, car chases, zombies, Tron levels, and bizarre sexual references.

The game rockets from one activity to the next, and many of these will be familiar to those who have followed the Saints Row series - you can merrily return to haphazardly chucking yourself in front of cars to make money in Insurance Fraud, or hanging off of buildings and sniping cyberpunk criminals just because you feel like it. This is where Saint's Row's strengths lie, glorious, mindless, violent stupid fun, a brilliant respite from the drama-heavy games of late. It's not for everyone, and I'm certain there'll be people who play it once and hate it. 

But for those who don't, you'll have hours upon hours of psychotic grin inducing gameplay ahead, especially if you have the preorder bonuses. This includes a mind controlling octopus gun, a gameshow costume topped with a Deadmau5 style cat head, and a truck mounted with a man-firing cannon that lets you fire yourself and countless others clean across the skyline. If you read that sentence and thought "Hell yeah", then Saints Row is definitely for you.

-SZ