Saints Row: The Third – The Most Outrageous Moments

Saints Row: The Third sees the series completely emerge from the shadow of GTA. After a debut that offered a fairly poor impression of Rockstar's seminal crime drama, the follow-up started to ramp up the craziness, but it's this week's release that sees the Saints find their true identity. A gaudy carnival of chaos and carnage, it's one of the most gleefully tasteless games of the year. How tasteless? Well, read on and find out…

Most modern sandbox games give you tricky dilemmas to test your moral fibre. Often you're given a choice between selfless or selfish – in Saints Row: The Third, almost all these decisions are win-win for the player, even if both choices make you feel a little seedy. That's certainly the case with one mission, where, after liberating a group of "hos" from a terrifying ordeal in a group of shipping containers, you have the option to sell them back to the gang you stole them from for an instant cash boost, or to keep them for yourself, and have a regular hourly income as they – ahem - get back down to business.

Commit any sort of crime and you'll be tailed by the cops for some distance, even if the Steelport PD isn't the most tenacious police force you'll ever encounter. Still, when they're preventing you from blowing up passing ambulances with rocket launchers, they can be quite annoying. So to get revenge, use your RC Possessor to take control of one of their vehicles, and then use it to run over a group of pedestrians. That way you get to keep your hands clean and pin the blame on the boys in blue.

With the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals recently targeting Mario for his use of a Tanooki suit (the plumber 'jokingly' accused of encouraging youngsters to skin raccoon dogs), we wonder what they'd make of the scenes in Dr. Genki's Hyper Reality Climax, a gameshow where contestants must gun down costumed mascots. Often these outfits are based on animals, and there's definitely something quite shocking about seeing the corpse of a giant rabbit twitching on the floor after you've pumped a few shotgun rounds into its stomach. It's not a real animal, of course, but that's never stopped PETA before…


One of the best new features of Saints Row: The Third is the revamped melee system, which is further tweaked by the sprint modifiers. Yes, your moveset is substantially expanded when you're running at full tilt, and you can perform a series of wrestling moves on innocent bystanders. We're particularly fond of a move we call the 'surfboard', where you knock a pedestrian over from behind and glide a few feet on the back of their prone body. But nothing quite beats elbow-dropping an old lady into the kerb before your avatar lies down, poses and grins at the camera to celebrate this act of heinous violence.

Saints Row has something of an obsession with genitalia, especially the male variety. So if you're wandering around the streets of Steelport, innocently flambéing passersby with your flamethrower and a police car rolls up, there's a particularly painful way to put them down. Simply stroll up to the driver's door as the cop emerges, and then click the right stick to pull off a testicle punch. You can add insult to injury by knocking him to the ground as he clutches his crotch, before repeatedly stomping on his man-parts until he stops moving.


Gang wars can be such a pain to deal with when you're in the middle of an important mission - if you drive past a rival's turf en route to a waypoint, you can end up in a steadily escalating combat situation that quickly spirals out of control as more enemy cars pile in once the shooting starts. So put a stop to it before it's even begun with your Reaper Drone – essentially a tactical nuke that obliterates everything in a 50ft radius. Except, of course, you. One missile and you stroll away from the carnage having expanded the Saints' territory. Easy.

Diving from the top of your penthouse is fun the first time, but can get a little boring. When you know you have a parachute to halt your descent, the sense of danger is immediately lowered. So to spice it up a little you could always try an airborne carjacking – simply guide your parachute towards a nearby vehicle, and press the appropriate button combination to leap like Bo and Duke through the windshield. There's no Achievement for it, but it looks pretty badass. Alternatively, you could try a spot of base jumping, and instead of aiming for the target provided, opt to use a nearby citizen for target practice. You'll find they cushion your landing quite effectively.

While we wouldn't normally advocate cheating, the wide variety of codes you can tap into your phone can make Saints Row: The Third even more riotously silly – even though Achievements and quicksaves are turned off as long as they're activated. Our current favourite combination is the Apocafist (type 'giveapoca' into your phone) with the Bloody Mess modifier ('notrated'). Punch anyone to produce a spray of blood and guts that would put your average Saw movie to shame.

While all this freeform fun is outrageous enough, sometimes the story itself can be even more shocking. Venture into the side rooms of the BDSM club featured in an early mission and you'll see an array of dodgy sex apparatus before making your escape in a cart pulled by a man dressed as a gimp. Keep an eye out, too, for the naughty puns in the titles of key locations – like the mechanics called Rim Jobs or the hotel named Stikit Inn. And if that wasn't enough, there's always the mission where you play as first a toilet and then a sex doll. You might think we're kidding. We're not.

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