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I’m using a sentient, gun-toting purple question mark as a human shield. I’ve killed men in luminescent rabbit suits, fired a stream of rockets at a thirty-foot prostitute, and smacked a horde of gimps to death with a dildo big enough to split someone’s rectum clean in half.
And they say games can’t be art!
This is Saints Row: The Third’s Whored (do you get it?) mode, which pits two players against thirty bizarre waves of enemies across three different maps. The rounds are predetermined and eclectic, so you might find yourself fighting a throng of enemies dressed up as energy drinks mere seconds after knocking away a gaggle of crazed midgets.
I’m playing on the Daedalus airship, a circular map scattered with convenient pillars for cover, a dangerous drop in the middle, and a raised helipad to retreat to as a last resort. Elsewhere, you can dip into Whored on Zombie Island (pardon?) and Angel’s Casino.
There are five characters to choose from, but I stopped on the first – the ever-affable Gimpy, whose defining characteristic is that he wears a gimp suit. You might fancy Cowgirl or Cyril, perhaps. Either way, we can probably all agree that these wafer-thin visual stereotypes actually have more character than the entire cast of Battlefield 3 combined.
Whored is another option slapped onto the Swiss army knife that is Saints Row: The Third. Elsewhere there’s the regular campaign, which can also be played in co-op for its entirety. The game kicks off with an advert for an energy row, followed by your gang launching a heist wearing oversized Johnny Gat masks.
A few explosions and an expensive airplane romp later and you’ll find yourself in the new city of Steelport, and an entire world of tangents and side-missions. This is one of those games where you can get lost in the extras; I spent a few hours with a near-final build of the game and barely scratched the main story campaign, instead getting caught up with a rapidly unfolding breadcrumb trail of baffling anarchy and frenzied chaos.
Firstly, I spent a frankly baffling amount of time running around Steelport in the buff. Leave a safehouse in your birthday suit (the game blurs out your privates, although there’s a slider in character creation which lets you change the size of your sex lumps) and you can launch the streaking mini-game, where your character (if they’re male, at least) pushes out their crotch and sashays down the streets. You’ve got a limited amount of time to shock people with your indecency, though get the attention of a police officer with your flesh baton and they will immediately attempt to murder you. It’s only natural, I suppose.
I also found myself running around on the rampage a fair bit, and Saints Row: The Third is more than happy to indulge these propensities. After getting in a protracted ruckus with both rival gangs and the fuzz – it all kicked off with a completely innocent attempt at running down a couple of luchador gang bangers on a street corner and rapidly escalated – I happened to run across a completely unguarded attack boat sitting in a nearby dock. I don’t know if this was a happy coincidence or intentional indulgence, but I got completely wrapped up in blowing up army helicopters for at least fifteen minutes.
And, yes, you read right – there’s an entire rival gang of gun-toting luchadors dressed in mint green suits.
This is how I choose to experience the game; as a manic sandbox rather than a cohesive linear experience. Saints Row: The Third’s missions seem fine and fun, but the real moments of beauty come from times like when you realise you’ve missed your exit on the freeway so you simply drive your vehicle off the edge and jump out. And that, my friends, is a work of art.
Saints Row: The Third will be released for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on November 18.
