A long time ago there was a review posted on The Escapist that I found wanting, so I hammered out one of my own. Then forgot about it. I found it again recently and decided I'd post it here.
The "Open-World Crime Game" genre has exploded in recent years ever
since Rockstar accidentially stumbled across the license to print
money that was Grand Theft Auto 3. It's controls were terrible, it's
missions idiotic and it's plot alternating between idiotic and crazy,
but it was FUN. Yes, you had to mornically chase a particular vehicle
around a huge and unintuitive city and then blow it up with a very
specific weapon, but after you did that, you were permitted to steal
an ambulance and drive-by a housing project while listening to a
faux-Public Radio station drone on about how gun control laws are for
communist states.
Ever since GTA 3 made giant fat gobs of money, other companies have
been looking to cash in on it's success, but very rarely have they
produced something you could hail as a success. Many of the GTA clones
are certainly open world, and they certainly have lots of crime, but
only very rarely are they any fun. Developers have had a tendency to
push the "idiotic mission" and "gritty crime drama" levers up, meaning
that players have to wade through a nonsensical plot and do all sorts
of silly stunts just to get back to killing police, which is the
reason they bought the game in the first place.
Enter Saints Row 2, a game by Volition, who already dipped their toe
in the water with Saints Row 1 a few years ago. Volition seems to have
learned a lot from Saints Row 1, the original GTA 3 and a number of
other open-world crime games (from here on referred to as OWCGs), and
the end result is a game with a few major flaws but which is, over
all, exceedingly fun.
You know Volition got it right when the first thing you get to do in
the game is create a custom character. One of the biggest draws to the
GTA series was that you could make your character have a specific
appearance or dress, and Volition has taken that to the extreme. You
can shoot up the city of Stillwater as a tiny geriatric Asian woman or
as a hulking grotesque Caucasian with a face only a mother baboon
could love. You the immediately set about killing police, which is, of
course, the whole reason one buys an OWCG.
From there, the game is open ended (as it SHOULD be) with an
overarching plot that you can get to whenever you feel like it, in
whatever order you feel like. There are a few initial objectives
involving capturing a new base of operations and carving out some
space for your gang to live in, but beyond that the player is free to
choose what missions they care to do as they see fit. There are three
enemy gangs (The Brotherhood, The Ronin and The Sons of Samedi) which
are all delightfully multicultural and equally poorly equipped. Most
gang missions are simple "go over there and blow up something" style
missions, and pretty much all of the game's objectives can be
conquered through the use of bullets and satchel charges.
Many gamers have complained that in order to unlock these gang
missions, it is necessary to have a certain level of "respect."
Respect is earned by purchasing fancy vehicles, doing stunts, buying
clothes, and completing missions. The amount of respect earned by
doing these things is enhanced by wearing crazy outfits, jewelry and
tattoos. This, along with the rapid availability of easy missions,
means that respect is very easy to get, especially since completing
gang missions gives large loads of respect just like completing
non-gang missions does. When playing the game, I found that I needed
nothing more than to play through all twelve missions of "Fuzz" (a
take on COPS where one runs around the city in a cop car brutally
oppressing hippies and rednecks) to unlock enough respect to snowball
from one gang mission into the next. Halfway through my war with the
Sons of Samedi (the second gang I decided to wipe out) I found myself
with my respect completely maxed out, allowing me to take on anyone I
wanted whenever I wanted.
The point where Saints Row 2 really shines, however, is in the
multiplayer aspect. Yes, it has some very fun multiplayer games that
encompass the typical sorts of multiplayer modes these days
(Deathmatch, King of the Hill, Protect Some Guy, etc.) but the biggest
advantage of Saints Row 2 is that you can bring along a friend for
every mission. Unlike the idiot NPC gang members, these actual real
people can pick up decent weapons and steal decent cars and then
provide covering fire while you focus on important things, like
driving or having sex in the back seat. The game literally begs you to
play with other people, allowing random other players to seamlessly
drop in or out of your game unless you flip a switch to make them keep
out. I played Saints Row 2 almost exclusively with a good friend of
mine, and quite frankly it's the most fun we've had with our Xbox Live
subscriptions.
