Hugo Weaving's day-trip to Stillwater.
Vanilla is not an adjective I would use to describe Saints Row 2. In fact, Saints Row 2 is not the vanilla open-world crime game that it seems to be in its trailers. Quite the contrary, it is a marbled neopolitan with shades of vanilla, odd, and cra-cra equally represented throughout the whole of it. It manages to find a balance in these elements, but it never forces you to play the parts that you don’t want to with a few exceptions.
Saints Row 2 picks up three years after the first game (which you don’t need to play) left off. You play as “the boss”, the playable character in the last game that was blown to bits in the “bad” ending. The point is that you don’t need to know any of the player character’s backstory, as the boat explosion only serves as a vehicle to change your appearance in the character creation screen. It’s a robust system that rivals a lot of wrestling games, at first I made a large redheaded dude that had a slightly amused look on his face at all times but then I made Hugo Weaving as agent smith. That was pretty amazing, and it’s pretty amazing that you can make Hugo Weaving in this game.
Anyway, the game follows the standard open world genre mission structure. There are three gangs that need to be taken out before the Third Street Saints can take over the dense island city of Stillwater. Unlike most open world games, though, you’re not taking orders from a lesser-of-two-evils kind of guy, instead you take orders from your crew as they gather intelligence to take down the three gangs. Each gang has it’s own unique set of missions and cutscenes that tell of the demise of each one. After all three gangs are taken out an epilogue to the story plays out where you fight against corporate takeover. It’s an interesting story, and it will keep you going through some of the more boring side activities.
Those side activities are what feed into your “respect” meter. This meter is filled to gain access to new story missions and stronghold takeovers. This means that you have to do these activities if you want to progress through the main story, but thankfully there’s a ton of variety in them. They can range from typical Taxi and Race missions found in most open world games, to the saints row staple of Insurance Fraud, to the absolutely bizarre reality show FUZZ. All of these activities are structured into 6 difficulty levels with unlockable bonuses offered at the halfway and endpoint, but that’s besides the cash and respect payout that each difficulty level will get you. Then there are the diversions. Diversions are like smaller versions of activities that can be done almost anywhere. These fall under the category of your typical taxi, ambulance, and towing missions, but some other ones involve vehicle surfing, mugging, and base jumping. I recommend finding a few different kinds of activities that you enjoy and then grinding those out to the finish, as the bonuses for completing all levels of an activity are kind of useless at the end of the story mode.
Technically, Saints Row 2 doesn’t look that great. It’s got a lot of problems with framerate, pop-in textures, and clipping. It’s also pretty untenable on the PC. There are no Xbox 360 button prompts on screen when using a 360 gamepad. It’s understandable that most PC players prefer mouse and keyboard, and it’s not a problem that a mod can’t fix but it’s an unfortunate oversight all the same. I also experienced several crashes before I installed the Gentlemen of the Row mod. It didn’t help all that much, but crashes seemed less frequent with it installed.
Saints Row 2 plays it pretty straight for most of the story, but isn’t afraid to put on a clown nose during the side missions. This is to its benefit, as side missions in most open-world action games can get incredibly repetitive. The off-beat humour doesn’t stop at the side missions though; Pierce, one of your lieutenants, puts on So Sick by Ne-Yo while doing a drive-by and describes it as the perfect drive-by song. It’s ridiculous in enough ways to be interesting when a somber tone might have come off as overly self-serious. However, it’s not too ridiculous that the death of Johnny Gat’s main squeeze doesn’t carry any weight. There’s a lot of frustration to be found in Stillwater’s boroughs, but it’s never enough to keep you from finding something to enjoy.