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Review: Saints Row 2
Saints Row 2 is two games in one. The first game is capable, competently paced and crammed with distractions; the second can be needlessly cruel, tiresome and ultimately rather depressing. In blending the two, Volition has created a genuine talking point: this is a title that challenges you to examine the relationship between content and context, to explore how the success of a game’s mechanics is affected by the bodywork bolted on top.
Those mechanics will be familiar. Tear around the city, acquire a reputation, take on rivals and, inevitably, spend at least a little while parachuting out of a plane in your underwear while trying to land in a swimming pool. No one could accuse Saints Row 2 of lacking diversions. Stilwater may not be the most detailed of environments – even up close it tends to seem out-of-focus and under-imagined – but from the lengthy character customisation process through co-op and multiplayer options to the surprisingly varied side-quests, there’s enough to keep you plugging away.
Yet what makes this otherwise generic experience truly individual is the unremitting unpleasantness in every level of its design, from the missions (kill a doctor, butcher homeless people, blow up a trailer park), to the parade of stereotypes the game scrapes together to tell its tale of revenge. GTA may have explored a similarly seamy side of life, but recent releases have tended to ground the player in some kind of otherness, presenting their world from a perspective of (often sympathetic) exclusion, adding a moral dimension by offering real characters and consequences. While Saints Row 2 stalks somewhat similar territory, its blank-slate protagonist and fratboy misanthropy invites you to view society as nothing more than a bloodied rabble of interchangeable freaks, where the only human distinctions are whether you’re alive or dead, and the only character development is how you transition from the first state to the second.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Oh, come on! In GTA IV, you had to work with former terrorists. Nothing in Saints Row 2 turned my stomach to that extent.
A friend of mine brought this round on Friday. It's has its merits but ultimately I found, it's not the most satisfying of games. Trouble with this is, if you play and love the GTA series. Which I admit I do. Then you may find like me that this game is little hard to get on with. But that's purely because I was constantly compare every tiny little detail with the GTA series.
On the flip side of this my buddy thought it was the bee's knees and had only played GTA Vice City and didn't really like it. so to him it was an awesome game in its own right.
If you can get passed that fact that it NOT a GTA then you you'll probably find that this is a pretty good game in its own right, however I found it very difficult to cross over and would prefer to play GTA SA.
Not my cup of tea and I can see why the Edge reviewers are similarly minded.. Most of us can't let GTA go, ever game that's ever remotely similar will always be compared by it. Maybe Edge should have got a reviewer with no previous GTA experience.
I've got to agree with ronron here, this review seems to actively avoid the point, not just miss it.
I bought this game off the back of heavy praise from a number of American friends, only then to see the Edge review (reviews I generally trust) and wonder if I'd made a mistake in believing my friends. Thankfully my mates were right and Edge was wrong, this is a daft, but incredibly entertaining game. It's not trying to be edgy, it's a big, dumb, loud and fun game. It also offers up a remarkable amount of things for the gamer to do and doesn't try to block you at any point from exploring the world they've created. In fact, the game does everything it can to encourage you to explore and make it as entertaining as possible as you do.
I loved GTAIV, I thought it was a fantastic game, but SR2 is also a highly entertaining game and one that takes the excesses of the older GTAs and turns the dials up to 11.
There’s a zone where games make you feel empowered, and then a line across which games just make you feel gross. I think the reviewers’ point was that GTA goes right up to that line, and Saints Row 2 darts right across.
In GTA, you have an open world that’s enhanced by the fact that you can break any law and commit any act, cause bedlam and still have a chance at getting away. GTA relishes in mayhem, and violence is a means to that end (besides being the means used to complete missions and advance the story). It sounds like Saints Row 2 relishes violence itself, making that the end, and the unpleasantness of that is something that can legitimately alienate gamers and reviewers.
I’ve always defended games like GTA from outside criticism because I think that game creators have as much a right as creators of high-minded HBO dramas to delve into the depths of human depravity. However, I find it hard to defend a game like Saints Row 2 where it sounds as though the violence serves no purpose beyond _being_ the purpose. If a game has you going around butchering homeless people, and requires you to be okay with this in order to enjoy the game, it’s going to have limited appeal and limited value.
