Saints Row is nothing we haven't seen before, but it does what it does very well.
The game mechanics are just your basic GTA type thing, I wont bother explaining. If you have played GTA you know how to play Saints Row. Everything controls well, the weapons are all great fun to use, there is a good selection of cars for you to nab. The game is solid all around.
The story is actually pretty good for this type of game, though its unfortunately lost under the body count and explosions which will grab peoples attention much more, and I can't blame anyone for that. The voice acting is also solid.
You can customize your character a lot but I didn't find the character creation to be very intuitive so I just stayed with the basic caucasian character and was more creative when dressing him up. =P You can buy all kinds of different clothes, I went for a kind of cowboy/biker mix-up which looked interesting. Its fun to try different combinations of clothing and I loved how your character appears in cutscenes dressed the way you choose. You can't get particularly attached to your character because he doesn't even speak (except one line at the end of every storyline... so 4 lines through the whole game. But they're funny lines and its a funny shock when he just speaks when you're not expecting it.), though I suppose you could design the guy to look like you if you're lucky and are good with the character creation.
The missions are well structured, though some of them are very same-y, and they could use some checkpoints instead of having to start the whole mission again if you die. Probably the biggest con of the game for me is the Respect system. You need to earn respect for every mission you do, and to earn it you need to do sidequests which are just repeats over and over again. Though there is some variety to which sidequest you choose, there are around 9 levels to each and they are all mostly the same just getting slightly harder each time. It gets pretty monotonous and its obviously just artificial lengthening. You need to earn one point of respect to do one of the games missions, which sometimes means doing two levels of a sidequest to earn the one point; and you need to do this for every real mission you do. Its not hard to see how this can get annoying.
The city is alright but there isn't a whole lot to do and a severe lack of locations where you can do insane stunts like in GTA. Once you've finished the game you can't continue roaming the city, but you won't really want to. It serves its purpose enough for setting up missions though.
Graphically, Saints Row is obviously not state of the art, not that it needs to be. The people all look a bit plastic-y. But some of the fabric on clothing looks good and the explosions are fantastic. The game world looks okay with nothing else really standing out. I loved how everything is a big display of physics and how the ragdoll's are so over-the-top.
Buy this game because its really fun. Nuff said!