Saints Row The Third review
“Screw you Grand Theft Auto, with your overwrought attempts at moralising. You make the protagonist a murderous psychopath, but you want players to empathise with him? You force them to sit through hours of tedious sub-soap opera character development, to watch this immoral wreck of a man angst over his friends and family, fall in love and spend time indulging in humdrum activities, all in some misguided attempt to build a connection with him, to have players sympathise with his need to massacre thousands upon thousands of people?
Sod that. I’ll show you storytelling. This is a game about acts of mindless violence, so of course I’ll portray the main character as a murderous lunatic. Who would want to play that sort of a character you ask? The same sort of people who played and loved the early Grand Theft Autos of course! Players, just as with readers, moviegoers and every other consumer of narrative fiction, are perfectly happy with nihilistic, immoral antagonists, just so long as the fiction they belong in is clearly demarcated as parody. I mean, they’ve had a few thousand years of the genre to get used to it, so I think people can handle it. Can you imagine a narrative form better suited to the ultra-nihilistic concept that is the sandbox crime genre? No, neither can I.
So I’ll give you parody. I’ll give you a story that never takes itself seriously, a story willing to go anywhere and everywhere. I’ll show you how to take the freedom offered by a sandbox crime game and improve it tenfold through heavy dashes of the absurd. I’ll show you how to use and abuse memes, stereotypes and tropes from a massive variety of sources, creating an irreverent, hilarious game which is as clever as it is wilfully stupid. And I’ll give you, despite all the above, a lesson in storytelling. Because despite the irreverence, despite the absurdity, I still know how to tell a story, to keep a player interested in the vestigial narrative driving things, explaining every daft event, every insane plot twist and keeping them guessing all the way through. I’ll even give them choices – choices which impact the story and the options available to the player, but which never moralise. Freedom with consequence, but without judgement.
And I’ll match all of that to my gameplay. I’ll allow my players to become as overpowered as they wish, to tailor the game to their preferences. They want super-powered weapons and vehicles? Save up some money and they can have whatever they like. They want to buy up and control the city, filling their coffers with the gains and the streets with their gang members. Or maybe they’d prefer to invest in their gang, creating a super-tough army to cover their back? Their choice. Hell, if they want to become invincible, all they need is enough money. And what if they don’t care about any of this? They don’t have to. Everything is permitted, nothing is required.
I’ll offer my players numerous ways to earn money and respect, but won’t require it to push the plot forwards. They can drive around in a tank, blowing things up for money; they can take part in a murderous game show; they can throw themselves in front of vehicles for the insurance. They can take on assassination missions, they can hunt down drug stashes and they can wipe out opposing gang operations. They can car surf or BASE jump or perform stunts. They can choose from a huge variety of activities to earn them money and respect for upgrades. Or they can ignore all of the above and just focus on completing the story.
And then there are the vehicles. First things first: these are easy to control. No heavy, ‘realistic’ physics here: the bigger, heavier cars are sluggish of course, but anything speedy has the handling to match, allowing for easy, dramatic cornering and power slides for absurdly high-speed chases without a loss of control. And then there’s the range of options open to the player. Not only do I offer a wide range of fully upgradeable cars and bikes, I allow the player to get their hands on a variety of military hardware, ranging from APCs and attack helicopters, to tanks and futuristic VTOL aircraft. All of which can be stored by the player in their garages and helipads, allowing for easy access whenever they’re required.
I do all this and I am the better for it. I am an exuberant, daft, hilarious and enthralling game, never subjecting my players to a dull moment. Perhaps I could do with being a little less restrictive in certain missions, allowing players to call upon whatever vehicles and gang members they desire no matter the situation, but these occasions are few and far between. And perhaps I should not have limited some of the wilder items in the game to those who pre-ordered me. And I must admit that I push the aging consoles that I appear on a little far, meaning that at moments they can struggle to keep up.
But for all that, I remain a brilliant game. I don’t mix my messages, I don’t take myself too seriously: I just show the player a good time and they thank me for it. I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a far truer example of the sandbox crime genre than you and a far better game than you. So screw you, Grand Theft Auto and everything you have become – I am the true successor to your crown and deserve to be recognised as such”.
And you know what? Saints Row: The Third is right.
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ilpostino
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https://incomedisposed.wordpress.com/ Yann Best
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http://www.facebook.com/griffis007 Scott Griffiths
