Saint's Row 2

Saint’s Row 2 : An open world gangsta game that’s flakin' and perpetratin
But scared to kick reality.

Story : After some kind of explosion from the first game, your character wakes up in a prison hospital, and doctors must rejuvenate you using the game’s character creator. (I’m sure it’s coincidence this very same aspect of gameplay appears in TNA Impact the video game, but developers and people in general should try to avoid having anything in common with TNA Impact, both the game and show.) More on the story in a bit…

Saint’s Row 2 leaves a killer first impression. The character creation tool gives you a good deal of depth with your character’s appearance, giving you the freedom to make your character look anywhere from a muscle-bound afro-surfer to granny gangsta-mime. I’m always up for a game that lets me create my avatar in the absence of a more interesting protagonist. From there, the game’s (strictly optional) tutorial mission comprises of your character and a buddy breaking out of prison in the most macho way possible – with enough firepower to mow down a seemingly army-like brigade of police officers.

From there, the game lets you cut loose on the virtual city of Stillwater…and I mean the whole city, not just a small portion of city that’s cut off because a bridge needs repairs. You could elect to not bother with the story missions because you want to check out all of the game’s unusual side jobs, like being a celebrity’s bouncer or joining a fight club or throwing your character into cars and earning money based on how much you let the game show off those ragdoll physics. The money you earning roughing up people while disguised as a cop can then be spent on jewelry, togas, alcohol, stun guns, boats, a pimped-out crib, and so forth.

Once you finally decide to jump into story missions, the game gives the early impression that the same slapstick humour that litters the sidequests is present here too. The one aspect of your avatar character that you can’t control is personality, and no matter how you design your character, he or she will possess the brain of Duke Nukem; pro-death, pro-beer and probably present at a strip club during whatever cutscene you’re watching (regardless of your chosen gender). The game then has you boldly breaking into a courthouse to rescue your friend, the not-subtly-named Johnny Gat, by way of spectacular gunfight, which includes a judge that pulls a shotgun.

For the first hour or so, one should be thinking “man, this game is FUN!”

A story that seemingly doesn’t take itself seriously, a goofy sense of humour, some hilarious mini-games, and the freedom to go on a spectacular killing spree without fear of your cousin asking you out on a date. None of that nonsense about having to maintain friendships or virtual television or attempts at being serious and dramatic that sucked the fun out of Grand Theft Auto 4. In fact a good deal of the game’s marketing seems to be based around how it’s everything Grand Theft Auto 4 wasn’t.

And then you start playing into the second hour.

Then you realize that all those mini-games are relatively shallow, and that there’s only about ten of them despite how the in-game map seems to be littered with them; many games will repeat over again at different locations (only marked as a question mark before you approach them) and players looking to obtain 100% completion of the game are going to need to repeat the same shallow games over and over again. For as fun as driving around in a burning ATV lighting everyone else on fire is the first time, repeating it twelve more times isn’t quite as exhilarating. Just like the mini-games, the stores repeat themselves, and suddenly the thrill of exploring the city to see what that green question mark on the map is vanishes when you remember the last time you felt so inclined to explore and found the exact same tattoo parlor with the exact same tattoos.

Then the story that you hoped wasn’t going to attempt to be dramatic like Grand Theft Auto 4 tries to be dramatic like Grand Theft Auto 4…except where Grand Theft Auto 4 had interesting characters coupled with well-written dialogue and voice-acting, and genuinely entertaining comedy, Saint’s Row 2’s characters are by and large a combination of standard, one-dimensional character archetypes, ethnic stereotypes and general stupidity without being funny. The antagonists may as well be Saturday morning cartoon supervillains with the way they behave themselves, and your allies are equally shallow. Despite the presence of a Japanese gang wearing Game of Death (or I guess Kill Bill) jumpsuits and wielding swords, and a Rastafarian gang headed by a man with a voodoo staff, the game is hell-bent on making you taking these characters seriously. Ironically, most of the cutscenes seem to take this serious tone more frequently than the very game Saint’s Row 2 is claiming to be more “fun” than.

