Saints Row 2 improves upon its predecessor while featuring new and exciting content

User Rating: 9.5 | Saints Row 2 (Collector's Edition) X360
By amuricanpatriot | Review Date:
Just to let you know, my original review for Saints Row 2 got removed for some reason, so I won't be going into as much detail as I did in that review. Anyway, pretty much anyone who's looking to buy this game has already played a Grand Theft Auto game before, am I wrong? Grand Theft Auto IV, released about 11 months ago, was much more serious than, say, GTA: San Andreas. Saints Row 2 is a lot like its predecessor and San Andreas, making it a fun game to play for any fan of the first game.

You start off in the hospital of a prison, awakening from a five-year-long coma. You can customize your character however you choose. After breaking out of prison with your buddy Carlos, you're set free to do anything you want to. Of course, killing civilians at the plenty is the main form of entertainment, though there are tons of side missions to do. There are various cribs to purchase, and these basically act as safehouses to save clothes and money in. Accessible through the TV in anyone of your safehouses is the mode Zombie Uprising, which basically puts you and two other buddies against zombies using breakable weapons.

The mission structure is pretty basic: drive somewhere, shoot a bunch of people, or escort someone to a specific rendezvous location. However, you can have someone play with you over Xbox Live cooperatively, which is a lot of fun and makes up for the lousy friendly AI you normally have to put up with. In order to do missions, you have to earn enough respect either by completing side missions, having a hostage while driving in a car, or killing rival gang members. Killing gang members is probably the most efficient way for getting respect points, so you can play more missions faster. In terms of multiplayer, there really isn't much to talk about. There's team deathmatch and various team-based game modes that are pretty fun to play, but then again, this is no Call of Duty 4 or anything, either.

The visuals look alright, but they're far from cutting-edge. Often times cars disappear, there are numerous clipping and aliasing issues, the frame rate can take a turn for the worse drastically, and car explosions don't look that great. The voice acting is solid, though a bit goofy and cheesy, and the in-game sound and weapon effects are solid.

Overall, Saints Row 2 is basically a wacky version of Grand Theft Auto IV. Despite my issues with this game, it is very enjoyable and flat-out satisfying to play. I fully recommend Saints Row 2.

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