Ever since the release of “Grand Theft Auto III,” nearly every game publisher has tried to produce a clone of the gameplay format to cash in on its success. Most of them sucked, pretty much (See, for example, the “True Crime” games), mostly because they captured the spirit of the game through duplication of gameplay elements, but forgot about the writing and other atmospheric elements to the game. One game that was considered one of the more blatant GTA3 clones, yet had something to stand on its own, was “Saints Row” from Volition and THQ. Despite being rather buggy, many of the features that “Saints Row” brought to the field were actually improvements on the GTA series, such as being able to save anywhere, or frequent checkpoints in the middle of missions (things “Grand Theft Auto IV” still lacks). Seeing as the game was quite successful, it was no surprise that THQ requested another go-round from Volition (and, as I write this, they’ve announced a third game), and Volition used the feedback from the first game — as well as likely seeing how GTAIV played out to audiences — to make “Saints Row 2,” a product that is still the same game as “Saints Row,” but manages to surpass it in every way.
The game places you as the unnamed protagonist from the first game, whose ending saw you, as the leader of the 3rd Street Saints in the urban-warfare-ridden city of Stilwater, getting caught in a rather suspicious explosive boating accident and ending up in a five-year coma. Waking up after some reconstructive surgery, you explore Stilwater to find that the Saints have dispersed and new gangs have taken over the city, still rebuilding after a disastrous earthquake in the interim. Your character is determined to regain control of the city, and works to rebuild the Saints from the ground up. The game sports a pretty impressive cast of stars including Neil Patrick Harris and Michael Dorn, which definitely help with the atmosphere. By far, however, the biggest and best difference in the story is Volition’s option to give the main character a voice (one of 6 you select when you create the character). The main character was voiceless during the first game, but here, having the character talk and interact with others makes the cut-scenes so much less awkward.
“Saints Row 2″ is still pretty much a GTA clone. You establish safehouses (aka “cribs”), drive around the city finding missions to complete, and do a lot of shooting and the like to earn rewards. Given the three different gangs, you will generally always have three main story missions to complete (one from each gang), so you can opt to work your way through all the missions from one gang first or spread the wealth around as you see fit. However, before you can start these missions, you need to earn respect, and that’s where you’ll need to look to the side missions, known as “activities,” for this. Activities include various vehicle races, attempts to cause as much damage as possible in a short amount of time, or committing insurance fraud by getting run over in traffic. Each activity has a number of locations about the city, and several levels to complete, each level giving more respect. Play enough of a given activity and you can earn other perks such as improved health or damage. It may seem early on that this activity system is a way to force you to play these side games, but it is rather easy to gain the necessary respect you need to be able to complete all the story-based missions, simply by selecting three or four of your favorite activities and completing all the levels. You can also gain respect bonuses by styling out your outfit and your crib, making it easier to get to a point where activities don’t get in the way of gameplay. But most importantly, most of these activities are simply outright fun, once you get the hang of the controls. For example, the insurance fraud requires you to take dives into traffic and let the ragdoll physics take over. In normal city traffic, it might seem really difficult to earn scores needed to pass, but once you find “sweet spots” around the city where high traffic is always present, this becomes incredibly fun.
As for main missions, these are pretty much by-the-book GTA approaches: follow the mini-map to the marked location, kill people, and repeat until the mission is over. Mind you, they’re not all like that, but as with GTA4, these can get old after a while. That said, Saints Row 2 does try to shake up the formula a bit by adding boss-like battles; for example, in one case you have to fend off against several monster trucks armed only with a supply of RPGs, while another has you fighting off a voodoo-doll-wielding foe. Fortunately, most multi-part missions in Saints Row 2, as in its prequel, have checkpoints so that dying will allow you to restart at that checkpoint, which makes for a much more enjoyable game than having to drive all the way back from some starting point. Beyond the missions and activities, you can also go around buying all the stores in the area to make money, and do special “spot” diversions that earn you extra cash, such as taxi service, firefighting, and skydiving. The number of vehicles is pretty large and includes numerous cars and trucks, motorcycles, boats, helicopters, and even a plane.
What really makes Saints Row 2 stand out above GTA4, and even above its predecessor, is the seamless integration of 2-player online co-op into the game. This is a true “drop-in, drop-out” approach where you can invite a friend in at any time while not in a mission and keep playing along with him. Every mission and activity can be played by both players, sometimes with unexpected results — for example, in the “Escort” activity where, in single player, you drive a prostitute around while they “deal” with their client, avoiding the paprazzi and ex-lovers; in co-op, the first player continues this, but the second player takes the role of the service provide via an interesting mini-game. Both players gain the benefits of completing missions and activities, which helps to keep the co-op from seeming worthless for the second player. While this can make completing missions much easier, the co-op really shines on the various activities and just general mayhem that can occur if you opt to start chaos. There are other multiplayer modes, but really, the co-op here is an example that all similar games should really aspire to. The only way it could be better is if there was support for four-player co-op.
There are two areas where the game has some problems, but neither of them ruin the experience. The first is the lack of a way to quickly jump about the city. It would have been helpful if there was a system like with Crackdown’s safehouses that allowed you to teleport between them, or something akin to GTA4’s taxi service, but unfortunately if you want to go from one side of the city to the other, you’re going to have to drive there yourself, which may take a good 5 minutes or so. Thus, in the later part of the game when you start trying to approach full completion by doing all the side missions and the like, you start planning on grouping your “errands” together to avoid that. It’s more annoying than anything else. The second aspect that detracts a bit from the game is that it really is not very hard. Single-player may have a few tough battles, but if you are doing your activities as needed to bring up your respect, you likely will earn the necessary bonuses that are needed to make missions even easier. With regenerable health, ammo and guns-a-plenty from defeated foes, and numerous ways to ditch the gangs or police that are trying to get you, there really isn’t as much of a challenge as there was in the first game; co-op makes this even less difficult since your human comrade will always be better than the computer AI “homies” that you can call in to help. However, what it lacks in difficulty, Saints Row 2 makes up for in fun content, and there wasn’t a minute of this game that I did not enjoy playing.
While there are a lot of similarities between Saints Row 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV, the two games are quite different. You are going to find a much deeper and emotional story, and a more graphically stunning game, with Grand Theft Auto IV, but with Saints Row 2, the game does not try to take itself seriously, and can be a fun 20-hour romp with a lot of extras for those completionists. It is definitely a worthy successor to the first Saints Row, and can even be jumped into if you’ve not played the first game.
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