The game is not without it's flaws, however. The massive open world is
prone to crashing when there's too many ragdolls and exploded cars
flying around, and the bugs and glitches often cause hours of work to
go down the drain. The driving physics is okay, but keeping a car
going in a straight line, or dodging the idiotic traffic, is painfully
difficult. The flying mechanics could also use a lot of work,
especially in regards to the airplanes. The helicopters are all right,
which is good since many missions require the use of an assault
copter. The planes, however, are slow, clumsy, have gigantic turning
radiuses, and end up being largely not worth the trouble of even
stealing.
The game is also plagued by idiotic, overly difficult or just plain
not-fun missions, as seems to be some sort of horrible requirement for
OWCGs. For every mission where I get to drive around killing hippies
or spraying raw sewage on corporate headquarters, I had to slog
through an idiotic mission filled with poorly defined objectives and
enemies which magically teleported in behind me in an infinite stream
of physics defying vehicles. The DLC packs included in the game are
particularly cruel in this regard, since not only are they not very
fun, they dupe one into spending more money on the game in hopes of
getting more playtime out of it.
On a positive note, however, the world of Stillwater is fantastic, and
perfectly suited for the nature of the game. Cars are everywhere and
easily stolen, guns and ammo are everywhere, an infinite array of
shops permit a player to customize their character and vehicle to the
point of absurdity, and damn near everything in the game is a joke.
While some are more overt and easy to find (such as restaraunt names
like Freckle *****'s, Two Scoops, One Cup and Phuc Mi Phuc Yu) there
are also a great number of hilarious quiet jokes and secret areas such
as the crypt which leads into a redneck's secret necrophiliac sex
dungeon or the Volition Shrine located far off the coast. The game
world begs for you to explore it and rewards you at every opportunity
for doing so.
So is Saints Row 2 worth the money? Yes, it is. It's silly and
cartoony and has nothing even approaching the pretense of a serious
crime game, making it not only a great escape, but relatively guilt
free. The citizens of Stillwater are so corrupt and so stupid that you
feel like you're doing them a favor when you set them on fire or run
them over with a bus, and in a town where setting fire to an entire
city block is considered a "hilarious college prank" you don't feel
very bad about large scale destruction. It's this tounge-in-cheek,
cartoon nature that keeps the game fun and playable even through the
frustrating and/or stupid parts. The fact that you can chew through
all this madness with your best bud or some random person off the
internet also really adds to the game, because the only thing better
than mass mudering mimes is mass murdering mimes with a friend.
The "Open-World Crime Game" genre has exploded in recent years ever
since Rockstar accidentially stumbled across the license to print
money that was Grand Theft Auto 3. It's controls were terrible, it's
missions idiotic and it's plot alternating between idiotic and crazy,
but it was FUN. Yes, you had to mornically chase a particular vehicle
around a huge and unintuitive city and then blow it up with a very
specific weapon, but after you did that, you were permitted to steal
an ambulance and drive-by a housing project while listening to a
faux-Public Radio station drone on about how gun control laws are for
communist states.
Ever since GTA 3 made giant fat gobs of money, other companies have
been looking to cash in on it's success, but very rarely have they
produced something you could hail as a success. Many of the GTA clones
are certainly open world, and they certainly have lots of crime, but
only very rarely are they any fun. Developers have had a tendency to
push the "idiotic mission" and "gritty crime drama" levers up, meaning
that players have to wade through a nonsensical plot and do all sorts
of silly stunts just to get back to killing police, which is the
reason they bought the game in the first place.
Enter Saints Row 2, a game by Volition, who already dipped their toe
in the water with Saints Row 1 a few years ago. Volition seems to have
learned a lot from Saints Row 1, the original GTA 3 and a number of
other open-world crime games (from here on referred to as OWCGs), and
the end result is a game with a few major flaws but which is, over
all, exceedingly fun.
You know Volition got it right when the first thing you get to do in
the game is create a custom character. One of the biggest draws to the
GTA series was that you could make your character have a specific
appearance or dress, and Volition has taken that to the extreme. You
can shoot up the city of Stillwater as a tiny geriatric Asian woman or
as a hulking grotesque Caucasian with a face only a mother baboon
could love. You the immediately set about killing police, which is, of
course, the whole reason one buys an OWCG.
From there, the game is open ended (as it SHOULD be) with an
overarching plot that you can get to whenever you feel like it, in
whatever order you feel like. There are a few initial objectives
involving capturing a new base of operations and carving out some
space for your gang to live in, but beyond that the player is free to
choose what missions they care to do as they see fit. There are three
enemy gangs (The Brotherhood, The Ronin and The Sons of Samedi) which
are all delightfully multicultural and equally poorly equipped. Most
gang missions are simple "go over there and blow up something" style
missions, and pretty much all of the game's objectives can be
conquered through the use of bullets and satchel charges.
