Saints Row the Third: Supervillian simulator

[Stark]

That's a shame. It does seem that the weapons are overall less lethal (although that's probably just because of the added scope for upgrades) so individual gunfights seem to go on for longer. The threat curve is a lot steeper, too; I guess since it's trivial to clear your heat they make it ramp up fast. Doing survivals vs the cops is waaaaay harder than the gang ones, due to armoured cars, gunships etc.

[Mr Bean]

That's a gun issue because the pistols and the Assault rifles are one shot lethal to any gang-bangers or cops while the same guns can take seven chest shots to put down the same people. It makes combat on the PC trivial at times except for facing off against the Gang's special enemies who it does not work on since they have buckets of HP. I went through the mission to clear out that Tower and never bothered to take cover once, just walking slowly forward tapping once to drop every single blastard who can at me the only problem being the Brutes who I ducked behind something then filled them full of lead until they fell down.

Sad to say grenades are not even one hit kills anymore and the UAV drop is almost useless unless your targets are marked since the camera is so shitty. Unlike the mission where you get to use it the first time where the camera is outstanding and you can spam missiles to your hearts content.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Did I completely miss it, or did they take out cruise control? It was one of the things that SR2 had over the competition.

So, story line is pretty short. Beat that bit today, when I got bored of running around taking territory... It lets you replay the last mission over again. Not sure where the two missions it says I haven't done are...

Plenty of territory to take... but eh.

[Molyneux]

Got it, I've only had a few hours to play so far.
I like the cartoonishly over-the-top-ness of it all. Can't wait to see more of the game.

I'm mildly surprised that there's no way to remove the censoring for naked characters.

[Ford Prefect]

That's a shame. It does seem that the weapons are overall less lethal (although that's probably just because of the added scope for upgrades) so individual gunfights seem to go on for longer. The threat curve is a lot steeper, too; I guess since it's trivial to clear your heat they make it ramp up fast. Doing survivals vs the cops is waaaaay harder than the gang ones, due to armoured cars, gunships etc.

Yeah, the cops have way better gear than the gangs, though the gangs have better dudes, like the Decker teleport roller hammer chicks and the Morningstar Brutes. STAG make the National Guard look like a bunch of pansies though lol

[Joviwan]

Did I completely miss it, or did they take out cruise control?.

Ctrl. On the PC, at least, I'm not sure about consoles.

[Mr Bean]

Beat it tonight Spoiler

Last mission is actually three god long missions in one where you can't really quit from who thought that up needs to be shot. First off you get a very simple mission to go to three locations and kill about 50 STAG/Luchadores at the locations who are fighting and more keep showing up, after a few minutes your gang shows up an on to the next hotspot. Well easy enough let me break out my unlocked tank(From story missions) or my VTOL(Also auto-unlocked by story missions) or my awesome new rocket bike you just got two missions ago and is as awesome as it sounds. Want to use it for the final mission? Fuck you no playing with your toys unless you park it at the mission start an enter on foot otherwise because Oleg has to come and Oleg can't fit in tanks or choppers.

Also the fact that there is no mission where you drive Oleg and joust the clones of Oleg or just chariot race them, very disappointing.

Back to the final, after you beat the three hotspots you get presented with a binary choice, go stop Killbane from escaping or prevent a major land mark from being blown up and by the way most of your gang is on the statue tied there because they intent to fake a terrorist attack and blame the saints. So let me get this right you want me to choice between saving the life of Burt Reyonds and most of my gang and prevent me from being labeled a terrorist... Or.... I can go chase down the asshole wrestler who I just got done kicking the ass of two missions ago. Yeah that's not a binary choice, there is the idiot option and the option that makes sense.

For those interested I completed in 14 hours and a few minutes with an 87% rating around respec level 44 with 1/3rd of the shit unlocked which is a shame since the highest damaging gun combo in the game is the default pistol at level 4 with instant reloading which does the highest dps and spike damage of any gun in the game outside the rocket launcher with instant reloading and infinite ammo.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Relating to that: Spoiler

So, if you choose to chase down killbane, you go, rescue Angel, then he drives you to the airport so you can shoot rockets at killbane's jet.

