Saints Row: The Third isn’t a sandbox crime game. You don’t play a criminal. You don’t run around committing crimes. You play a freaking supervillain. This isn’t an exaggeration.

By the time I got through the game, I lived in a nuclear plant, had an attack helicopter, an army of ninjas, and dressed in a green waistcoat and top hat like a steampunk Riddler.

How am I not a supervillain?

Like Saints Row 2 threw out the gang drama and most serious subjects in favor of sheer destruction, Saints Row: The Third further steps away from reality. There are clones. There’s virtual reality. There are paramilitary forces with their own supercarrier. There are zombies. This isn’t a game about just running around and capturing neighborhoods anymore. You’re trying to get the entire city of Steelport in your insane iron grip, and you get a lot of toys to do it.

It’s basically the same game as Saints Row 2, but in a different city. You can upgrade your weapons in addition to your vehicles, and you can also pay money for perks instead of earning them just through doing all of one type of mission. You can get a few bonuses for doing all the activities, but most bonuses come from getting levels through respect points and paying money for things like extra ammo or nitro on all cars. Running around, driving, shooting, all of that’s pretty much the same. It’s definitely worth saving up to completely max out your pistols, because dual-wielded, fully-upgraded 45′s can cut through even armored enemies with ease.

There are plenty of activities for making money, getting respect, and taking control of neighborhoods. There are the classics from Saints Row 2 like Snatch and Trail Blazer, plus a few new ones. Unfortunately, the best activity from Saints Row 2, Septic Avenger, is nowhere to be seen. There better be some poo-spraying DLC in the future, Volition! Professor Genki’s Ethical Reality Climax is the biggest new activity, and unfortunately it’s not that unique. There are enemies in funny costumes and pop-up animal targets, but it amounts to just a series of shooting gallery gauntlets, where you have to earn money by shooting people and then get to the end of the maze. That’s it, and it’s unfortunately not as fun as it sounds and doesn’t reach the levels of wackiness shown in the commercials for the game or implied by the very nature of Japanese game shows. It’s just another run-and-gun activity, like the game’s missions.

Fortunately, what craziness the Professor Genki bits lack the rest of the game has in spades. You can beat people to death with a four-foot dildo or giant fists that make them explode. You can shoot people with a mega buster or a sonic boom weapon that makes them pop like water balloons. You can drive around in a neon green voxel tank that fires cubes or a light cycle. You can fly a fighter jet or a high-tech VTOL motorcycle. You can dress like a furry or a spaceman. There’s a lot of weird shit out there you can enjoy.

Steelport isn’t much of a change from Stilwater, but Stilwater felt like it had more distinct neighborhoods. Besides the military base, nuclear plant, and airport, the city of Steelport kind of blurs together into an indistinct urban mass. It’s unfortunate, because a game with this much personality needs a setting with personality, and Steelport doesn’t deliver. It’s a functional sandbox, but compared to Stilwater, San Andreas, and Liberty City, it feels a bit bland. The Saints’ strongholds look great and the mission settings have a lot of interesting appeal, but the city just doesn’t seem that interesting.

Saints Row: The Third isn’t a deep or engrossing game, but it doesn’t try to be. It knows it’s there to fulfill our desire for insanity and violence, and provides a loose structure that lets you do it. It knows what it wants, and it gives it to you without pretenses. If you loved Saints Row 2, if you felt bored or stifled by the drama of Grand Theft Auto 4, and if you like the idea of flying around a cardboard city, mowing down crowds of people with various weapons, Saints Row: The Third is your game.