It's ridiculously fun
It's impossible to avoid comparing Saints Row to GTA. The first Saints Row was viewed as a momentary fix for those craving GTA-esque gameplay on the next generation of consoles, and thus was infinitely compared to GTA. Well, the first Saints Row didn't really benefit from these comparisons, because while Saints Row was a valiant attempt at recreating GTA, Grand Theft Auto was still viewed as the better franchise. Volition is now trying to counter that by giving Saints Row 2 a personality of its own. While GTAIV attempted (and succeeded) to draw players in with a very deep story and extremely polished gameplay, Saints Row 2 aims to provide as many possibilities for the player to have absurd fun, and the end result is just that; ridiculously fun.
After you create your character, you have to escape the prison with the help of a sidekick, Carlos. Once you get off the prison, you receive a small crib and can start working on taking out the new gangs that have populated Stillwater after Saints Row. The Ronin, Japanese ninjas and my personal favorite gang, The Brotherhood, tattooed lunatics and The Sons of Samedi, a gang that has a constant purple haze around it. Just like in the first Saints Row, you need to do activities to earn respect bars in order to play these missions. Not all of these activities are awesome, but there are some really cool ones like riding a flaming quadbike, protecting people with an attack helicopter and more. Earning respect definitely seems easier this time around, as beating both heli assault locations and one of the drug trafficking locations was enough for me to get through the entire game.
The stories of the three gangs are completely stand-alone, as they can be played in any order. This does make them somewhat boring, because there is pretty much no story progression, apart from a couple of moments. Two moments, however, are very strong and really fuel your desire for revenge. Johnny is oddly almost completely absent from two of the three gang stories, which is too bad, because he's awesome. If you were hoping for Dex to return, without spoiling too much, his appearance is way too brief to satisfy. Overall, the story in Saints Row 2 is nothing compared to GTAIV's, though the cutscenes are well directed. Voice work is solid across the board as well.
Those cribs are all completely customizable too, along with your gang style (gangster, bodyguard, freakin' ninjas), your own look, which vehicles your gang uses, radio stations and more. There are a whole lot of thing you can change to really personalize the game.
Combat is pretty awesome this time around. The first Saints Row had fun moments, but overall I felt the combat to be quite tame in that game. Not so this time around. Explosions are huge, you have acces to some crazy weapons and vehicles, melee is improved with three combat styles that all have some pretty insane combos. Melee weapons are nice too, with chainsaws, baseball bats and katanas, with that last one having some cool uses in the Ronin storyline.
Overall, I love this game. I still need to do alot of activities, and I've put around 20 hours into the game so far, which is a rarity for me. If you liked GTA SA, you will love this. It's not the heavyweight GTAIV is, but this Saints Row 2 will provide hours upon hours of pure, unadulterated fun.
