In one of the first missions you get in this game, immediately after you break out of prison, you learn that your gang’s right-hand man is currently on trial for murder. So you launch a one-man assault on the courthouse to free him, gunning down dozens of police officers in the way. Even the judge, a gray-haired, grandmotherly type, produces a shotgun from somewhere beneath her robes so that’s clear license to blow her head off too. This sets the tone for the whole game and gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect.
While the Grand Theft Auto games keep being embroiled in controversy, the Saint’s Row series has been flying under the radar of the mainstream press. You get the impression that developer Volition kind of resents this as much of what they’ve done here seems deliberately calculated to upstage the more well-known series. Gratuitous violence? Check. Risqué sexual references? Check. Profanity? Check. No effort is spared to make this game as obnoxious as possible. As they say, all publicity is good publicity and garnering more sales is well worth the cost of getting some nasty hate mail.
Saint’s Row 2 tells an unpretentious and straightforward story. The unnamed protagonist is in jail and recovering from injuries following the events of the first game. When you wake up, you learn that five years have passed while you were in a coma and that extensive plastic surgery has been performed on you. This is, of course, just in-game justification to allow the player to customize the character and it needs to be said that the editor is powerful indeed, allowing you to make pretty much any character you want, male or female.
An impressionable, young gang member offers to break you out of prison and once outside, you find that Stillwater has changed and your old gang, the 3rd Street Saints, has been dissolved. So you set out to rebuild your old gang, waging war against the gangs that have set up shop during your absence, and to prove once again that you’re the undisputed ruler of the city. This starts with recruiting lieutenants for your new gang, muscling in on the other gangs’ profit-making ventures and ends with large-scale firefights. It’s not prize-winning writing but it’s an honest approach and it works for this game.
Saint’s Row 2 gives the player full access to the city right from beginning, making it an open-world game in the truest sense. Filling that virtual space is the largest diversity of activities I’ve ever seen in any game outside an MMO. Seriously, while the main storyline missions are competent enough and sometimes even inspired (such as planting bombs to demolish a hotel and then escaping by jumping from the top floor into the inner atrium and activating your parachute), the side-activities are where it’s at and what everyone talks about on videogame forums.
You’ve probably heard the one where you’re asked to devalue property values in a neighborhood, which you accomplish by driving around a septic truck and spraying literal shit all over the place. But have you heard the one where you set out to defraud insurance companies by deliberately running into cars so they send you flying and cause you as much pain as possible? Or the one where you need to recruit prostitutes from rival gangs and transport them safely to your place of business? Or course, you have the more mundane stuff as well, such as assassinating targets based on a list you’re given, or stealing specific cars. There’s also Mayhem mode where you need to cause a certain amount of property damage within the time limit, plus there’s the usual assortment of races, taxi missions, ambulance missions etc. There’s simply way too many things to do to list.
Even better, the game gives you good reason to do all these side-activities. Access to the storyline missions is regulated by a resource called Respect. This is depleted as you complete the main missions so you need to build it up by doing side-activities. Along the way, the game also offers you a steady stream of carrots. Sometimes, the reward is merely cosmetic, such as a new suit of clothes, but there are also plenty of useful stuff such as new guns, cool vehicles, infinite ammunition, resistance to bullet damage etc. If you’re anything like me, this is enough incentive to complete all of them, getting Infinite Respect. If you need more Respect though, there’s also a Style meter which is increased by buying clothes, remodeling your cribs and buying expensive vehicles. This unlocks increasing levels of multiplicative bonuses whenever you earn Respect, making it easier to get more of it.
Coming to this series for the first time after years of playing various versions of the Grand Theft Auto, it’s evident that Volition makes games first and foremost, while Rockstar has been busy indulging their fantasies by making movies out of their games. Everything is designed to ensure that gameplay is smooth and that the player’s time is not wasted. Checkpoints are distributed logically throughout missions and when you fail a mission or die, you’re given the option of restarting the whole thing or reloading from the last checkpoint. At any time, you can elect to abort any activity or mission. The game never strands you anywhere either and you’ll always find a suitable vehicle to use every time you start a mission.
There are lots of other features that make this game a joy to play. All of your cribs have garages and you can store tons of vehicles at one garage and have access to your whole fleet anywhere in the city. You don’t even need to return a stored vehicle to your garage. Even if you trash the vehicle or otherwise lose it, it’ll be magically back at your garage when you need it, so feel free to collect whatever you want and customize the heck out of them. You can also unlock the ability to use your mobile phone to have any of your stored vehicles delivered to you wherever you are. The same goes homies who can follow you around and help out in fights.
That said, Volition falls a long way short from Rockstar when it comes to polish. The graphics look muddy and the colors bland even on the highest settings. Worse, performance is bad even on high-end machines. Objects pop in and out of existence in clear sight of the player, which results in an unrealistic city while making driving vehicles at high speed unreasonably difficult. Frequently, some combination of the awkward controls and jerky framerate can result in very unpleasant experiences. One pet peeve of mine is that the game doesn’t fully support mouse-wheels, so it works in some situations but not in others. There is definitely a game in which you have to fight against the controls.
The lack of polish and generally low production quality shows up in other areas as well. The selection of music tracks available for the in-game radio is below par and their attempts to tell jokes mostly result in groans. While the faces of the main characters are drawn and animated well enough, it’s impossible not to notice that the faces of the generic pedestrians and gang members look like grotesque corpses up close. Overall, Stillwater is a lot less attractive and realistic than Liberty City and you need to make an effort to look past the poor first impressions of the game.
On balance however, I still find Saint’s Row 2 to be unquestionably the better game. Its Stillwater may be less pretty, but due to all of the stuff that you can get up to in the game, you get to know the city rather well, which helps cement it in your mind as a real place. Even if some of the activities aren’t to your liking, as the helicopter races were to me due to how jittery their controls are, there’s so much to do that some of it is bound to appeal. It’s also refreshing how free-form they are. Having trouble with the Mayhem activity? Simply grab an APC and let loose with the mounted minigun. Some QT3 members have wondered if it’s possible to do the Snatch activity with a helicopter gunship.
Activities aside, simply exploring the city can be a real joy with all of the collectibles and secrets hidden everywhere. For example, if you go into the church which served as the base of the 3rd Street Saints in the first game, you can find a set of fully voice-acted recordings recounting the history of the city’s gangs. It’s very impressive how much effort they put into making areas that most players will likely never see. Adding to the atmosphere are the snippets of dialog you can hear from the pedestrians all over the city and the inexplicable sights you are sometimes presented with. On one unforgettable early morning, I was passing by an outdoor cantine on coast and noticed that most of the patrons were wearing horrific masks.
My only concern at this point is that the series might go overboard in their quest to be recognized by being as offensive as possible. Gang warfare is all well and good, but kidnapping the girlfriend of a rival gang leader and having him kill her by accident is beyond the pale even for me. I want them to crank up the technology but crank down on the brutishness, though still keeping in mind that all this is just a game. In any case, between this game and Red Faction: Guerrilla, Volition has certainly become a very interesting developer to watch. I for one will be waiting with bated breath for Saint’s Row 3.
Leave a Reply