Getting ‘Whored’ In The First 17% Of Saints Row: The Third

When I saw Saints Row: The Third earlier this year, developer Volition showcased a spectacular bank heist from the game, a carnage-filled showdown with Steelport’s SWAT team. It was a bizarre, comedically ultraviolent shootout that played like a major, mid-game highlight.

Turns out that bloody cops and robbers confrontation was just Saints Row: The Third‘s tutorial mission.

I played Saints Row: The Third for hours last week at an event in Hollywood–you know, the one Lindsay Lohan’s teeth attended — making my way through 17 per cent of the November-due game. It was a small slice of the crime spree comedy and that bank heist was just the tip of the ridiculous Saints Row iceberg.

Saints Row: The Third starts with a Star Wars-style crawl, a quick, easily forgettable set up to the third game in Volition’s Grand Theft Auto-like. It then drops players into that over-the-top robbery, then into extensive player character customisation — I went with a foxy Saint with skin-tight golf pants and “bad girl boots”, conservatively keeping the “sex appeal” (read: breast size) meter at its D-cup default — and then into a set piece that easily trumped that bank job.

Without spoiling too much, playing as my customised lady Saint, I fought my way through and out of an aeroplane owned by the Syndicate, the international crime syndicate led by Belgian bad guy Phillipe Loren, then parachuted my way through an amusement park ride-like murder spree. My Saint plummeted toward the earth for a long, long time, gunning down parachuting gangsters in pursuit, dodging falling sports cars and rescuing my fellow Saint, Shaundi, from becoming a splatter.