A disappointing followup to everything that made Saints Row 2 work. Just when the groundwork for the series felt like it's been perfectly fertilized, finally giving Saints Row a unique identity, Volition went out of their way to disregard it. It’s almost like a dire omen of what’s coming in the game opening with the Saints returning with their newfound excessively commercialized lives as “gangsters” in everything but name. Right from the get-go I knew I wasn’t going to like this based on how the presentation felt superficial, dated, and cheap. It’s almost fascinating playing this in the good ol’ year of 2022 because the tone and humor has aged not the best. The tight balance between absurdism and realism perfect by SR2 is not even bothered to be matched here. I wondered why Volition would even take this direction in the first place but then I remembered Borderlands was popular around the time and suddenly everything made perfect sense. Ironically, by trying to desperately distance themselves further from being associated with GTA has only caused Saints Row to feel more confused and flanderized.

Nothing you might’ve loved about Saints Row 2 remains here. Anything that does only shares a hollow passing resemblance that’s been stripped down for the worse. Customization was easily the best part about SR2 and it’s depressing to see how much of it got butchered here. The character creator is limited in creating the weirdly specific yet accurate protagonist you want. Buying clothes in this game feels like a waste because they lack variety in the kinds of styles you can wear to further customize. A lot of them are just “ecksdee so random” clothes with little to offer beyond that to feel rewarding. Even the crib and gang customization feels like a downgrade because you can’t really change up your player homes that much.

Steelport is mediocre. As an open-world sandbox it pales in comparison with how lively Stillwater was, right down to the unmemorable districts and needless open-world additions of giant signs pointing which direction you’re supposed to drive to and waypoints centered right on the screen. What made Stillwater so cool was how it felt like a map dominated by different factions that you need to steer clear of and take over one at a time. It’s a solid approach to gradually unraveling the open-world to the player as a sandbox worth fucking around in. There’s nothing in Steelport that carries the same sense of progression in dominating other gangs and claiming your mark on the map. It’s not worth trying to dick around for much mindless fun here because the side activities feel lacking and enemies are bullet sponges. I guess the biggest compliment I can give it is that the driving is decent and seems like maybe the biggest improvement from SR2 in how smooth it feels to control. But what hampers it ties back to how Steelport is boring to explore in and vehicle customization also feels stagnant. Also Pierce's AI somehow got even WORSE than it was in SR2.

I’d try to pick apart the story, but that’d imply there was one to begin with. I’m not really exaggerating when I say there’s like the most shredded paper scraps of a plot going on beyond the opening of the game which is never taken full advantage of in creating narrative momentum. It’s meandering, poorly paced, and downright lazy with how uncreative the main missions are by just being side activities they recycled with the occasional super gimmicky mission to show off how “haha funny lol random ecksdee” it can get which got predictable as it did annoying. There’s only very few that I enjoy, mostly the entire mission where you jump out of the helicopter while crashing a penthouse party guns blazing while Power by Kanye West plays which is fucking fire. Uh, I guess that weird DLC with the Johnny Gat clone was some mindless fun because it gave you ridiculous super powers? Everything else feels like a downturn because the gameplay isn’t too good and the story never bothers to actually try, which is insanely disappointing because SR2’s story is so good. You don’t care about the Saints like you did previously because there’s not a lot of time spent with them personally to feel close. You especially don’t care about the villains because the game can’t even decide which one is the central antagonist before they just give up and you never really confront them personally like you did in SR2. It’s not even to say you can’t take the chess pieces that are already placed on the board here and rearrange them to form a stronger narrative that lived up to the heights of SR2. Like after the events of SR2, The Saints became drunk on their newfound fame and power and as a result went from a respectable scrappy gang to just an over-glorified shameless brand. This would’ve helped justify the change felt in the game’s opening as something intentionally satirical to show how far these guys have fallen since we last saw them. It would’ve made the death of a certain character actually matter because it’s the reality check they needed when they immediately plummeted back to the bottom to realize how they need to rebuild themselves as certified Saints once more. It might’ve given SR3 a more meaningful place in the series because it’s when Volition could’ve just stopped desperately trying to distance themselves from the inescapable stigma of being a “lesser” GTA clone and just accept it while playing into what made SR2 feel special. I don’t expect too much in telling a story in a game like this but it at least has to do something with it rather than nothing at all.

I understand that this game has its own fans, apparently being the most commercially successful entry in the series, and I could even see some of the appeal for people who were okay with this sharp turn of a direction. But being too unabashedly stupid to compensate for how little it offers doesn’t sit right with me as someone who loved Saints Row 2, and wanted something that faithfully followed its footsteps.

Saints Row aqui apostou na criatividade pra se diferenciar de apenas um "GTA de baixo orçamento". E eles conseguem realmente deixar o jogo bem variado e criativo. O problema é que o jogo é mal feito, mal programado, bugado e muito desinteressante.

