(Publisher: THQ / Developer: Volition / Platform: Xbox 360 / Release Date: November 15, 2011)

After two warm-up acts that were each a little wackier than the one before it, Saints Row: The Third is officially and enthusiastically going “full crazy” (to borrow from Tropic Thunder). Yes, nothing is off-limits this time around, from clubbing old women with giant purple “personal massagers” to donning a furry costume while socking random pedestrians in the groin. Amusingly, our hands-on time in The Third’s brand-new city of Steelport included exactly zero-percent of the main story arc (in which your Third Street Saints gang is threatened by a criminal supergroup known as The Syndicate). And you know, we didn’t even mind. Here are the top five craziest things we discovered during our first free-roaming hour in Steelport.

1) The Reaper Drone

Everybody plays Call of Duty — even game designers. Clearly, the crew at Volition enjoyed raining death from above on their foes with the Predator Missile in Modern Warfare 2, and now the same option awaits your joystick-twiddling hands in Saints Row. Simply pop open the briefcase anywhere you like (we recommend finding somewhere quiet, like the rooftop of a building), and you’ll be given a bird’s-eye view of the city. Launch your rocket and then manually steer it from an on-board first-person camera, speeding it up with RT or slowing it down with LT for maximum street-navigating precision. Alternatively, you can pull off similar carnage by whipping out the handheld airstrike gun, which works a bit like Gears of War’s Hammer of Dawn. Hell yes.

2) The Apoca-fist

Young or old, male or fe…OK, maybe just the guys, but who doesn’t like to play with Hulk Hands? SMASH! The new Saints Row brings the ultimate version of that fantasy to life, allowing you to don the giant-fist gloves, take a swing at anyone who so much as looks at you funny, and instantly explode them into a pulpy red mist. They won’t always be the preferred method of attack — don’t expect to last long with them when you’re surrounded by trigger-happy cops, for instance — but if an innocent pedestrian gets in your way or a gangster mouths off, you’ve got the perfect way to ensure they’ll never do it again. It’s probably just a happy coincidence, but we’re going to pretend that the designers are paying homage to the original Doom’s Berserker mode here.

3) The Mollusk Cannon

What looks like an ordinary rocket launcher is equally deadly but in fact much more hilarious. Riffing on the left-field craziness of Japanese manga, the Mollusk Cannon fires living octopi that mumble random broken-English phrases such as “Why you want to hurt me?” as they fly through the air and stick to their targets. Once latched, they mind-control your foes, causing them to temporarily fight for you until you decide to press RB and detonate them — preferably in the middle of a crowded intersection packed with the Luchadores, Deckers, or other rival street gangs.

4) The Man-apult

This aptly named vehicle might be the funniest thing ever. Drive it around and point the giant bumper-mounted vacuum at pedestrians. It inhales and stashes up to six of them at a time (making a giggle-worthy “thoop” sound as it sucks each person in), then lets you fire them out of the roof-mounted cannon with violent results. And though we didn’t get to try it out, we’re told you can gobble up and spit out your buddy in a co-op game. Griefers rejoice!

5) The Stag Tank

Tanks aren’t exactly new to open-world games, but we took extra delight in The Third’s implementation of the beefy war machine. Thanks to new vehicle deformation tech, you can now literally pancake both entire cars and specific sections of them. We couldn’t help but maniacally laugh as we plowed through intersections, ending police chases by crunching over just the front of their squad cars so that they no longer had an engine to power their pursuit.

So Much More

Volition had to pry the gamepad out of our hands at the end of our session, but not before we also got to try out the increasingly ludicrous character-customization options (want to make a metallic-skinned 350-pound blue person? Do it!), the vast vehicle modification choices (underglow kits!), QTE-powered melee takedowns of scantily-clad female prostitutes (the cinematic camera this triggers is a crack-up), and way, way more. “Full crazy,” indeed.