It’s getting late, there’s a full day of E3 tomorrow, but here are my thoughts on the demonstration of Saint’s Row 3. I might get crude, but it’s a crude game so suck it up. I entered a small theater where THQ presented to a small audience Saint’s Row: The Third. Here are my thoughts:
1. Calling it Saint’s Row: The Third is dumb. What kind of pretentious crap is that? If they called it Saint’s Row 3, I would know it was the third one by the number. Now I’ve got to type “The Third” every time I write about it. Screw it. I’m not doing that anymore. It’s Saint’s Row 3.
2. There’s over the top…and then there’s whatever Saint’s Row 3 is. I love the Saint’s Row games. They’ve both been over the top as well, and I loved every pre-pubescent humor laden second of it. SR3 goes over the top and then keeps on going. The trailer opened with just randomly attacking pedestrians, some of those attacks were followed by posing right after. There are now weapons like the ApocoFists, which are like giant hulk hands which with one hit causes people to explode.
3. People getting hit in the nuts is funny. America’s Funniest Home Videos has proven that axiom time after time. After seeing a lot of nutshots just within the space of the trailer, it wasn’t as funny anymore. A whole game of that would get annoying.
4. The Saints are now in a city where they are celebrities. Considering the amount of NPCs I’ve taken out, that’s kind of messed up. They showed a mission where you get interupted during the mission to sign an autograph.
5. Driving looks a lot better and more in line with an actual arcade style driving game instead of the loose feeling of the previous games. I was told this had been completely revamped.
6. New weapons include things like the aforementioned ApocoFists, but there is also an impractical looking giant purple dildo sword, the ability to call in airstrikes (really), and we were promised many more. I’m not sure why there’s a giant purple dildo sword. It looks like something that would be funny for like a minute and then be pointless. I hope airstrikes are limited as they seem to be powerful enough to just make the game a piece of cake.
7. We were shown a mission and it looked much more cinematic than the prior games. There were cut scenes in between objectives and everything just had a more dynamic feel to it than other Saint’s Row missions.
8. This particular mission showed far more character development than we are used to seeing in a Saint’s Row title. Characters chatted during the missions and it gave a much better sense of who these side characters were instead of just random sociopaths that you hang out with between missions.
9. There are even more side missions than in the previous two games. We were showed a tank one that looked fun, even if it was another “Destroy Everything” type diversion. There was an armed response right away, and it reminded me of playing the old GTA games, turning on the tank code and just going crazy, only as an actual supported mode in this game.
10. Seriously, I think this game is actually too over the top. I don’t mind over the top violence, I love it even in both movies, games and so on, but this is to the point where it becomes camp. When they give a demo and people are excited for attacking random pedestrians, nut punches, and beating up homeless people with dildos, well I start to wonder is they just asked a bunch of thirteen year old boys about what they would think would be fun to do in a game and then only used the most asshole-ish responses. I love Saint’s Row 1 and 2 and I’m going to buy this one day one as well, so I guess that maybe that makes me one of those assholes.
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