Saints Row: The Third Trailer Brings Down the House (With Bullets)

As a wise man once said: “It’s gettin’ hot in here, so take your guns and shoot the hell out of the place.”

Whereas the once over-the-top and zany Grand Theft Auto moved ever so slowly into the realm of mostly-serious crime drama with GTA4, Volition’s Saints Row did the exact opposite. The first Saints Row was little more than a GTA clone, but the second was an over-the-top guilty pleasure that won the affection of a notoriously hard-to-please British ex-pat.

Judging from this cinematic trailer, Saints Row: The Third should be just as over-the-top as its predecessor. What’s impressive about the trailer is how quickly the violence ramps up, from simply beating up a bouncer to a slow-motion shootout-slash-brawl in the middle of an elite nightclub, and finally to being surrounded by military jets on the top of a skyscraper.

Some gameplay would be nice to see, but the trailer works fine on its own. We do know, thanks to IGN, that while it is still an open-world game, the vast majority of missions will take place in instanced spaces like one would find in MMORPGs like WoW. This gives developer Volition the power for more scripted events in action scenes to better further the plot, though some gamers will undoubtedly lament taking players out of the open world, even if it’s only for missions.

Saints Row: The Third is out this November.

(IGN)