Grand Theft Auto started out as a criminal playground where you got up to mischief first and missions second, before it morphed into the heavily story-driven critiques of modern America we've seen since GTA III. Sure, you could go on a rampage for the fun of it, but it was always a side event, something you did when the story was done, or the story wasn't interesting to you.
What if there was a game about running a criminal empire that put the fun back into being the absolute worst person in the city? Where missions weren't separated from silly shenanigans, but made of them? Where you could be the kind of badly dressed asshole you always wanted to be and still not look out of place in a cutscene?
Cue Saints Row 2.
Fun Times
It can be tricky to dive into a series with a sequel, but Saints Row 2 follows on from the first Saints Row's conclusion by having us awake from a years-long coma with whatever glorious mug we like the look of - and the selection is quite extensive.
Naturally, a dark-haired pudgy white man seems to be an easy to create character, and this one happens to come with an utterly ridiculous accent that does not give you any confidence in Saints Row 2's ability to deliver a powerful message about the criminal underworld.
No, this is a game where the leader of the 3rd Street Saints - us - wakes from a coma and gets chatting with a guy who got deliberately shanked so that he could bust us out of prison.
I'm playing the PC version of Saints Row 2, and while I wanted to play it with a controller, default support for them seems to be far from useful, so it's over to the keyboard and mouse for a third-person action-adventure open-world crime spree, starting with the killing of a doctor from a few punches 'just because'.
It's not long before the guards are on to your escape plans, however, and you can either get used to the melee combos for some quick finishes or learn to pick up improvised weapons like cinder blocks to swing and throw at your problems.
It plays reasonably well, to say I've switched over to a different set of input devices. I'm not sure how best to aim any of my attacks, or if there is some kind of aim-assist or lock-on, but this tutorial is introducing things bit by bit at a nice pace, and our escape is alarmingly straightforward.
Crouching, sprinting, precision aiming, weapon wheels, car-jacking... this game isn't slacking or cutting corners with regards to what it offers the player. It may not look like GTA IV, but it plays like an arcade version of it, not quite realistic but not over the top either.
Hopping into a police car and driving down the first road does highlight the unusual physics, though...
Immediately flipping your escape vehicle isn't wise, but in this tutorial section, we appear to be invincible and are looking for a boat anyway. Car's aren't good enough for an escape from an island, and once in the clear, we can get a little backstory about what has happened between games for those returning from Saints Row, and what has happened in general for people like me coming straight into this sequel.
So we're working our way back to the top of the pile from the ground up. It hasn't been a few weeks since the last game, but a few years. The city of Stilwater isn't ours anymore, but when a career criminal escapes from prison, there's not a lot else to do but carry on doing what we do best.
To clearly demonstrate that the plot is bonkers, your gang buddy, Johnny Gat, is appealing his sentence for hundreds of murders at a courthouse today - what a coincidence. Your reaction to that is to decide to bust him out, and the clock is ticking. Best find a car.
Slight problem with that plan, though, as we cracked a gang member over the head with a bottle and upset him, unsurprisingly. Saints Row 2 is about reputation and standing, and battering people is going to raise their awareness of you in the same way that breaking the law will raise the police's awareness of you.
This was a clumsy fight, each of us ragdolling all over the place to complete the ridiculous vibe the game is going for. You can pick up a barstool and get swinging if you can line yourself up with one that wants to be picked up, and then have a large enough window for the animation to be completed.
In all the driving that followed, including the races I got into, I didn't use cruise control. Or maybe I was using it without noticing. Whatever was going on under the hood, the cars drove as good and as poorly as you expect. Fast cars were nimble, trucks less so. You get the idea.
Frustrations
Stilwater is an amalgamation of Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, giving you lots of distinctive shades of gloom as you drive through the city. The sun shines, the rain falls, the clouds cover all the joy of a blue sky. You could stand and admire the view if you weren't on a time limit during this mission and if the city wasn't so empty and lifeless.
