I wishlisted this after watching Sakura Miko play (highly recommended), and a friend got it for me on sale. I'm really only interested in the online.
It is a very odd mix of hilarious gameplay, bizarre design decisions, geological load times, and one of the worst interfaces I've ever had the displeasure to wade through.
Just getting into a mission with a friend is an arduous task, and frequently fails. Typically one or both will hang in a forever-loading state or have to leave (and leaving sessions is bad!). Just finding or sending invites is a painful slog through the awful menus. And when you do make it, often the host will have some ultra -retard mode on that makes no sense. Like some kind of team event with team sizes of 1 so everyone just shoots each other.
You get these nonstop popup notifications which are utterly useless as you have no way to click on them. Lately most of mine have been about my fake money making factory which vanished off the map so I couldn't even find it. I tried to just sell it but there's actually no way to sell property. You have to keep buying till you hit the limit and then replace the property you no longer want. I did this and I only got the option to trade in my best place. None of the others were even in the list.
As a result of all that assgoblinry I now own 7 properties, and the limit is supposed to be 6? I have no idea what is going on. One made me the boss of a bike gang, one made me CEO of a corporation which didn't take my name so is named "An Organization".
The version I got comes with this criminal enterprise stuff, where you can set up like counterfeiting, or gun running etc. They seem to have extremely slim profit margins and you are basically food for hacking kids that can completely ruin your missions. I shut them off and would sell them if I could as they gank money out of your bank daily.
The radio stations are great, the clothes are great, the tattoos are so-so (saints row 2/3 is the best for tats). All the voice acting is top notch. But they just don't do enough asshole-mitigation or bugfixing to make the online great.
My guess is that "whats a server?" - "Welcome to Ubisoft!" guy got fired from Ubi and hired at Rockstar.
Despite all the negativity I've been having fun. Just hauling ass around town in fast car, pickin up hookers (though the animations don't really work for girls) and buying clothes and all the minigames and stuff. Fun times!
Someone was spamming like crazy. I'm guessing that's supposed to be chinese