This is a map of Steelport; it's the city in the game (Source: Internet).
Saints Row: The 3rd lets you wield purple dildo bats (and other things) as weapons. You have probably heard of purple dildo bats. That would be because of this game. There's also liberal use of the term "motherfucker"; and many beautiful, big-boobed women walk the streets wearing only thongs and bras and angel wings.
But these are not the only reasons why Saints Row: The Third is great and way better than Grand Theft Auto IV.
Remember the snap-to-cover system I hate? Well Saints Row doesn't have it; and (not surprisingly) it controls so much better than every game with a cover system. In SR I can just crouch, via pressing the dedicated crouch button. I can crouch behind cover, reducing my chances of being hit, and it's so elegant. It is such an advance over the snap-to-cover system of Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter, Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption, and GTA IV, that I want to end this sentence reminding you that the Playstation 2 GTAs (and every shooter before this console generation) did not have the evil snap-cover thing.
"Why then" you ask, "did the GTA devs go the snappy route?
I've got two theories -- one: Rockstar wanted to make their game to look more realistic in order to make their game look more realistic; and two: the masses believed they liked the snap-to-cover system.
I don't know which of these reasons was the real one, but lets roll with the too-realistic one, because it segways into my next point, which is: Saints Row's vehicles drive the way you wish vehicles in real life would drive: unrealistically. Saints Row's cars do not easily skid. Its autos take lots of damage before exploding. Vehicles don't flip over easily. BDSM gimps dragging carts, like horses, explode. And any tire can be armed with a spike. While GTA IV tries hard to make your car obey the boring laws of reality, Saints Row tries hard enough to break them.
Another thing Saints Row does better is difficulty curve. The main story missions follow the classic, gradually-increasing-in-difficulty one, with the optional side missions being labeled "easy," "medium" and "hard." GTA IV meanwhile follows the real-life difficulty curve; for a bit it will feel ridiculously easy, and then ROCK-EATINGLY HARD! WHY?!! And then easy again for a long time. And then HAAARD! FOR HOURS! And then incredibly easy for a mome-HAAARD!!
Another reason Saints Row is better is that it makes sense. Yes, despite having missions in which you have cars 'n trucks run over you so that you can bankrupt your health insurance company, Saints Row generally makes sense while GTA IV does not. Remember how GTA's player protagonist Niko Bellic was depicted as this thinking, morally complex man? He would say things that made you think: "Hmmm...maybe he's not a psycho mass murderer," and then you'd hijack a dozen cars and run over a thousand people. Well, Saints Row avoids this schizophrenic story-telling by making it quite clear that The Steelport Saints are a bunch of egocentric, people-killing yahoos who are only interested in money, whores, and their celebrity status as criminals. You learn that some of the Saints care about each other, yes, but regarding those outside their clique, as long as the whores and money and fame come their way, everything is right.
Not to say GTA IV is a bad game. Although it does rely on the snap-to-cover system, so it kind of is. No, seriousness, okay; GTA IV provides one of the great satires of American Capitalism, and it happened to come out right before the Recession began. (Not that I'm hinting that GTA IV was a possibly cause of the Recession. Though it was a record-breaking seller, and it wasn't short. Plus it relied on that cover system....)
GTA IV does have better radio than Saints Row.
Speaking of Saints Row, another way by which it's better is its smart phone. Both games give you virtual smart phones, but in Saints Row, calling someone actually gets useful stuff delivered to your location, such as gang members (from your gang), or a helicopter gunship, or a tank. In GTA IV, NPCs would often call you and ask if you'd like to drive them to some boring place and build virtual relationships with them. "Hey Nico! Want to go to the pub and make the player watch you drink something that they won't be able to taste?"
But, woefully, it is now time I should say some hateful things about Saints Row, starting with its better-than-GTA IV's smart phone. Its annoyance occurs when you call an ally for help and they're "busy." "Beep beep beep," It says. This is what we call, in humanland, a pointless "waste of your time"; And it's somehow realistic. I also don't like that some of the main story missions are exactly the same as some of the side missions. The game is at least an hour too long. Also, I don't like how lines get repeated during some battles, especially early in the game.
And that's it!
The game features something called "Whored Mode" for single and multiplayer. Basically it is what it sounds like, yet it's not nearly as fun as the main game.
Apparently there's also a coop, campaign mode. But I couldn't get it working, so don't take my word for it.
And now, onwards to the end of the Gears of War Healing and Cover System, Third Person Shooters Review (Part 2). Saints Row: The Third does use the auto-healing system, and it works. You know how, in Gears of War, you'll get hit, and then you'll just remain under cover and wait for your health to regenerate, and then you'll shoot at the enemy and then do all this a thousand more times until you've beaten the game? Well in Saints Row cover is fun, in part because it's hard to find. If you're taking too much damage, you'll end up running around the place in frantic excitement/fear; perhaps you'll hijack a passing car (perhaps with enemies in it!) just to stop the receiving of pain and restart the auto-healing. And none of these methods are guaranteed to work. The autohealing system, combined with the not-having-a-snap-to-cover system, well, works.
I like to think that one of the original causers for Halo's auto-healing was to make it so the XBOX player wouldn't die as much due to their bad FPS controls. I.e., with good FPS controls, health packs are funner. But in a GTA-style game, regenerating health makes sense. A level designer shouldn't have to figure out where to place health in a dynamic, city-sized, free world game, that largely has no levels.
You've probably noticed that I prefer this game to Grand Theft Auto IV. But that's not doing it justice. Saints Row: The Third is better than every Grand Theft Auto game. And the coolest thing is it was made by Volition, the creators of the classic space fighter sim Freespace 2. What makes this cool, other than seeing a relatively small developer being the best in two different genres, is knowing that finally they got paid. Freespace 2, as good as it was, sold something like twelve copies (I bought one! Me!). Saints Row, though, has sold something like six billion copies. That's almost six billion more than twelve! It makes me proud.
Verdict: It's one of the best games ever made, but has somethings preventing it from being palatable to everyone. Available for PS3, PC, and XBOX 360
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