Saints Row: The Third
Saints Row: The Third has a stupid, nonsensical story. There is no central villain (except the player character) -- the evil Belgian crimelord from the intro dies after a few missions; his replacement is shortly overshadowed by an overzealous military police force; and even they are discarded relatively quickly. There's no overarching goal or conflict, there's no moral, or lesson. Really, the story exists as an excuse: to introduce ludicrous amounts of gang violence, to have mission objectives that span from fighting in a TRON-inspired cyberspace to professional wrestling, to give you laser-powered military hardware, to blow up zombies, and to be doing it as a favor to Mayor Burt Reynolds.
It's an interesting setup, because while it's not uncommon for this kind of game to use its campaign as a vehicle for introducing new mechanics and items, Saints Row 3 has basically all of its bullet-point features from the beginning. After the intro mission, you can take over the entire city without doing any of the campaign. SR3 flips on its head the modern GTA idea, that the open world's activities and features should feed into or enhance the storyline. This game is all about the extra stuff. Buying property, upgrading vehicles and weapons, doing madcap side-missions (like shooting costumed thugs in a TV game show), and of course blowing up street gangs, all in the name of gaining influence over Steelport.
It's a beautiful dance of money and power, at least for the most part. You take over some districts, you get more income, you use that income to upgrade your abilities: you can upgrade everything from your sprinting duration and your allies' health, to reload speed and damage resistance. As you use cash to become more powerful and capable, you use that newfound ability to do progressively more difficult challenges, taking on increasingly ludicrous amounts and arrangements of rivals. By the end, assuming you've paid in to the system, you can have infinite ammo on all your weapons, which don't ever have to reload, and you won't take damage from anything.
The fly in the ointment is that the income formula is pretty disparate; you earn much more from buying factories and stores than you do from completing activities that involve real gameplay. If you go about the game in the wrong order, it could make for a tough time. So just make sure that you start out by doing the Business Tycoon thing. No problemo.
While the vehicle upgrade system is a little weak - the upgrades themselves don't really feel substantial, and if they did, it would be irritating how they're tied to particular car models - the rest of the upgrades really enhance how the game is played. With increased health, health regen, and resistance to bullets, you can charge into a gunfight with no worries. With a pistol upgrade for explosive rounds, you can blow oncoming foes right out of your way. With reduced reload time on an SMG, you can unleash a practically infinite stream of bullets into a crowd. And as you use these to conquer Steelport's tougher opponents, like bullet-sponge brutes with miniguns, schoolgirls with rocket-skates and energy hammers, and tanks with fucking laser cannons, you'll feel proud of yourself for using economics as a weapon to upgrade and defeat them.
The driving mechanics still don't feel right, in that the collisions aren't very elastic, and the showy drifting ignores so much momentum. And, no matter how many rockets you fire at them, the buildings will never fall apart. But while Saints Row: The Third doesn't have the same attributes that make GTA4 or Red Faction: Guerrilla so fun, it's finally found one all its own: taking over a city, and becoming a crime god. Because while many games put you in the position of gaining notoriety in their worlds, SR3 is the only one that ultimately allows you to take off an experimental hover-jet from your penthouse helipad, and rain energy missiles on luchadores while Benny Benassi's "Satisfaction" plays on your radio.
Better than: Saints Row 2
Not as good as: Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
The final mission is on a fake Mars: and includes one of the cheesiest lines from Red Faction
Progress: Own the city, finished the story, 92%