Saints Row The Third: Initiation Station – First Impression

I cannot even begin to explain my level of excitement when I got my hands on the Saints Row The Third: Initiation Station beta. Going in, I honestly knew nothing about it other than the fact that it was a “beta” for a game that I am extremely excited about. I regularly describe Saints Row The Third as a game that is going to be a amazingly-stupid fun game.

Upon starting up the Initiation Station, a hilarious infomercial video ran, describing the ability to create a character for Saints Row The Third, upload said character, and play with them in the game when it releases on November 15th. You are also supposed to be able to upload your character once you create it and submit it to the Saints Row community at the Saints Row website.
Little did I know, the way you went about creating these characters was via the Initiation Station.

Once I launched the “beta” the first thing you see after the short video mentioned earlier, is a defaulted character that has already been created. There are four options to choose from initially, Customize Character, Customize Clothing, Customize Tattoos, and Upload Character. Once I dove into customizing my character, his clothes were instantly removed leaving me with an eye shot full of man bulges. This set the pace for the entire experience that I was about to ingest. Once in Customize Character, you are able to choose between specific characteristic such as body, face, hair, make-up, and personality. So I decided, what better way to begin that starting at the top.

My first character that I wanted to make was a mental representation of what I would look like, so I started off pretty simple: Male, Asian, and matched up my skin tone. The build option was a little odd though; to set your character’s build you are given a triangle where the three corners are Strength, Skinny, and Fat followed by a percentage. This made it a little difficult to put in my beer belly but still have my skinny legs, arms, and face, so I did the best I could. Body Mask allows you to give your character tan lines with four options, two of which were for females, but the “Farmer Tan” didn’t seem to do anything for my guy. I set my age, and saw the “Sex Appeal” stat which had a scroll bar. I wasn’t sure what it was for (perhaps make my character more buff?) so I started changing it around only to behold my character’s “man parts” growing and shrinking.

This was only the tip of the iceberg so to speak, the level of customization in this Imitation Station is ludicrous. You can adjust literally every aspect of your characters face, I’m talking about Crown, Forehead, Brow, Eyes, Eye Color, Ears, Cheekbones, Nose, Mouth, Chin, Jaw, and each one has dozens of additional options to adjust from 0-100. There are fifty different hair styles to choose from, twenty-seven different facial hair options, over a dozen different eyebrows, the list just keeps going on and on. You also have a plethora of different taunts and compliments to choose from, and after about ten minutes of still not being able to decide, I just gave up and chose to go with the “eff you two” (flipping two birds), and the souljah boy dance.

Once I was done making my character look just how I wanted him (I was already a good 30 minutes invested into this character mind you), it was time to dress him. It took me a few minutes to actually browse through the entire list of clothing as there are over 30 different headgear items, from mascot heads to S-n-M mouth zipper masks, twenty different pieces of eye-wear, and dozens upon dozens of upper body, lower body, wrists, piercings, outfits and suits to choose from.

After about two hours of creating my new character, I went to upload him and was promted to create a THQ profile; The process was quick and easy and my new creation seemed to have uploaded without a problem, that is until I went to the Saints Row website and logged in. My character simply was not there. Ok, I thought, perhaps it takes some time for the character to upload; I went ahead and created two more characters, one that looked like Shaft and another that looked like some one straight out of the matrix, uploaded them and waited till morning. This morning I woke and still no characters. I just finished making one more character, uploaded, and still nothing. I honestly had a lot of fun making these characters and have no doubt that Saints Row The Third will be hella fun, but I will be pretty upset if all the time I put into these character were for naught.