While the Grand Theft Auto series has taken a more "realistic" angle over the last few releases, the developers at Volition have taken a completely different approach on the open world genre. That approach: to deliver an absolutely over the top experience that is just a whole lot of fun from beginning to end, and deliver a few laughs along the way. With Saints Row: The Third, they're certainly well on their way to delivering on that promise.

At E3 this year, we got an early look at the game in a brief video. At a recent event in Los Angeles, we had an opportunity to get an extensive hands on look at the game and spend a few hours playing through the campaign and the recently announced instant-action "Whored Mode". To give you an example of the depth of the campaign, through six hours or so of co-operative play we only managed to complete around thirty-five percent of the campaign, along with a small handful of the side missions and activities.

In the campaign, you're thrown right into the action without any hesitation. Since the conclusion of Saints Row 2, the Saints have skyrocketed in popularity and become celebrities; their faces are on everything from billboards to their own energy drink. The first mission in the game has you walking into a bank with guns blazing. A bumbling gang member accidentally alerts the police, and after a failed attempt to airlift the bank vault right out of the building, the Saints are captured by the cops. It's only afterwards that they learn the bank is run by a major international crime organization known as the Syndicate.

After bribing the cops, the leader of the Syndicate brings the Saints leader Johnny Gat and Shaundi aboard and a gunfight ensues mid-air. You and Shaundi manage an exciting escape, with Johnny presumed dead after staying behind to buy you a few extra minutes. With the Syndicate in full control of Stillwater, the Saints begin to set up in the new city of Steelport.

Throughout the campaign, you'll battle through three gangs - The Morning Star, Luchadores, and Deckers - before taking on the Syndicate. In fact, most of the biggest and most powerful weaponry and vehicles won't be unlocked until over halfway through the game, when you eventually face the military brought in by the mayor to combat the rising gang violence in the city.

The missions themselves are quite varied, and many have objectives or scenes that will leave you laughing your butt off. In one example, an enemy is trying to ram you with a private jet, sparking the line "don't get upset, but I think they're trying to ram us with that plane". You subsequently kick your way through the windscreen, knock out the pilot, and in one fell swoop fly out through the loading bay. According to the lead designer on the game, this specific scene was inspired from a scene in the Schwarzenegger thriller "Eraser". Another great example is a mission where, in an effort to "face your fear", you're required to drive around the city with a tiger in the passenger seat, which feels the need to maul you whenever you collide with pretty much anything. In the co-operative campaign, the second player can try and comfort the tiger, but it won't help much when he's clawing your face off. This scene in particular reminded us of "The Hangover", and left us on the floor laughing. You'll even recognize specific tie-ins to previous games in the series. In one of the missions you'll hear a character referencing a time when a sewage truck went out of control and starting spraying crap all over the place, an obvious reference to one of the activities in the second game.

Speaking of activities, through completing odd jobs and side missions you're able to earn extra cash and respect. Many of the popular activities from the previous Saints games have returned. My personal favourites: insurance fraud where your goal is to "ragdoll" in front of oncoming vehicles and collect the insurance money, trail blazing where you drive a flaming ATV across the city, causing anything and everything you touch to explode, and guardian angel where you're tasked with protecting a person of interest with a sniper rifle and rocket launchers. You'll also find new activities such as Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax, a Japanese game show where you're goal is to kill as many people as possible while traversing through a studio of death.

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