Saints Row: The Third

Saints Row: The Third is an open-world adventure game where players lead their gang to invade a brand-new metropolis. You can drive various vehicles and even tanks through the streets, engage in fierce firefights with gangs who dominate the underworld, complete 47 missions, and ultimately eliminate them to unify the city's dark side. The game offers players a rich selection of weapons and vehicles, allowing you to switch flexibly against different enemies and enjoy the thrill of defeating them. Players can customize the screen layout and controller controls to create a more comfortable gaming environment.

Gameplay:

Saints Row: The Third is an action-adventure game played from the third-person perspective in an open world, such that players explore an unrestricted environment. Similar to the premise of the previous Saints Row games, the player's goal is to lead the Third Street Saints gang to overtake its rival gangs in a city-wide turf war. While the protagonist is the same, the game introduces a new setting, the city of Steelport, with its own three gangs: the Morningstar, Luchadores, and Deckers, together known as the Syndicate. To further complicate matters, the government's Special Tactical Anti-Gang unit (STAG) is summoned to quell both organizations. Saints Row: The Third is the first in the series to intertwine the narratives of its three-gang structures, and presents the player with story-altering decisions.

The player shooting as a vehicle explodes; ambient challenge progress is shown on the right.The series has been considered a clone of Grand Theft Auto that later positioned itself as more "gleefully silly" in comparison. In combat, players select weapons from a weapon selection wheel, including pistols, submachine guns, shotguns, and rocket launchers alongside special weapons such as UAV drones and a fart-in-a-jar stun grenade. Player melee attacks include running attacks such as DDTs and a purple dildo bat. Players may use vehicles to navigate the city, including a hover jet (known as the F-69 VTOL) and a pixelated retrogame tank that are unlocked through story missions. Once special vehicles are unlocked, they are in unlimited supply and can be delivered directly to the player-character's location. Player actions are intensified with what Volition calls the "awesome button", where for example the player will divekick through the windshield into the driver's seat of a car. The main story campaign missions can be played alone, or cooperatively either online or via System Link offline. Some elements are added to the campaign for the second player. There is no competitive multiplayer, but a "wave-based survival mode" called Whored Mode supports up to two players.

Features:

Taking the City Back District by District: The main campaign works through Steelport in chunks, letting the Saints push their influence outward one district at a time. Each new area opens up its own problems, shortcuts, and opportunities, so the map genuinely changes as you progress. There are 47 madcap missions in total, and they range from straightforward firefights to sequences that lean hard on absurd set pieces and sharp tonal swings.Progression is not just a checklist, either. Your crew grows, your operations spread, and the city reacts to a growing reputation that you earned rather than one that was handed to you. Missions reward boldness, and the freedom to start a fire, hijack a car, and improvise your way into a firefight keeps even the more scripted encounters feeling loose and unpredictable.

Three Gang Factions and One Arms Race: Three very different criminal organizations stand between the Saints and control of Steelport. The Morningstar are a gun-running outfit with military discipline and serious firepower, the Luchadores are a wrestling-fueled syndicate with their own masked aesthetic, and the Decker cyber-criminals operate from the digital shadows. Each faction fights differently, so the same open world changes character depending on who you are pressuring.You have to outpace all three rather than wait for one to eliminate the others, which keeps the middle of the campaign busy with side pressure and counterattacks. Confrontations escalate rather than resolve cleanly, and alliances of convenience form and collapse along the way. Winning an arms race against three groups at once is the central challenge, and it keeps Steelport tense long after the first mission is behind you.

Weapons of Crass Destruction: Defeating an enemy is the baseline, and humiliating one is the bonus. The Saints' arsenal leans into that idea with weapons designed less for realism than for spectacle, and there are plenty of them to collect as you move through the city. Heavy ordnance and improvised hardware let you clear a hostile group in ways that look and sound like something out of a fever dream.The complete package also adds more than 30 extra weapons, vehicles, and costumes on top of the base game, so the options keep widening as you play. Professor Genki's murderous Genkibowl VII and the strangest corners of the Gangstas in Space DLC push the tone even further toward the surreal. The Trouble With Clones leans into weirder science, and the whole collection adds flavor to a campaign that never once plays it straight.

Useful Tips:

Never use cheats. Cheats have a nasty habit of infecting saves. You use cheats once, that’s it, that save is ruined. Play on that save in coop mode with a friend and they save during this time? That save is ruined too. You can no longer get achievements or anything, and the game no longer autosaves anyway. Great way to lose several hours of missions.