Many gamers have complained that in order to unlock these gang
missions, it is necessary to have a certain level of "respect."
Respect is earned by purchasing fancy vehicles, doing stunts, buying
clothes, and completing missions. The amount of respect earned by
doing these things is enhanced by wearing crazy outfits, jewelry and
tattoos. This, along with the rapid availability of easy missions,
means that respect is very easy to get, especially since completing
gang missions gives large loads of respect just like completing
non-gang missions does. When playing the game, I found that I needed
nothing more than to play through all twelve missions of "Fuzz" (a
take on COPS where one runs around the city in a cop car brutally
oppressing hippies and rednecks) to unlock enough respect to snowball
from one gang mission into the next. Halfway through my war with the
Sons of Samedi (the second gang I decided to wipe out) I found myself
with my respect completely maxed out, allowing me to take on anyone I
wanted whenever I wanted.
The point where Saints Row 2 really shines, however, is in the
multiplayer aspect. Yes, it has some very fun multiplayer games that
encompass the typical sorts of multiplayer modes these days
(Deathmatch, King of the Hill, Protect Some Guy, etc.) but the biggest
advantage of Saints Row 2 is that you can bring along a friend for
every mission. Unlike the idiot NPC gang members, these actual real
people can pick up decent weapons and steal decent cars and then
provide covering fire while you focus on important things, like
driving or having sex in the back seat. The game literally begs you to
play with other people, allowing random other players to seamlessly
drop in or out of your game unless you flip a switch to make them keep
out. I played Saints Row 2 almost exclusively with a good friend of
mine, and quite frankly it's the most fun we've had with our Xbox Live
subscriptions.
The game is not without it's flaws, however. The massive open world is
prone to crashing when there's too many ragdolls and exploded cars
flying around, and the bugs and glitches often cause hours of work to
go down the drain. The driving physics is okay, but keeping a car
going in a straight line, or dodging the idiotic traffic, is painfully
difficult. The flying mechanics could also use a lot of work,
especially in regards to the airplanes. The helicopters are all right,
which is good since many missions require the use of an assault
copter. The planes, however, are slow, clumsy, have gigantic turning
radiuses, and end up being largely not worth the trouble of even
stealing.
The game is also plagued by idiotic, overly difficult or just plain
not-fun missions, as seems to be some sort of horrible requirement for
OWCGs. For every mission where I get to drive around killing hippies
or spraying raw sewage on corporate headquarters, I had to slog
through an idiotic mission filled with poorly defined objectives and
enemies which magically teleported in behind me in an infinite stream
of physics defying vehicles. The DLC packs included in the game are
particularly cruel in this regard, since not only are they not very
fun, they dupe one into spending more money on the game in hopes of
getting more playtime out of it.
On a positive note, however, the world of Stillwater is fantastic, and
perfectly suited for the nature of the game. Cars are everywhere and
easily stolen, guns and ammo are everywhere, an infinite array of
shops permit a player to customize their character and vehicle to the
point of absurdity, and damn near everything in the game is a joke.
While some are more overt and easy to find (such as restaraunt names
like Freckle *****'s, Two Scoops, One Cup and Phuc Mi Phuc Yu) there
are also a great number of hilarious quiet jokes and secret areas such
as the crypt which leads into a redneck's secret necrophiliac sex
dungeon or the Volition Shrine located far off the coast. The game
world begs for you to explore it and rewards you at every opportunity
for doing so.
So is Saints Row 2 worth the money? Yes, it is. It's silly and
cartoony and has nothing even approaching the pretense of a serious
crime game, making it not only a great escape, but relatively guilt
free. The citizens of Stillwater are so corrupt and so stupid that you
feel like you're doing them a favor when you set them on fire or run
them over with a bus, and in a town where setting fire to an entire
city block is considered a "hilarious college prank" you don't feel
very bad about large scale destruction. It's this tounge-in-cheek,
cartoon nature that keeps the game fun and playable even through the
frustrating and/or stupid parts. The fact that you can chew through
all this madness with your best bud or some random person off the
internet also really adds to the game, because the only thing better
than mass mudering mimes is mass murdering mimes with a friend.
