Release date: October 10, 2008 (Console)February 3, 2009 (Windows)
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Publisher: THQ
Developer: Volition Inc, CD Projekt (Windows)
Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Modes: Singleplayer Only
Saints Row, I cannot seem to get enough of it, it was a a while ago now that I saw the whole series on Steam sale and thought “Why not”? I enjoyed the Third installment, why not play the 4th and the rest of them legit? and so I did, albeit out of order. After playing the excellent Saints Row The Third and the insane Saints Row IV I was ready for more Saints Row but instead of going to Gat out of Hell I thought I would go back to the beginning. Though technically I couldn’t exactly go directly back to the beginning, the original Saints Row was on Xbox only, and although I do have access to an Xbox I really couldn’t be bothered buying the disc. So I decided to play Saints Row 2 which was apparently supposed to be the best one of the series and I admit I wasn’t disappointed but I wasn’t at all blown away either.
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| Just runnin' down the hood with my shotty |
The picks up a few years after the original Saints Row left
off, During this time, the 3rd Street Saints disband, and their legacy is
soon forgotten.[2]
With Julius
missing and the Saints gone, a power vacuum in Stilwater allowed three new
gangs to take over: The Brotherhood, The Sons
of Samedi, and The Ronin. You the protagonist and the exiled leader of
the Saints are in prison in a coma in the fictional city of Stilwater after
being blown off a yacht at the finale of the first game. Together with the
wannabe gangster Carlos Mendoza you break out of prison and head for
the mainland and shack up in this ratty old basement of
the Red Light district and man it is bad, of course you do have the option of
sprucing it up a bit which is pretty cool. There are various Cribs in the game similar to
Saints Row 3 and these can all be upgraded, your first crib has 3 overall
styles ‘cheap’, ‘classy’ and ‘pimp’ which gives each crib a makeover, The
classy style was nice for the time being having turned the basement into the
best thing it could be for a basement with carpet and painted walls and
pictures to make the place look nice and homely.
When out looking for clothes I
went pretty basic dressing up in normal jeans and sneakers with a basic tee and
a basketball jersey over the top with a 13 on the back, nice and practical, I
also added a bandana and a gold necklace for some flair as well as some rings
and a knuckle duster and a watch. All of the clothes apart from the jeans and jewelry
were coloured purple of course, I was pretty happy with the result.
After rescuing the infamous Johnny Gat
from custody you all then start rebuilding the 3rd Street Saints gang gaining members and fining
a new hideout. The Saints new
hideout is an interesting place being an abandoned hotel in an underground
area of the city called Old
Stilwater only accessible by going down into the basement, Johnny explains
that an earthquake destroyed part of the city, and that the wreckage was built
over so there’s a whole section of street with shops and traffic lights and a
rail car from the time the earthquake hit in the 50’s. This is pretty cool and
looks awesome though the area is overrun with bums and Samedi gang Members and
you basically just slaughter everyone and claim the place to yourself. You then
recruit old (or new) faces such as Pierce, and Shaundi and
then basically the progression and gameplay turns into the Saints Row 3 and 4
style where you have the option of doing main missions and side missions and
other activities slowly taking over the city.
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| My first crib, the Red Light Loft, looking better then before |
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| Second Crib the Penthouse Loft, oh yehhh |
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| You talking to me? |
I wasn’t exactly sure which mob to start with so I started
with the Ronin Missions. The Ronin were basically were a Yakuza-style gang, as it
seems all gangs have a particular colour, this gang’s colour is yellow. I’m not
going to spoil the story but this one had a fairly significant event in Johnny
Gat’s life that you replay in Saints Row 4 and boy did I love the Katana
battles, there’s a few of them in there too and interestingly you side with a
Chinese ally. I then battled the Sons
of Samedi which are a bunch of African Voodoo dudes who sell drugs, who you
choose Shaundi to investigate as per her drug addictions and knowledge of her
ex, the DJ
Veteran child who is working with the Samedi. Then finally you take on the The Brotherhood
where you get very personal with their Leader Maero. The last part of the
story revolves around the Ultor Corporation
and the young executive Dane
Vogel who becomes the game’s final antagonist, by defeating him and forming
an alliance with Ultor the Saints become the prominent power in Stilwater hence
the references in Saints Row the Third.
The Ronin "Kanto Connection" mission, I get my Samurai on. I like that shot at the start as I realise Pierce also wears a 13 on his shirt.
The activities were pretty usual of the series you had Heli
Assault and Insurance Fraud and Escort that I’ve
seen before but there was also new ones such as Crowd
Control where you are a bodyguard to celebrity and protect them from crazy
fans and Septic Avenger where you devalue real
estate by driving around in a waste truck and spraying shit on everything, I
enjoyed doing the Snatch mission again where you steal hookers from abusive
pimps and escort then back to supposedly a better life. A new one I really
liked was the FUZZ missions
which was like some sensationalistic version of the Cops TV series where
you bashed and murdered random criminals from drug addicts to prostitutes and
were encouraged to use increasingly brutal weapons such as the chainsaw, as you can
probably guess the game had its flair even back then. There were races as well
which were fun but overall the extra activities were pretty much like the other
games. By doing these activities you can gain more unlockables
which include abilities, weapons, homies, discounts and vehicles, I was happy
with gaining them as I went along doing missions but as I went on I soon looked
at getting particular abilities such as more health or infinite ammo for
certain guns and maybe even a certain vehicle I wanted, though there were
always lots of vehicles around.\
The FUZZ where you play as a Cop on a TV show, it's as ridiculous as it looks if the NSW Police weren't happy about the Police Mod then they certainly wouldn't like this.
