Saints Row 2

Reclaim the Saints in brutal, stylish fashion.

Saints Row 2 is a sandbox style adventure which follows on where the original Saints Row left off. As the game begins you wake up from your long term coma in a dingy prison hospital. An affiliate of your old but now defunct gang hears of your waking and comes to lend a hand and the fun begins...

On first impressions, the game seems a little lacking. The graphics aren’t great in the cutscenes or the gameplay, the voice acting isn’t the best and there are noticeable framerate issues. When you first take control and start your escape, the controls feel very lightweight and aiming and shooting feels awkward. However, once you get used to the controls and the feel of the game it becomes a lot more comfortable and is no longer an issue. Sure, the bugs tend to remain (characters ’popping’ out of cars if there is no room to open a door, for example) and the AI isn’t the most intuitive. Yet this game has a sort of charm about it that soon grips you and pushes these issues into the background.

Once the gameplay opens up and you take a look around your map of a vastly changed and expanded Stilwater, you see straight away that there is plenty to explore, many places to go and the choice is all yours. Of course comparisons to GTA IV are going to be rife, and it is indeed a pretty shameless copy of the central idea. There are mini-games to be discovered, side missions to accomplish, a main story to be advanced, or you can just go kill crazy until the SWAT teams and choppers come out in force. Its very cathartic.

The driving aspect of the game is notable in that it leans towards the more arcade feel, i.e easier to control, rather than the more realistic feel of GTA games. The racing and stunt missions are great fun and the cars look very tasty going at high speeds, with surroundings just starting to blur in the peripheral vision at high speeds, which is a nice touch.

The city itself is richly designed and there is plenty to discover in the various buildings, and the inhabitants add their own character to the city. I even heard one randomly muttering the bastardized lyrics of a Johnny Cash song, which fitted perfectly to the character’s demeanor - another nice touch.

As for the missions, the city is divided up into 45 ’hoods, and as you go through the mission some will come under your control and some will have to be taken by force. This in turn increases your respect levels, your cash flow and your ability to recruit gang members (homies) and purchase new ’cribs’ where you can save games, change clothes, get cash and weapons, you get the picture.

The customization features of the game are a major plus point too. Your character is completely yours to create. Gender, skin tone, weight, clothes - right down to socks, wristbands and T-shirt and hat logos, are all at your command. I may or may not have given my bad-ass gangster a frilly pink bra to wear under his shirt, just so he could be in touch with his feminine side...

The level of customization applies to your gang too, when you start building it. You can pick if you want them to look like ’pimps and ho’s’, sports casual, the choice is yours, even down to the type of car they choose to roll in. Same goes for your ’cribs’ - you can choose the decor, the size of the TV and the size of your desk if you choose. The more you spend, the more respect it earns you, in true gangster style.

All these mods you can make are only if you want to spend the time on them however. If you’d rather just cut to the chase, you have that option. The game can be as shallow or as complex as you like. If you take the time to upgrade cars, cribs etc, you earn more respect when you undertake missions; its all tied in to create a sense of genuine uniqueness.

The online aspect has a unique angle too. If you have a friend online who has the game, you can drop into his mission, help him out for a while then go back to your own game. Or vice versa. So you can co-operate on your single player mission, which is a very neat trick. Of course you can go on mindless rampages too, the choice is yours. There is no split screen feature, but for those who play online the deathmatch and missions are good carnage.

Overall, the comparisons with GTA will inevitably play a large part in the perceptions of this game. But it has its own charms and its own secrets to discover, and the sheer entertainment of the experience vastly overshadows any minor technical issues and will please any gamer for whom GTA is just a fading memory.

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