So I got the platinum for this game yesterday, and honestly the whole experience left me cold. It was my first Saints Row game and the reason I took a chance on it was due to people constantly hailing how "wacky" and "hilarious" the game is. There's never enough comedy in video games I find, so I was more than willing to lay down cash for some hearty guffaws.
Not one guffaw was to be had.
Maybe the occassional titter here and there, but overall I did not find this game humourous, yet I find it hard to pinpoint exactly why. Maybe it was because everything felt forced; a campaign always more concerned with trying to up the ante in terms of over-the-top action and scenarios than anything else. But nothing gels, nothing feels natural in its execution. Instead, I felt relentlessly bludgeoned by a game that wanted to hammer home its absurdity so much that I was dead to the experience a mere quarter of the way through. I mean, how can any game make a mission where you escort a restless tiger sitting in the passenger seat such a humdrum affair. This one does, somehow.
Even worse is when you strip down the content of the game piece by piece and realise that, ignoring those main missions that act as an intro to the activities, the only portion of the game that dares/tries to keep things fresh is about half of the main quest. Everything else is filler: activities, challenges, car thefts, assassinations, gang operations. Generic tasks that pretty much epitomise the term "grind-fest."
I'm no GTA fanboy; I hate on IV as much as the next guy and I'm not even particularly looking forward to V. But The Ballad Of Gay Tony got this sort of thing spot on. Through superior writing, through a protagonist who acted as the 'straight guy' to the krrrrrazy hijinks that ensued and through some fully fleshed out characters that didn't act like walking talking stereotypes in a (somewhat adult-orientated) cartoon show. I honestly laughed more in this
single scene than I did in the entirety of Saints Row 3.
/rant