Se eu tomasse um shot pra cada vez que um bug me obrigou a fechar o jogo ou a resetar uma missão, eu teria um coma alcólico em minutos. É simplesmente a festa dos bugs.
O jogo é mecanicamente horrível, sendo inferior até a jogos muito mais antigos como o próprio GTA 3. O gunplay é tosco e toda arma parece igual na hora de usar, a dirigibildiade é HORRENDA e o combate é super tosco e repetitivo, muitas vezes me fazendo jgoar com o cérebro no afk enquanto progredia.

O humor do jogo também honestamente não me pegou. É o tipo de humor 2010 que muitas vezes é só vergonhoso mesmo

What a magnificent spectacle this game is, I'm honestly in awe.
This was perhaps one of my most anticipated games, it looked absolutely phenomenal and I'm surprised how it actually lived up to the hype.

I was a little bit sceptical at first, because the gameplay felt very simple, but once you get the first 3 Eikons, it feels way better, the amount of abilities you get to unlock as you progress is kind of crazy, there are many Eikons to get by progressing the main story, and every single one has a different moveset, which makes combat feel fresh.

Also I've got to say, I was expecting the exploration to be way more restrictive but it's actually the opposite, there's a good amount of exploration, many side quests and areas to explore, and you can even hunt down monsters for materials to craft equipment. It takes a while for the game to open up though, it's very linear in the beginning, and has a lot of cutscenes that can be annoying, but once it opens up, it gets significantly better.

The story is one of my favorite stories the series has to offer, it's pretty dark and serious, has so many twists and turns, and arguably some of the highest peaks in any game I've ever played. The cutscenes are gorgeous and the boss fights are absolutely jaw-dropping, not only in terms of spectacle but also in terms of gameplay, they're so god damn fun, probably the highlight of the entire game.
Even the characters are very well written, Clive is undoubtedly my favorite character in the entire series, and the side characters are very likeable and relatable in many ways, you can really tell how much love and effort was put into creating this story overall.

As expected, the soundtrack is incredible, every track is beautiful and very much fitting, I found myself either humming some melodies or even singing along to some songs as I was playing.

What blew me away though is the Thousand Tomes, which works as some sort of a library for the game's world and lore where every single piece of information can be found there. It's honestly so important and useful, so much information and things to read so you can keep up with the story, learn about the characters, the monsters, the wars, the secrets of the world and pretty much everything the game has to offer. I actually reached the max level because I spend so much time collecting everything and it was a blast, for the first time ever in a videogame I genuinely loved reading, and finding new information was always very exciting.

That being said, I do have some issues with this game, with the most obvious one being the tedious side quests, which I did all of them yes, I spend way too much time in this game, it took me 87 hours to finish it because I did everything in the world and then finished the main story, and honestly... the side quests I genuinely liked were very few, specifically near the end of the game. Most side quests for like 80% of the game are actually kind of boring, they're not badly written, it's just that all of them are somewhat the same, you go somewhere, kill someone or collect something, go back to the person you first talked to, thats it.
Apart from the side quests being mostly tedious, the world doesn't have many things to offer, there's barely any endgame content, which is unfortunate.

However, my biggest issue with the game is the amount of fetch quests specifically in the middle of the story.
The game starts off very strong, but once you reach halfway through the story, the pacing slows down by a lot, and there's just a lot of random fetch quests that really kill the momentum, even though the pacing gets better shortly after, and the rest of the game has some of the most insane action I've ever seen in a videogame, the tonal shift is very noticeable.

Other than that, even with the issues it has, I'm in love with this game, playing it for the first time felt like a dream come true. What a beautiful experience, It's just so close to being a masterpiece.

Final Rating: "Amazing" ~ 9/10.

Never has a game gotten me so invested in its world surrounding it. Never has any piece of fiction, really. In most games, maybe only bar Horizon Zero Dawn, when you find a random note collectible or listen to an audio log, I almost always ignore them. They're usually just filler and ultimately unimportant. But Mass Effect proved to me that they don't have to be that way, and I read through and listened to just about damn near everything I could, stopping to exhaust all dialogue options whenever available. The worldbuilding is genuinely phenomenal and I can say with certainty that this is the coolest fictional universe I've ever experienced and likely will ever experience. Most of this is just do to the writing, its great. It can be humorous, witty, introspective or just about any other good sounding adjective you can think of and its just about always compelling. Characters like Liara, my love and Garrus, my bestie and Thane, my other love (and basically just about everyone else besides Jacob, fuck you Jacob) are fantastic to be around and really help make the world feel alive and The Normandy feel like a home. The combat is kind of shit, and the driving around in the Mako in the first game left a lot to be desired. The simplification of mechanics over the series was a little upsetting. The animations in dialogue/action sequences can be a bit jarring and mess up the tone of things. The ending had more potential than what was got out of it. All those problems are present here and a lot of it can be very noticeable. But even then? this series was still amazing and every of the honestly many problems mean jack shit in comparison to the sheer quality of everything else. This feels like I'm rambling now so this is the end. One final thing: The romance with Liara is the peak of the lesbian human-alien connection. Getting to tell her that you love her in the third game damn near broke my heart.

It was an honor serving with you Commander Shepard.

Nancyfly certified Top 10 game of all time
- 99/100