I’d mention that a game shouldn’t glamorize a gangster lifestyle, or treat the death of so many people as such an everyday event, but the only thing that these characters have in common with an actual gang is the occasional slang and hatred of cops. Otherwise they may as well be Cobras and GI Joes in an urban battlefield with the way they so casually fight with such large numbers.

There’s a decided lack of variety in the story missions. They generally comprise of go to an area and shoot enemies (that may or may not respawn with great numbers), or escort someone while shooting enemies, or shoot at enemies at multiple locations… well you get the idea. There’s no cover mechanic other than the ever-effective human shield; you run with one analog stick and aim with the other, with no auto-targeting, like a typical third-person shooter. The advantage to this is that your skill will reward you with more headshots. The disadvantage is that every gunfight is the exact same as the one before it, including some boss fights (and the ones that aren’t kind of suck. Take the sword duels for example…).

Seemingly, the idea behind this “streamlined” approach to level design is to allow the entire game to be played co-operatively, online. It certainly is neat for any of your buddies to jump in and out at their leisure and play along with you, but on the other hand, there’s no tactical strategy in the game to begin with other than “aim for the head”, so the only benefit of having a buddy around is for the game to become a glorified chatroom. On top of that, random strangers will randomly request to join in on your game.

This reminded me of an Xbox 360 game called Crackdown; a game that claimed to give the player open-ended, co-op friendly missions and the freedom to do whatever they want, but the lack of structure merely meant that the player was left to fight one wave of thugs after another. If you thought Crackdown never got old and played it to death, then you’ll find Saint’s Row 2 to be almost the same game except the generic super-armoured man is replaced with your vision of a gangster-mime. Then again, that probably means you have a high threshold (or even obtain a sick sense of pleasure) from repetition and thus could save money by playing through Crackdown again.

For the rest of the world, Saint’s Row 2 has an hour or so of laughs followed by some fifteen hours of monotony, giving the game the recommendation that all publishers dread hearing; that it’s “only worth a rental”. Ultimately, Saint’s Row 2 is a poser. A wanksta, if you will. A game designed by programmers who, for all we know, never seen gang graffiti in their neighborhood, let alone anything that may resemble a hood, but were told to make something that resembled Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas. Except San Andreas, as well as the game’s previously mentioned target of Grand Theft Auto 4, had both moments of clever humour and interesting plot development to make you want to play onwards, combined with a great dearth of gameplay variety to keep things interesting. Grand Theft Auto 4 was released 10 months ago, San Andreas 4 years ago (as of this writing) and both are games that I feel compelled to play through to this day. Saint’s Row 2 has been out a couple weeks and I could care less if I never play it again.

Pros : I’ve said this already, but I can’t stress how much I appreciate a good character-creation tool in a game like this. It’s not that I’m against games with an interesting character, much less ones whose stories are predetermined (i.e. most non-Western RPGs), but I’d rather play as a creation of mine instead of a generic, dull character, such at the one in Star Wars : The Force Unleashed.

Cons : Since the marketing on this game is designed to rag on Grand Theft Auto 4, lets rag on everything else in this game that doesn’t measure up to Grand Theft Auto 4: Terrible radio stations with boring DJs, unfunny commercials and mostly bad tracklists, clipping up the arse, bad enemy AI that has a habit of standing still while you gun down their homies, no incentive to explore every nook and cranny, weird vehicle controls, weird weapon balance that favors pistols over everything else, insipid characters that are neither realistic nor unique, the occasional game freeze, a city that nowhere feels as much like a real city as Liberty City, fake ads and fake stores that aren’t as clever, the inability to use taxis to quick-travel anywhere in the city, and, well, lack of immersion.

3 ½ stars

I decree that any game with a zombie mini-game included should be questioned in terms of quality. I’m looking at you, Call of Duty : World At War.