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If you like juvenile innuendo and extreme violence together, Saints Row was made for you
First impressions mean a lot; just ask your girlfriends parents. This is especially true when it comes to video games and why so many attempts at video game marketing and promoting miss the mark so badly. My first impression of Saints Row was ‘do not want’.
For me it had plenty of black marks against it. Clone of another very successful game series practically doomed to be mediocre? Check. Annoying rap focused gangsta lifestyle that seems to only appeal to lily white thirteen year olds? Check. References to ‘bling’, ‘being strapped’ and holding your gun side ways? Check, check and check. A friend actually bought me the game as a gift not long after its release and it languished in my cupboard up until about six months ago when a moment of restlessness prompted me to drop the disc into the tray for a spin.
About six hours later I managed to talk myself into going to bed for at least two hours sleep before going to work.
One RPG plus rush hour traffic equals gratuitous violent satisfaction
It’s not that Saints Row isn’t a clone of GTA, it most definitely is. But Saints Row has a hefty injection of candy colour and tongue in cheek humour that sets it apart from the seedy grittiness of the GTA games. While the GTA games have humour, they weigh it out with a heavy, serious mood to the plot; Saints Row on the other hand is pure helium.
After going through a detailed character customisation you start the game as another Joe walking down the streets of Stilwater, kind of a fictional Chicago. Then you stumble into a turf war between the Third Street Saints and rival gang the Vice Kings. The leader of the Saints Julius decides to recruit you instead of cap you and after an initiation its up to you to make your mark on Stilwater as part of the Saints.
The game has a few things that differentiate it from GTA. Firstly the territories. GTA San Andreas played around with the idea of turf wars and defending and capturing various hoods. In Saints Row the whole game is about the turf. Every story mission gains control of a new area and you’ll spend a good bit of time defending these captured areas from attacks. There are three other gangs in Stilwater, the street racing Westside Rollerz, the rap music industry running Vice Kings and the overly violent drug trade controlling Los Carnales. The various gangs are immediately identifiable by their bright colours and choice of vehicles.
There's a lot of blowing stuff up in Saints Row, it's like a national pass time
Secondly the activities. There are eleven different ‘activities’ you can do around Stilwater with at least three versions of each one. You can pick and choose which you enjoy and complete all levels of each to unlock cool stuff like unique clothes, tattoos, jewellery, cars and weapons. They range from races, to driving hookers and drug dealers around, stealing cars and throwing yourself in front of traffic for insurance money. It's like the side missions from GTA times ten.
One that I really enjoyed were the Hitman missions. You’re given a list of people with a photo, general location and weapon to use to kill them. Then you have to find them, the targets all automatically spawn so it largely comes down to luck. But success unlocks some terrific weapons at your safe house. The activities are also very well balanced out with the missions, certain activities don’t become available until you’ve progressed a certain level and the more territories you control the more fellow gang members you’ll have wandering the streets, eager to back you up if they see you get in trouble. Incidentally when you’ve gained enough respect (or respec’) you can recruit up to three homies (or 'homeboy's', the don't like 'homo's') to follow you around. You even get some unique homies including a baseball bat wielding man in a giant chicken mascot suit who drive to where you are when you call them on your mobile for back up.
Everything's bigger in Stilwater... consider though if this is actually a good thing
Third is a feature that GTA has only recently implemented with their recent expansion The Lost and Damned. When you fail a mission in Saints Row you can reload right back at the start of that mission without having to drive there. Hallelujah I say. You can also just wander into the various shops and rob them if you like, knocking out or shooting the shopkeeper and looting the safe or forcing them to do it at gun point (handy hint: Plastic surgeons have tons of cash). Sure GTA had some side missions and jobs you could do, but none of them were nearly as much fun as they are in Saints Row. The street races have checkpoints that are on fire and every time you drive through one the oil drums at the side of the road explode. That gives you an idea of the attitude of the game, aim for ridiculously over the top.
The game is just ridiculous levels of fun and can be pretty challenging in parts. There's even a comprehensive multiplayer section with competitions to pimp out your car and steal bling from other players over live.
Saints Row has a few problems though which are pretty much exemplified by this brilliant musical machinim, click here to watch it. Yes it does have some graphical problems and if you aren't connected to Live when you are playing after downloading the patch it can corrupt your saves (although thankfully this is corrected as soon as you reconnect to Live). If you forget to save the game for some time and it freezes you can lose everything you've done so far which can be insanely frustrating. But if you're looking for a crazy open world game thats high on fun and low on brains, you should really give Saints Row a try. You can pick it up for the PS3 or the Xbox 360 for less than $20 if you sniff around.
I should probably mention that you can now pick up Saints Row 2 for about $40 just now as well. It's a better game with everything, smut, violence and inappropriate humour, bumped up to the next level. But you'd be doing yourself a favour starting with the begginning. The story of Saints Row is intended to be a trilogy with a third game set to release late 2010 early 2011.
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