Killbane, of course, survives being in a jet exploded while taxiing on the runway, and you proceed to QTE him to a final death. Monument explodes, you get a call.

Mission complete for that "3 hotspots" mission.

Next one, STAG shows up with that flying aircraft carrier, and starts laying waste to the city. You fly up, plant some bombs, and shoot down the STAG leader in his souped up VTOL during a timed boss-fight.

[Stark]

The very idea of people giving a shit about their dps in a game like this is fucking ridiculous. I guess people love spreadsheets?

Cruise control on consoles is down on the dpad.

The game is disappointingly short and easy. I guess the DLC might add some kind of reason to play after finishing, but I'll probably be returning my copy. Its heaps of fun, but you quickly reach a point of there being basically nothing to do.

[Starglider]

I've been playing this in short bursts, I've gotten a little past STAG turning up. As with the second game there is a focus on player enjoyment and credibility be damned, but now there is a focus on visual style regardless of credibility as well, and I'd say both work quite well. The game mechanics stuff all seems fairly solid and balanced, allowing for that fact that a game like this is never going to have as good shooting as a dedicated shooter, driving as good as a dedicated racer etc. NPC AI still seems to be the biggest issue, I'm playing on hard and the majority of my mission failures are 'NPC died' or 'NPC was left behind'. On the mission where you bug radio towers in a helicopter, Shaundi actually fell off the skyscraper plumetted a few hundred feet and died three times, until it occured to me to ignore the helipad and just park the copter on the top platform. I am a big fan of messing about with aircraft so I certainly appreciate the VTOL, the aircraft controls still suck compare to GTA:SA or even Just Cause though. I appreciate the sci-fi weapons, they give the combat a nice little makeover compared to the 100s of hours of GTA-style gameplay I've previously played through.

My main criticism of the game would be the city. It looks like the GTA4 city with less attention to detail, some ludicrously high skyscrapers and bits of neon glued to everything. SR2 Stillwater had a bit of a Crackdown feel, in that there were lots of interesting bits of location design and good style variation between areas. SR3's city is a little more realistic and better laid out, but SR2's had a certain charm that SR3's lacks. The engine is still far more buggy than Rockstar's, the draw distance is good but physics glitches abound and the detail pop-in is very pronounced, particularly on the skyscrapers at altitude (I suspect they are using distance-to-mesh-centroid to control LOD, which doesn't work well on pointy objects the player can get very close to). I agree that the new Shaundi is a lot more generic and kinda disappointing than the old one.

Hopefully someone will eventually make a game that is the missions and activities from this fused with the world and engine from Just Cause 2.

[Stark]

The pop-in when flying is sometimes really terrible, but it seems worse in planes so maybe it's a streaming issue.

The AI guys are also really bad at flying the VTOL; they will often take about 5m to land (during which time you'll be wishing you had a grapple like in JC2) and the enemy pilots tend to ignore buildings and crash.

[Starglider]

Just completed the main plot (about 90% completion overall). I got a strong 'Mercenaries 2' feel from this, probably due to the amount of tanks, helicopters, annoying support characters and horrible physics glitches in the later missions. That's not so bad, I had a lot of fun with Mercenaries 2 and I had a lot of fun with this, but my previous criticism was definitely reinforced. The SR-3 city seems more drab, samey and lifeless the more you play the game; it would have been great in 2006 but not in 2011. After San Andreas, Just Cause 1/2, Far Cry 2 etc the one-island-city world model already feels confining, especially for the aircraft, and the copy-paste houses and stores really don't help. The devs seemed to put a lot more design resource into the story campaign while keeping the challenges about the same (i.e. still vastly better than the GTA diversions, although I'm surprised how much I missed the lack of air/land/sea race challenges) and under-resourcing the open world aspect. They're going to need either a significantly higher budget or some procedural magic to fix this in a future game. That said maybe I'm not the target audience here, but I'd prefer more environment space and variety to being able to streak, or some of the other 3-minutes-of-amusement devtime sinks they put in.

P.S. Found myself using the cyber arm-cannon a lot in the last few missions, because it puts down STAG troops with one shot even if they're hiding behind riot shields, and doesn't have backblast, limited ammo or too long a charge time.