okay so before you go in:
- install it on the drive steam is installed on or it might crash
- do not alt tab, it creates instability and makes the game liable to crash and stutter
- lock the game to 60fps with something like RivaTuner (bundled with msi afterburner) or graphical bugs and physics glitches happen
- don't play on hardcore unless you hate yourself. It's more annoying than hard since it just ramps up the numbers on all the enemies. Cars become made of paper mache due to the increased damage numbers, making you constantly change cars in trafficking and wrestling with the AI to get into a new car.
On hardcore, the game usually breaks before you do. Examples:
In snatch missions, the five second animation that plays when a ho/contact gets up off the ground is enough to get enemies to do enough damage to destroy your car, so you end up having to recruit them, driving away for a moment, then driving back once the animation finishes playing. Escort missions Brutes take entire magazines until you unlock weapons that actually do damage.
In the Trouble With Clones DLC, the helicopters shoot rockets at Jimmy's car, and it's literally impossible to destroy the helicopters before they shoot that first rocket (if you get bad RNG they shoot you the same frame that they enter your FOV). I got stuck in a loop of getting hit with multiple unavoidable rockets and restarting. I had to turn the difficulty down because despite memorizing the spawns, I still wasn't able to destroy them fast enough to stop the car from being destroyed.
In one of the main story missions where you first fly the VTOL, the heightened damage numbers caused enemies to accidentally destroy the VTOLs before I could even see them.
In hardcore there are so many enemies with high health pools that when you don't have many upgrades unlocked, the ideal path is to just avoid even fighting them and just run straight through to reach objectives since your guns are as effective as a wet fart and you were born with glass bones and paper skin.
The human shield mechanic is effectively pointless as they get instantly eviscerated by the high damage so the play style you adopt to kill things is mag dumping around corners since you can shoot enemies while they can't shoot you.
The pitiful damage you do on all difficulties with bodyshots makes the ideal way to play to just headshot everything with the aggressive aim assist. Saints row 4 improved a lot on this with making all of the weapons feel viable to use.
Not having Gat in this game kind of sucked, but the writing was nice. The three gangs you fight against have a lot of character and feel unique, and killbane being hyped up throughout the game and culminating in a climax where you fight him in a wrestling ring feels awesome, but it feels cheapened by "oh shaundi is gonna die or you can kill killbane" but why couldn't we have both? Why couldn't we have a fully satisfying ending where we both save Shaundi and kill killbane? Why even give us the choice when saving Shaundi is both the canon option, AND the less lame choice ("I need a hero" plays as you drive over to save her)
Many of the options in the game feel contrived with either an obvious choice (nyte blade as a homie or save three hours of district takeover gameplay) and was satirized in Saints Row 4 (as president, choose to stop world hunger or cure cancer)
I didn't like the permanent map changes, I wish that upon completion of the game you could bring the thermopylae or the aircraft carrier into the open world, or the zombie invasion on Arapice island could be toggled.
but the game does have a lot of fun and original mechanics.
Despite being completely unserious and lacking in gritty themes like previous saints row games, it does its own thing and has quite a bit of charm.
All of the activities are things you can't find anywhere else. Despite being braindead easy (unlike saints row 4 where getting gold on all of the activities was moderately difficult), they are still extremely fun.
Tank mayhem is my favorite activity, and watching the combo meter go up as you aim for bundles of street clutter (fences, newspaper boxes, etc.) and then destroying something actually worth some proper cash to get combos in the millions feels orgasmic.
Insurance fraud is a lot of fun, propelling your ragdolled self into oncoming traffic with lowered gravity from adrenaline will never not be fun.
Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax is literally just an arena where health is granted from pickups instead of regenerating like the base game. It's a lot of fun racking up a combo, but the timer is a non-threat and the cash goal is met without even having to think about it.
Other than that, I have 100%'ed this game 3 times. It's really good, and addicting to go through and do everything. It has bugs and glitchiness, but it's a fun game with lots of charm and silliness. Saints row 4 definitely improved upon the formula, but I still go back to this from time to time.