I have a confession to make

I really, really enjoy Saints Row 3. Granted, I'm only a couple hours in, but I still really enjoy it. Even my four year old enjoys the driving portion of the game - "aim for the pimp, son!"

I didn't pick it up at first because I was still working on Dead Island and BF3 when it first came out. Within the first week or two after it was released, the reviews began to paint a less-than-perfect picture of the game. There are a number of threads in our Sandbox Gaming forum that supported the idea that the game was incomplete and not the huge step forward from SR2 that everybody expected.

I'm a huge fan of the genre - I still remember all the kids in my dorm huddled around my computer in 1998, playing the original Grand Theft Auto. So while I was relieved I didn't pay full price at launch, I still wanted to play the game. With a couple game trades, Best Buy reward certificates and last week's sale I grabbed the game for $1 and change.

If you haven't played it, the first few missions include a massive bank heist in which you're standing on a safe, hoisted by a helicopter, shooting at SWAT teams while the safe crashes into adjacent skyscrapers; a skydiving shoot-out in which you shoot through the cockpit window of a plane and shoot at bad guys while free-falling through the cargo area of the plane, and destroying tanks with guided missiles via a military satellite link. That's all within the first 30 minutes of the game.

The only complaint I had about Saints Row 2 was that the location was (more or less) the same city as the first game. SR2 had improved on everything within that city, but some of the similarities felt repetitive after having played SR. SR3 feels completely fresh in its new city and with its new gangs while retaining the same mechanics that made SR2 a ton of fun.

Maybe I'm not far enough into the game to experience the same reasons for complaints other site members have. Either way, I'm thoroughly enjoying it and I think it was a dollar well spent. Hell, I'd probably even be willing to pay $2 for the game.

Oh, and the instant clincher for me - it's the first time I've ever seen a truck that even closely resembles my own vehicle in a video game.