Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I’ve been immersed in Saint’s Row 2 for a couple of weeks now. Steam reports my playing time as slightly over 30 hours by now but I’m still at only about 50% completion. With all of the optional side activities, it’s just that expansive a game. In the meantime, here are some hopefully helpful tips that I wished I’d known before I started out:

• One of the great things about this game is that doing just about anything can unlock cool rewards, but unless you hit up an online guide, it can be hard to tell which activities to do first to get the unlocks you want. The best unlock to aim for early is easily Insurance Fraud in the Factories District. Having access to Infinite Sprint makes doing everything else a whole lot easier.
• When doing Insurance Fraud, the game tells you to go to designated locations that give an Adrenaline bonus. Don’t believe it. Having a bonus is useless if there isn’t any actual traffic at those locations. The best place to go are the highways. You’re guaranteed a nonstop stream of traffic there, making it easy for you to get hit by multiple vehicles.
• Once you have Infinite Sprint, you’d probably want to aim for one of the Infinite Ammo unlocks. The easiest of those is doing the Fuzz activities at the Projects Districts. This gets you Infinite Ammo for all pistols, which is nice as you can use them both on-foot and in a vehicle. The nicest overall unlock is Infinite Ammo for SMGs which are also dual use but the Snatch activities are harder to complete. You probably won’t be able to complete the last level without first getting an upgraded vehicle of some sort.
• Don’t forget that unlike the Grand Theft Auto games, you can steal any vehicle and then store it in any of your garages. You can then retrieve that vehicle to use over and over again so long as you remember to use another vehicle between retrievals. If you complete the Escort activities at the Red Light District, you can even use your mobile phone to call for a vehicle delivery. There’s nothing quite like calling for an APC with a mounted minigun to be delivered to you in the middle of a fight.
• Buying clothes and upgrading cribs earns you Style points. Having enough Style gives you bonus Respect for completing activities. But I found it easy enough to get Infinite Respect since I enjoyed doing the activities for their own sake anyway so Style wasn’t very important to me. If it’s important to you, keep in mind that you don’t actually have to wear the clothes you buy to get the Style bonus for them, it’s enough to just have them available in your wardrobe.
• If you’re having trouble making it through a fight, remember that you can recruit homies you help you out. The number of homies you can have following you around at a time increases automatically as you complete Storyline missions. The coolest part is that if they can’t all fit into your current vehicle, they’ll automatically hijack a nearby vehicle and follow you around it in. They’re not very good drivers however.
• The fastest way to get from one end of the map to another is by helicopter. There’s a reason why you have helipads on most of your cribs after all. Remember that you don’t even need to land your helicopter carefully if you don’t need it anymore. You can just bail from it in mid-air and quickly hit the button to release your parachutes. It’s awesome.

There’s way too much stuff in the game to list them all out and I could go on and on about good things to try out, but the above list should make for a good start. What’s particularly fantastic is everything is available right from the beginning, so if you don’t like one activity, just go elsewhere and do something else. Rockstar needs to learn this lesson ASAP.