When I was a child I recall going to the doctors for an injection. A nice nurse lead me through to the room, sat me down, and took a toy off the table and put it in my hand. It was one of those things that had a maze and a little ball and you had to get the ball in a hole. Assuming that she was just asking me to hold it for a second so the table would be clearer, I ignored the toy and stared at my arm as the needle went in. It was only days later that I realised that I was supposed to play with this toy so that I wouldn’t notice the jab. I tell you this story not only to pad out the word count, but to make you understand that I’m someone who doesn’t like to be distracted pointlessly.
Sometimes we all want to be distracted, either because there’s something we don’t want to focus on or because the distraction itself is worth our time. This is something I can get behind. Sometimes, however, there are games seemingly oblivious to the Inception-like recursiveness of the whole exercise that will attempt to distract you from itself.
Saints Row the Third is a hilarious game. American comedy rarely gets to me as much as it does to Americans, but Saints Row had me laughing even alone playing singleplayer. Not just thinking to myself “oh, that was rather clever”, but actually laughing. Do you know what made the game funny? It’s writing and its staged moments. When that chainsaw falls into the wrestling ring and “You’re the Best Around” starts playing? That’s up there with down with this sort of thing. The bits of the game that weren’t funny, well they were the bits that relied on the open world. Sure, occasionally there would be a funny bit of dialogue while driving a character from one place to another, but mostly the open world was boring.
Let’s start with the side missions. They’re bollocks. Either boring or too hard, the game insists that after its excellently paced and written story missions that you play these laborious side missions that serve only as padding. The little amount of context that surrounds them the first time you do them doesn’t succeed in making them funny, and that little bit of context is thrown out of the window if you try to do them again. These missions are simply distractions from the main, interesting, actually funny storyline.
Little else about the open world lives up to the promise of the games writing and set pieces. I realise this is personal preference, but frankly hitting pedestrians with a dildo bat or (in Saints Row 4) a dubstep gun wouldn’t entertain me in the slightest. Torturing AI has never been my thing. That kind of stuff seems like the crux of the enjoyment you are supposed to take from the open world, but I don’t think it works. I know it’s intrinsic to the series, but while the open world isn’t offensively dull, it adds nothing to either Saints Row 3 or 4. Especially 4, in fact, since it marginalizes the role of vehicles in favour of super powers.
Thanks to the VTOL in 3 and the super jumps in 4, moving from one point to another isn’t entirely boring, but it isn’t fun either after the first couple of times. The open world is only an issue when moving from one point to another, and the content of the world serves only as a substandard distraction from the genuinely great parts of the game. The game overloads players with choices, all of which detract from the core of the experience. Like a doctor’s toy, the only purpose they serve is to distract you from the point.
