 Edge said that the series "wants to be the WarioWare of open-city games", "a cartoon flipbook of anything-goes extremity" to Grand Theft Auto's "ostentatious crime drama". They wrote that the game's "single-minded" "puerile imagination" demanded respect and noted the game's escalation of video game tropes and cultural references from Japanese game shows to text adventures to zombie apocalypses to lucha libre. Famitsu described the game as "' pop 'crime action", and IGN's Daemon Hatfield called the game "an open world adult theme park". He said that calling it "a good time would be a severe understatement" and praised its method of incentivizing almost every action in the game as "fantastic game design". Hatfield was "addicted" to efficiently expanding his in-game hourly income. GamesRadar's Michael Grimm wrote Saints Row: The Third was nearly surreal, and praised the player-character's running attacks.