Speaking of vehicles It was good to get to use them again
after playing Saints Row IV for the second time around, for those of you who
don’t know there is basically no point in driving vehicles in Saints Row IV. I
used my fair share of them and even found a nice Harley-Style bike called the Melbourne
and I also added a (Motorcycle) chopper and a Coupe which I thought was pretty
cool and I painted them in the gang colours of course. Once you open up the
main underground Saints Row crib you can customize what style of clothing your
crew wears and also what cars they drive which was fun as you can choose pretty
ludicrous things my current setup includes a saints Halberd, Compton
all of which are automatically pimped to the saints colours. As you go through
the missions you gain vehicles and outfits for both your crew and yourself and
other unlockables, specifically when you finish all the missions for a
particular gang i.e. the Ronin you get access to their vehicles like the Kaneda for your Garage and
the Ninja style gang customization.
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| The Saints Gang Car version of the Halberd, looks pretty cool heh |
Of course as being an open-world game there are dozens of
other things
you can do apart from the main missions and activities, most of which I
didn’t really touch. You can do stunt jumps, you can collect CD’s?, you can fly
planes through tight spaces, you can do the classic Taxi, Ho-ing missions and Tow
truck missions, you play mini-games like Blackjack and also rob stores and mug
people or even play an entertaining zombie uprising minigame, it’s up to you, I
actually just did the races if I can remember correctly. There’s also this
thing called Respect and Style, respect you gain from
killing gang members, completing missions, doing dangerous stunts such as
wheelies and driving on the wrong side of the road, there is just so many ways
to get it, you pretty much just do anything. Style affects how much respect you
get when you gain Respect for example better clothes, upgrading your cars and
owning more cribs grants you more style.
Gameplay is basically the same as in Saints Row the Third but
nowhere near as refined, from early on I could smell a console port as there
was no mouse support for the main menu so I quickly knew this was going to be a
bit wonky for the PC, and wonky it was, it was badly optimized with poor frame
rates and jerky movement, it really didn’t play very well. The cars handled awfully
and were very hard to control at first, I was wondering why I had such a sore
thumb then I realized it was because almost whenever I turned a corner I used
spacebar for the handbrake because it worked all the time no matter how fast
you were going. I remember I went back to play GTA5 online at one point and
tried to drive the same way and boy it did not work at all heh. The controls
were simple enough and I managed fine as the movement and shooting was
bearable.
Everything is very arcade-like as in the other Saints Row games I’ve
played, even the helicopters were easy as you just had buttons for up and down
then you pointed them in the direction you wanted to go. The heli assault missions were pretty nuts, you had to blow up enemy
vans so your homies could do drug deals. What more was that they could
run out of gas then you had to pick them up which was incredibly
difficult so I was glad the chopper controls were relatively simple I spent a lot of my
time in motorcycles then finished with The
General’s Bulldog
which is customized with a gun turret on the top which you can freely control,
this made doing missions much easier as you were always being chased by an
endless supply of gang cars and having the turret there helped immensely as you
didn’t have to lean out of the car to shoot all of the time. Of course there
were some limitations, the thing was huge and it had a terrible turning circle
and wasn’t that fast, but was a choice vehicle for pretty much anything towards
the end of the game where you were fighting huge amounts of heavily armed
enemies so the durability really came in handy.
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| Drug Trafficking mission complete, with the respect gained and style bonus |
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| Yes that is Shaundi and Carlos hanging from the helicopter landing legs. |
Customizing and driving the Military Bulldog, this thing was a beast.
The graphics for this game were not that remarkable and
worse than the previous Saints Row games I have played but of course this is an
earlier game from 2008 so what do you expect? Yeh some parts looked pretty bad,
the terrain in the off-road areas particularly as it seemed like they were just
a bunch of brown mush, the character models weren’t too good, some of the cars
and explosion effects looked weird. But of course it doesn’t really matter, you
don’t play a game like Saints Row to go “AWR LOOKIT DEM GREPHICS!” you play it
for the gameplay and the general craziness, Saints Row isn’t exactly famous for
its graphics compared to the likes of say Far Cry. As far as music and
sound goes it’s got the same radio station setup as Saints Row 3, in fact I
think all of the games have the same setup of radio stations for a number of
different genres from techno to classical same as Saints Row 3 and 4, I far as
music I love the games original soundtrack with its banging hiphop beats you
can’t beat the Saints for epic rap, I just don’t know how to explain it, it’s
like a blockbuster movie style the whole intro to the game and in the main menu
and it sounds great.
Ultimately if you liked Saints Row 3 then you will like 2,
if you liked 2 then you’ll like 1 etc. My only regret was that I played it
without realizing there was one particularly huge mod that was made for the PC
game titled Gentleman
of the Row. This mod added a ton of new features to the game mostly
clothes, vehicles, cribs and customization options similar to a Skyrim mod,
though it also added new walking animations and taunts. Not only that it added
and optional first person mode, increased FOV and an option to remove the HUD
for screenshots. I was kinda annoyed that I didn’t play it with this mod but
meh it was still good anyway and I had fun with it, next up in the Saints Row
agenda is Gat
out of Hell which I may play with a friend as it has CO-OP.
I’ve found I’ve forgotten to do the score and the “things I
like and didn’t like” for the games I review so I’ll start that again now.
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| On the whole graphics weren't the best but it was the soundtrack that made it |
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| I like this shot, it's got all the main players in it except for Johnny Gat |
Things I liked:
- General Saints Row craziness
- Always Entertaining story
- Vehicle design and customization
- Character customization
- Entertaining side activities
Things I didn’t like:
- Poorly developed console port
- Poorly optimized gameplay and graphics with jerky movement
- Odd handling on vehicles jerky movement
7/10
JD
Saints Row 2 Game Trailer
If this were a TV show
I’d watch it
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