Get the Turbo For All Cars upgrade. You don’t really need any other upgrades for vehicles. Not only do you save a fortune adding turbo to cars you store in your garage, but this upgrade means that, when you smash your newly painted car to bits (and you will), you can leap into any other car and get away nice and fast.

Buy up all the properties early on. Screw the main story missions, get yourself rich by being a landowner. Get weapon shops first as you get discounts on places you own. But make sure you leave some areas controlled by other gangs so you can do the assassination missions. Many of them require that you draw in enemy gangs’ attention to lure out your target, and you can’t do that if you own the entire city. Also, for easy cash and experience, hold a shop you own at gunpoint (using any gun, zoom in but don’t fire at the shop attendant until the alarm rings), then run out then back into the shop, this will immediately remove any police hostility towards you. You’ll have to wait for the alarm to stop though, so you can’t do this with one shop over and over.

Invest in the damage reductions and health upgrades. I’d go 50-50 in health increases and health regeneration, but you want to get bullet resistance, explosive resistance and vehicle resistance pretty early on. The enemies will try and run you over and will quickly call in the explosive experts. While we’re at it, the Revive upgrades (under Abilities) and the bleedout time for homies (under Gang Abilities) are also incredibly useful and worth investing in early on.

The Tornado is the second best helicopter you can get, the VTOL being absolutely terrifying but harder to aim. If you can’t get either, then the Vulture will do. VTOLs are much harder to grab than Tornados, but you’ll get one by completing the main story line. The easiest way to get a Tornado is to unlock the Heli Homie, who will deliver a Tornado to you, and you can take that back to your helipad and store it there. Why is the Tornado so good? Because you can constantly fire homing missiles without any sort of cooldown. The minigun does have a cooldown, but the homing missiles (which lock on by focusing on a target until the lock on box goes green) have no such limit.

Spoiler alert: Arapice Island doesn’t reset after THAT mission, so make sure you finish all things in that area first before completing main storyline missions there. But after THAT mission, you can grab a helicopter and rain death and get easy experience. Other tricks for easy experience include causing giant explosions right outside your base, doing the carnage missions (either Mayhem, Tank Mayhem or Heli Assault) and driving on the wrong side of the road along the highways, which is really easy to do.

Gun-wise it’s all up to you, but I’d recommend avoiding the STAG weapons, apart from the shotgun. The automatic ones overheat really quickly, but you can get a good 10 to 15 shots from the shotgun before having to cool it down. Sniping isn’t the best choice in this game, there’s generally so much flying around, you can rarely get a good shot. But do make use of the infinite ammo items during missions, especially rocket launchers. I’d recommend upgrading the rocket launcher first as it’s great for taking out the many armoured STAG vehicles. I also recommend using the RC Controller to destroy vehicles you can’t shoot, but that needs expensive upgrades first.

Player Comments:

Many years after my first completion of this beautiful game. I decided to go through it again. And, to my surprise, I realised that this game was so great that I laughed at it, I got high on it, and I was really interested in playing it. 10/10

An experience unlike any other. It never takes itself too seriously, it remembers that games should be fun and they should entertain. It's not that any particular part stands out above the other, rather, on the whole, everything is just downright awesome. The character creator alone warrants multiple playthroughs and the story is literally only half the game.

Feels like a game whose designers have found the note-perfect tone for the series while also wielding their own talents with razor-sharp precision. It's the game Volition - a studio whose successes go back 15 years to the original Descent - was born to make.

Saints Row: The Third is the ultimate sandbox, and Volition has given gamers a massive playground and the biggest and best set of toys possible to carve their own unique destiny in Steelport, both in the engaging single player story and the limitless fun waiting to be shared in the co-op game.

Volition has fully released grips on this one, letting the player do literally whatever they want as they complete missions and wreak havoc in the city. The presentation is the best yet for the series, and though the lack of competitive multiplayer may be a turn off for some, the inclusion of Whored Mode, Survival waves and co-op more than makes up for its omission. This is one of the wildest gaming experiences you'll have this year.

Final Thoughts:

Saints Row: The Third delivers a vibrant and chaotic open-world experience set in the anarchic city of Steelport, where players engage in a mix of intense combat, quirky missions, and over-the-top activities. The remastered version enhances visual fidelity and includes all DLC content, adding new weapons, vehicles, and costumes that enrich gameplay variety.