Maybe it's early days and it is empty so that we can focus on learning and will slowly fill up and become more interesting when our gang starts to gather momentum. Maybe it's just too expansive and ambitious and isn't crammed full of character. Maybe this is the character, depressive and dull.
Busting our way into an empty courtroom and then shooting our way out through an alarming number of easy headshots shows us that Saints Row 2 isn't dull, but it isn't inspiring, either. I'm sure a lot of work went into creating the interior of this building, but it feels a little cheap, like a budget title that's trying to cash in on Grand Theft Auto.
After this rampage, we escape the police by driving through the equivalent of a pay-and-spray, the 'Forgive and Forget', and like magic, the police who were right behind us forget about the tens of bodies that lay on the floor of the courthouse. This isn't a serious game, it's meant to be a sandbox of fun. I'm sure it'll have its moments, but I can help shake the feeling that it's just throwing everything against a wall and seeing what sticks.
Speaking of which...
Despite breaking out of an island prison and busting Johnny Gat out of the courthouse, and even though we're the head of the 3rd Street Saints, we don't have enough reputation to start the next mission for them, and have to build that reputation up by taking part in side-missions which include the obvious, like street races, to the not-so-obvious, like shit-flinging.
Yes, driving around the neighbourhood spraying crap everywhere is a valid way to build up your reputation. That's the kind of game Saints Row 2 is, and I can't say it's the kind of game I want to play.
We need to get a crew together, and a crew needs a headquarters, and Johnny happens to know that there's an underground hotel or something, long since buried by an earthquake, that might be an ideal solution, once we rid it of rival gang members and homeless folks.
As far as gunfights go, it's an excuse to run around and shoot people with dual pistols, or a shotgun, or batter them with baseball bats. You can grab people to use them as human shields, or hurl them through the air with a throw. Saints Row 2 gives you all this freedom... and then tells you to smash a bunch of shanty huts that are stronger than a goddamn nuclear bunker.
The more I play it, the more reasons I find to not play it. The characters aren't appealing, the story and writing aren't appealing, the city isn't appealing. So it must be the gameplay that hooks players, right? Why isn't that fun either?
The next mission has us recruit some lieutenants to start building our gang, and has us tasting the kinds of things we can get up to in Stilwater. Stunt jumps, like GTA. Drive by's, like GTA. Towing vehicles away, like GTA, only with driving physics that have you swerving all over the place and making slow progress. Maybe my cruise control was on.
Final Word
It wasn't long after I got the gang together that I abandoned the dream of dominating the city once more. It's not that Saints Row 2 is a little janky or highly derivative, it's that it just isn't doing anything for me.
I can see there could be fun to be had - one absurd side-mission has you defend a famous person from over-eager fans, earning money for tossing them into environmental obstacles, usually killing them in the process - but it's not the kind of fun I look for in games, especially open-world crime sandboxes.
Everyone has gone a little bit off the rails in GTA at least once. Saints Row is for the player who goes off the rails more than they go on them, and that simply isn't me. I want more of a structure, more of a story. That's not to say Saints Row 2 doesn't have either, because it does, it's just skewed a little too far into the absurd for my liking.
I can see how it could provide plenty of entertainment, but not really for me. It's a little too cheap, or low-brow, especially compared to GTA IV, but that's a slightly unfair comparison to make in regards to the budgets, I'd imagine.
Saints Row as a series is a great alternative to GTA. You might like both, but you'll probably prefer one over the other. I prefer GTA, but I've really not touched the Saints Row series, and Saints Row 2 hasn't convinced me to touch it some more - but I do have Saints Row IV in this Steam library. Would that be a better entry point for me?
I'm unlikely to play more Saints Row 2, but that's not to say it should be avoided by all. GTA does need a competitor, and while few, if any, can match its output, they can at least offer something similar enough to get some attention.
Fun Facts
12 in-game radio stations serve up 170 pieces of licensed music. Yeah, it's a GTA-clone, but where GTA IV goes for realism, Saints Row 2 is more than happy to go to the other extreme to compete against it.
Saints Row 2, developed by Volition, first released in 2008.
Version played: PC, 2009.