Recent reviews by ContinedDerivation

The time that a major gaming franchise said, "the hell with it" and just went completely off the rails. While this still has the more serious elements of the first two Saints Row games, SR3 amps up the goofy Grand Theft Auto-style satire to well beyond Earth-shatteringly loud. It"s about as blunt as a Norwegian streamer being blasted with multiple copies of a very loud Eastern European advertisement for ice cream.

I pretty much love everything in this game - in my weird metric, I"d consider it a perfect game due to how I find something satisfying in EVERYTHING the game offers, from its writing to its twists to even the DLC mission packs. But I know to some, they won"t take a lot of satisfaction out of the serious ending being largely ignored only to be referenced in SR4"s Enter the Dominatrix DLC pack. And I know a lot of people largely prefer SR4 because of its wide range of gameplay styles - and I agree. SR4 is a better game than SR3. But SR3 is an important game in the mass-adoption of the art game. It told people not to expect super-serious Gears of War-style narratives from games - it took the air out of the big console art games before they became a thing. By doing the simple thing of not taking itself seriously while being a blast to play - and giving you a serious ending that requires you to be a vindictive revenge-obsessed player - you probably wouldn"t get the public buying into games like Undertale or the Fullbright Co. walking simulators. That doesn"t necessarily mean that those games wouldn"t be made - their inspirations run entirely independent of SR3, with Undertale"s being the MOTHER series and the Fullbright Co. taking cues from early 3D DOS games and the works of Cyan Worlds, plus RealMYST - but it means that they wouldn"t be so wildly successful. It wasn"t feminists who made Gone Home a viable game in this marketplace. It was a joke-filled gang-simulator sandbox RPG that told everybody but some people that games could be anything and say anything because they"re not expected to be movies.

But about SR3? Gameplay is smooth, the story is funny, the DLC mission packs are fun to fool around in, the character customization options are a blast to go through (plus the various voice actors voicing the Boss add some variety to the self-insert nameless player character), the driving is silky smooth, the range of weaponry is absolutely astounding (including effective joke weapons), and the idea of just having a gang that will come to your rescue and help you fight bosses is really effective and adds to the incentive of completing territory acquisition missions. I adore the film industry satire of Gangstas in Space, the callbacks to SR2"s darkest moments with The Trouble with Clones, and the overall anarchic battle royale arena fun of Genkibowl VII. This game is a lot more fun than you remember it being.