Saints Row: The Third was a sacred moment in time where lunatics reimagined the animus of an open-world crime game. It enabled players to thunderously lead a prestigious gang of miscreants and also turn themselves into a toilet. Eight years later Saints Row: The Third's glut of Content is more difficult to digest, but its outrageous ambience is (mostly) still so sweet.
Grand Theft Auto IV was a gift to Saints Row. Rockstar’s debut on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 shifted Grand Theft Auto’s priorities away from the madcap open-world omnibus of San Andreas and toward a more Serious and Important direction with its narrative and content. Saints Row 2, while full of goofy jaunts, wasn’t technologically or inspirationally prepared to capitalize on the space Grand Theft Auto IV had left behind. Saints Row: The Third, first released at the end of 2011, was where Volition finally established Saints Row’s identity; a monstrous amount of open world “content” complimented and augmented by eccentric amounts of sex, violence, and cybercrime.
Saints Row: The Third has little respect for logic and no pretense of morality. The new city of Steelport ostensibly contains actual citizens and a functioning police force, but murdering any one of them has almost no consequence. It’s almost an exercise in solipsism where an infinite number of identical opposing-gang members and authority figures exist only to be destroyed by the player. This is the way videogames always are but Saints Row: The Third, rather than invent some kind of narrative justification for any of its logical fallacies, winked and nodded without explicitly breaking the fourth wall. Sure, you can take the polygon gun (you know, that gun that’s made of geometric shapes you earned while you were briefly digitized in a Tron knock-off) back into real life. And kill people with it. Why not?
Eight years after its debut, several moments from Saints Row: The Third are still referenced in the gaming lexicon. Most of these were tied to its smart application of its soundtrack. When Kanye West’s “Power” played as the saints parachuted into and destroyed everyone in a high rise penthouse, it was a perfect synchronization of self-aware song selection and player empowerment. As Sublime’s “What I got” played on the car radio, both the player-character and Pierce sang along to the full song during the drive. During Saints Row: The Third’s climatic finish, Bonnie Tyler’s “I Need a Hero” punctuated its most triumphant moment. Each of these sequences were perfect in empowering the player and appreciating its world.
Saints Row: The Third also took time to elevate ordinary challenges with outrageous context. You didn’t simply run out of the building to escape a BDSM club, you rescued its captives (in gimp suits) by having them pull you in a chariot. http://deckers.die, which isn’t a URL but literally the name of the mission, was an ordinary base assault, but its world-digitization made room for a text-based adventure, weird status effects, and giant monster fight. The opening of the game is a (kind of bad playing!) parachute gunfight, but the player falls out of a plane and then falls back in the plane then jumps out of the plane again. It’s all so deliciously stupid. In a time when games were all about using their expensive set-pieces to impress the player with grandeur, Saints Row: The Third just wanted to make a big goofy joke.
Even the time-wasting side missions that compose an open world’s odds and ends benefit from Saints Row: The Third’s madcap ethos. Taxi missions are portrayed as sex worker drop-off missions. Checkpoint races exist, but you’re on fire and encouraged to hit, rather than avoid, cars to boost your time. It’s not an “arena battle,” it’s “Professor Genki’s Super Ethical Reality Climax.” I don’t know what riding in cars with a live tigers was supposed to parody or riff on, but it fits right in. It feels like someone at Volition was assigned to take every basic action and make it ridiculous.
It’s impressive that Saints Row: The Third works without doing any of its “game” bits particularly well. The player is as slow as molasses and frequently marooned without a car. Gunplay is especially awful and cycling through weapons (which I can’t even tell the difference between) is tedious. Enemy difficulty is represented by how often they do spin moves after you hit them, turning fights into outrageous and annoying ballet sequences. While the context is funny, Sniper Missions, Tank Missions, Escort Missions, Territory Takeovers, Rocket Launcher Missions, and Generic Building Killing Sprees are composed of the same dated objectives established in Grand Theft Auto III. Saints Row: The Third used the familiar as a backbone and only took risks with its presentation.
Some less savory aspects make Saints Row: The Third feel like an unfortunate victim of time. In 2011 I wasn’t thinking about sex work as a valid profession and thought “Whored Mode,” Saints Row: The Third’s riff on Horde Mode, was a funny pun. The same goes for the game’s treatment of sex trafficking as a throwaway plot point. The retention of Hulk Hogan, now a public racist, as the voice of Angel was also a bummer. It is unreasonable to expect Saints Row: The Third to change, the game is the game, but it’s a clear and present reminder of how much social progress has been made in the near-decade since its release.
At the same time, some aspects of Saints Row: The Third still stand as wildly progressive. The character creator accounts for large and small bodies of either gender and doesn’t make any choice the butt of a joke. The player can also pick one of three male or three female voices for any type of character. In the present day I can’t think of a major studio game that allows players to create anyone who could identify as trans. Saints Row: The Third may be a joke, but it’s serious about creating visibility and representation for marginalized people.
It’s also important to consider the quality of life options Saints Row: The Third introduced in 2011. If you find that you’ve driven a car into a river, rather than waste time paddling back to shore, you have the option to instantly warp back. You get to call in an air strike as an option toward the middle of the game, joining other outlandish, overly-powerful abilities and vehicles. Player progression, eventually enabling skills like infinite ammo, also speaks to Saints Row: The Third’s mission of empowering the player by any means necessary. The other side of this equation are the hordes of irritating opponents to cut through, but, in its time, Saints Row: The Third was a step up for open-world comfort.
Saints Row: The Third’s trip to the Switch seems to have gone well. The physical size of the world feels large and the relatively underpowered hardware didn’t seem to have a hard time managing its operation. Saints Row: The Third played fine, and leagues better than the miserable experience Saints Row IV was on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. There was one instance, around the Stop All the Downloading mission, where the voice tracks in the cut-scenes dropped out. This continued for two more missions before I rebooted the game, which reset everything back to normal.
Playing Saints Row: The Third in 2019—engaging its open world, appreciating its classic moments, and deciding if the humor still hits—was a mixture of ups and downs. I 100%’d the game on normal years ago on PlayStation 3. This time I set it to easy and leisurely made my way through the core missions and ignored everything on the side. I was basically invincible and it was totally fine. Steelport still lacks a sense of place and the combat felt, at best, perfunctory, but I had a good time for the dozen hours it took to reach the credits. Saints Row: The Third still works, and, like everything else, they should put it on Switch. Now it is.
Saints Row: The Third was a sacred moment in time where lunatics reimagined the animus of an open-world crime game. It enabled players to thunderously lead a prestigious gang of miscreants and also turn themselves into a toilet. Eight years later Saints Row: The Third’s glut of Content is more difficult to digest, but its outrageous ambience is (mostly) still so sweet.
