Saints Row The Third – review

In the guilty pleasures stakes, playing the first two Saints Row games was right up there with listening to 1970s prog rock: great fun until someone catches you doing it.It was all too easy to dismiss them as Grand Theft Auto clones, and at times, they felt a bit like they were made by middle-class white boys who habitually wore backwards baseball bats and referred to their "homies".

But Saints Row The Third demands to be taken seriously – ironically, because it goes out of its way not to take itself at all seriously.

This time around, developer Volition has embarked on a scorched-earth policy of going as ridiculously over-the-top as is humanly possible. And at last, as a result, Saints Row has stepped out of GTA's shadow and developed a personality of its own.

Saints Row The Third starts with such a bang that it leaves you feeling that the first two games were some sort of rehearsal. The 3rd Street Saints have become full-blown celebrities in Stilwater, inspiring a line of merchandising, and with a movie about them in the works.

They've pitched up in the bigger city of Steelport and decide to rob a bank, wearing giant bobble-heads bearing the likeness of their leader, Johnny Gat. The bank, though, turns out to be owned by the shadowy Syndicate – frankly, a much larger and better organised criminal enterprise – and after a string of hilarious escapades (including shooting down countless choppers while suspended from one yourself, and parachuting twice from a Syndicate jet that you've helped destroy), Johnny Gat ends up dead.

Gat was last seen at the controls of the aforementioned jet – despite, as a character points out, not being able to handle a stick-shift on a car – and so you become the boss of the gang before embarking on twin missions to wreak revenge on the Syndicate and take over Steelport.

Aided initially by sexy psychopath Shaundi and urbane gangster Pierce, you swiftly acquire a larger cast of lieutenants – including Oleg, a genetically enhanced giant; Kinzie, an ex-FBI hacker; and Zimos, a pimpish type with an Autotuned voice-box on a stick, whom you rescue from a Syndicate brothel where he's being forced to pull people along in pony-traps, dressed in a full gimp suit complete with ball-gag.

Each of this cast of unsavoury but hilarious characters provides you with a mission thread. There are also, of course, countless open-world missions to perform – including stealing cars to order, massacring pockets of rival gangs, causing set amounts of damage to property with the aid of unlimited grenades and taking on assassinations.

In other words, Saints Row The Third ignores the mundane in favour of the sorts of OTT missions that cropped up rarely in GTA, but stuck most firmly in the mind.

Tanks and helicopter gunships are accessible more or less from the start. There's a constant undercurrent which involves taking the mickey out of 21st-century celebrity culture.

For example, you can participate in Professor Genki's Ethical Reality Climax – a TV show in which you must shoot a set number of people, as stylishly as possible, within a certain time. A whole radio station dedicates itself to poking fun at True Blood and its vampiric ilk.

The radio stations emphasise the game's debt to GTA, but also that it has been immaculately assembled – anything that, for instance, brings the Icicle Works' Lost Classic Birds Fly to a new audience deserves praise.

There are some imaginative weapons, such as one that lets you drive nearby vehicles by radio control, and a satisfying co-op mode that basically encourages you to commit mayhem. And while it may not be the best-looking game, its art direction stands out – the Saints, of course, have their purple livery with its fleur de lys motif, and the likes of the Luchadores – a gang of Mexican wrestlers – are great to behold when you wreak havoc among them.

If you've played a GTA game before, you'll know precisely what to expect gameplay-wise from Saints Row The Third, and that in itself is a major recommendation in a GTA-free year.

But the fact that it refuses to take itself at all seriously for even a microsecond elevates it way beyond its predecessors. The moral majority will probably froth at the mouth about it, but even they would experience a sense of being undermined if, for once, they broke the habit of a lifetime and investigated the subject of their opprobrium.

Because it's so deliciously ludicrous, you'd have to be certifiable to mistake anything in it for real life.