In the first two Saints Row games, which each play like a lampoon of Grand Theft Auto, you start at the bottom, working you way up from street punk to the king of the hill. In Saints Row The Third (SRTT), however, you kick things off at the tippy-top of the teetering pile of celebrity crime syndicates, complicit in criminal activity for the thrill and prestige of it - rather than out of any real necessity.

This was immediately rammed home to us when we kicked off a new game in our hands on session recently. We started the game by raiding a bank - wearing giant rubber masks that depicted... ourselves. Not only is the status of your crew made clear through the dialogue between the members of the team, it's reinforced by frequent opportunities to sign autographs or sightings of Saints-branded energy drinks and other miscellaneous merchandise.

The Saints, it seems, have made it.

Of course, sitting back and counting piles of cash wouldn't make for much of a game, so very early on we find ourselves embroiled in a turf war between rival factions - the result, in fact, of that bank robbery we started the game with. This all plays out in a series of high-intensity, high-energy missions, in which you're introduced (or re-introduced - Saints 2 was three years ago, after all) to the game's mechanics and general feel.

It's violent and funny - a rare combination, and one that fits the mayhem like a glove. Whether it's gunning down the heavily armed bank security while wearing an enormous, cartoon caricature mask of your character (think: bobblehead), or having a machine gun fight in mid-air while falling from a plane and trying to dodge the comically numerous tumbling ex-contents of that same plane, the action is indescribably, viscerally, fun.

There's a sequence - spoiler alert - for example, where the enemy attempts to ram you, while you dangle from a parachute, with an aeroplane. Already comedic, the ludicrous nature of the situation is dialled way north of 9,000 by the way that you deal with it. Despite the spoiler tag, I won't detail it here - let's just say, you've never done anything like this before and you will play through the entire sequence with a grin reminiscent of The Joker. It's epic.

The streets of Stilwater - despite, or perhaps because of the Saint's activities - are still a seedy, dangerous place to be. Gangs roam around and the cops are quick on the trigger finger, which made us ever grateful of the pre-order content that our preview build was pre-loaded with.

The amusing Octopuss gun, for example, achieves its enemy-dominating ability resplendent in pop-up text that wouldn't be out of place on a Japanese game show. Turning a heavily-armed copper against his pals is an ability that's not to be scoffed at, either.

The leisure suit, though, was less successful - the mask in particular was so enormous that it made some of the sniping missions, etc, quite a lot more challenging than was perhaps intended due to the sheer amount of screen real-estate that it managed to obscure. It definitely increased the amusement we gleaned from the (already fun) ways in which you can piledrive pedestrians, though.

Launching said pedestrians out of the Man-a-pult is about as fun as you can imagine it would be, although ballistic bystanders seemed to have little effect when fired at vehicles. They do make a satisfying splat (complete with appropriate sound effects) when impacting signs, walls, or other vehicles, though...

After tooling around in the single-player game for a while, we jumped out and spent the rest of our (extensive!) hands-on time with the newly announced Whored mode. Yeah, whored. As you may be able to guess, it's Saints Row's irreverant take on the wave-based co-operative multiplayer modes that are taking multiplayer games by storm at the moment.

Basically, it boils down something like this: you jump into a map at which point you're given a specific weapon and must use it to defeat a wave of a particular enemy type. Sounds like any other horde-like mode, right? Mostly. However it's in the details that Saints Row manages to carve out its own niche here.

For example, one wave saw us fending off energetic nymphs with just a huge purple dildo, while another showed scores of angry minature valkyrie-like minions closing in on us with high-powered sniper rifles - fortunately our own sniper rifle was capable of exploding them in a satisfying burst of gore with a single shot.

Other rounds set us up with all sorts of comedic situations and weapons, resulting in the same frantic wave-based escalation in difficulty but with an all-new fun factor. It's like Serious Sam, in many ways, but with dildos instead of double-barrels.

We left the experience with a huge grin on our faces, hungry for more - hell, the only reason we left in the first place is because they were doing the old watch-glancing, vacuuming-around-your-feet, "isn't it about time you f&%ked off?" hinting that generally implied our time was up.

Still, it's not that long to wait now - Saints Row: The Third is out on the 18th of November, a scant three weeks away. It's got some stiff competition, of course, but we reckon SRTT could be just the tonic when it comes time to lighten the mood from the more serious tone set by it's competitors.

Keep an eye out for our full review soon!

Saints Row The Third Hands On

By Alan Bell

Xbox 360/PS3