Game Review: Saints Row 2

The newest addition to Volition’s ‘Saints Row’ series, ‘Saints Row 2’ arrived in the UK last week. With the promise of a more weapons, vehicles, and space to wreck all kinds of havoc in, Saints Row 2 looked to be a significant improvement on the original. But could it meet the standards set by the brilliant Grand Theft Auto IV?

Not much has changed in Saints Row 2. As the leader of a small gang, you’ll fight rival gangs, earn respect, and attempt to take over the city of Stilwater. While for the most part it’s essentially the same as the original, Saints Row 2 has made a few additions, including new guns, vehicles, and character customisation options. It’s a typical sequel, but fans of the original game will appreciate the new toys they’ve been given to play with.

Some parts of this game just ooze quality from every orifice.

The big addition made to Saints Row 2 is how much more there is to do, and how many ways there are to earn respect. As well as adding to the different types of side missions (including missions that have you dress up as a cop and terrorise citizens with flame throwers) there are extra “diversions” that can be attempted in different situations. These range from ordinary taxi jobs, to seeing how far you can jump out of a car, to base jumping. Each of these diversions is absolutely pointless, but brilliant in equal measure, and with the variety of silly crap to do, you’ll be playing Saints Row 2 for a while before boredom sets in.

Fighting with the Chainsaw has a distinct "Dead Rising" feel to it. That's no bad thing.

Unfortunately, almost everything else about Saints Row 2 is fairly mediocre. The games attempts at humour are a perfect example of this, and it’s almost embarrassing having to listen to such worn out jokes so often, and anyone with a higher mental age than twelve is going to be very tired of them very quickly. It's as if it's trying too hard to offend in an attempt to impress, and failing miserably because all it's managing to churn out is watered down racism and a few "yo momma" jokes.

The game is also marred by a huge amount of glitches. Usually it’s minor visual glitches, such as textures failing to load, but after seeing cars driving without wheels, and torsos floating around the streets as their invisible heads scream in terror, you realise just how rushed and untested Saints Row 2 is. Considering most of these problems were in the original game, it’s really disappointing that Volition didn’t fix them for the sequel.

Stillwater itself is another way Saints Row 2 feels rushed. Aside from looking fairly dated, the city feels incredibly empty. It’s all well and good making the environment bigger, but if the extra size comes from putting in large, empty spaces there isn’t really much point, since these aren’t fun or interesting to play in. There’s also a surprising lack of vehicles and people, and more often than not that streets of Stilwater will feel very empty. Maybe Stilwater is still trying to populate itself after the carnage of the first Saints Row game.

He's doesn't know where everyone is, either.

While controlling your character is fairly smooth, you’ll find yourself constantly restricted by their inability to interact with the environment. The character outright refuses to grab onto almost anything, which can lead to some incredibly frustrating moments. There were a couple of moments where I was constantly jumping into a wall in a fruitless hope that my character would have the guile or intelligence to hop over it. But apparently prancing around like a ninny is more ghetto in his book, so he proceeded to do that as he was gunned in the back by several overzealous policemen. Nice.

The soundtrack is usually one of the main appeals of Grand Theft Auto and it’s clones, and Saints Row 2 is no exception. The soundtrack is pretty big, with hundreds of songs from several different genres to choose from, but you will start to notice the relatively short loop after a while. Songs on certain radio stations will crop up almost constantly, and listening to the same 80s hit over and over gets repetitive after a while. Still, there are some absolute gems in the soundtrack, and the ability to pick and choose songs and create your own radio station is a decent feature.

Saints Row 2 is a genuinely fun game. The sheer amount of pointless stuff you can do is absolutely great, and it’ll be a while before you find that you’ve run out of things to do. But the novelty doesn’t quite cover the mediocrity. The glitches, the graphics and the humour are all incredibly dated, and for me served as a potent, constant reminder of how much better Grand Theft Auto IV was. Saints Row 2 fails to meet the high standards set by GTA in pretty much every situation, and no matter what stunts it tries to pull with the next game, I don’t think it’s ever going to truly rival the series it tries so hard to impersonate.

7/10

I did try the online multiplayer, but after hearing six small children scream various racial slurs I decided to ignore it and go have sex in the local strip club. In the game, of course. Er-hem.