The New York Times public editor once put it this way: “the trouble with being edgy is that, sometimes, you fall off the edge.”
(I’ve heard the argument that such displays are really high-minded deconstructions of violence, that many hyper-violent movies and such are really just mind-benders that are intended to get you horrified at what you’ve just consented to participate in. I’ve always disliked that excuse—the good old “it was meant to be ironic” dodge—but it may apply here: you will be horrified at the fact that you consented to pay $60 for this mess.)
Sorry Tina, but I see absolutely no difference in merit between the stories of GTA IV and Saints Row 2. GTA's story is just as shallow, deriviative and exploitative as SR2's, only SR2 isn't trying to justify its amorality with its silly tales. It really doesn't need to - it's quite clearly a ludicrous cartoon, which is why I find objections to its content baffling. Almost like berating a child for being a child, really.
Give me a break. The industry did nothing but slurp up the sadistic go-out-and-kill-cops-and-innocent-people game that was GTA1,2,3...etc.
But all of a sudden it's in bad taste? Give me a break. How about an actual review of...gee...I dunno....THE GAMEPLAY. The only thing a two page article that does nothing but rant about the rude and crass nature of SR2 tells me is that someone with more experience with these types of games should have reviewed it.
No mention of the online coop. No mention of just about any gameplay element. Just a soccer mom-ish rant.
I find it pretty stunning that anyone would take SR2's base humour as contemptible - it's all very predictible and utterly inconsequential, really. All you have to do is ignore that you find distasteful, after all. To me, SR2 is nothing but a cartoon parody of GTA's attempt at justifying its seediness and amorality as some kind of adult, artistic endeavour - so SR2's blatant stereotyping and outlandish lack of taste and tact fit perfectly. There's nothing any more offensive than the average episode of South Park in there.
But, this all misses a critical point about Saints Row 2. Given the sheer amount of content, allowance for what a player will actually want to do in its world and the consideration given to minimising chores and donkey work, SR2 is pretty much a shining beacon of how to do GTA-style gaming and, for my money, completely trounces Rockstar's effort in every single area aside looks and those hideous bug-bears of modern games, cinematic 'characterisation' and 'narrative'.
It's a crying shame that Edge chose to completely ignore that fact in its review. SR2 rights so many of GTA IV's design wrongs that any childish, base presentation of character and narrative is - and should be - easily overlooked and forgiven.
Maybe they don't like South Park either, who knows? I know you're confused over why they didn't mention gameplay, but I'm even more confused at arguments like "it has the same humor as South Park" and "GTA4 and SR2's stories are the same" without an explanation of WHY.
I could bring up one reason why there's no reason to mention the gameplay: it's exactly the same as the last game, even down to the largely recycled side-missions available. If anything, Saint's Row 2 is an over-glorified add-on that also manages to somehow look crappier than its predecessor. Even then, the side-missions are needlessly crude and stupid and only fun for a little while (I started to find the Crowd Control more frustrating than fun past the third level). Not to mention the game is incredibly easy, given your character simultaneously has regenerating health, the skin of an elephant, and the accuracy of a sniper no matter what guns he carries. The enemies stand and shoot at you as you move around and kill them without much effort on your part - this even applies to the cops, who may as well be another gang. I mean, if enemies may as well be motionless targets rather than people, 99.9% of the fun is taken away unless you happen to enjoy endlessly shooting and blowing things up over and over and over again - but that just seems pointless even in a sandbox game.
If that isn't a good enough reason, I don't know what is - other than the fact every minute of playing felt insulting to my intelligence.
I actually had a dream once where one of you Edge people wrote a lengthy reflection on how gross Saints Row 2 made you feel. I feel kind of awful to be right!
I knew the game was sophomoric, but I didn’t expect it to be contemptible. Thanks for telling the truth: developers undermine their games and their worlds when they engage in such ugly baseness.