E3 08 Preview: Saint's Row 2
With the April release of the very successful Grand Theft Auto IV, you might think that the developers of this franchise's biggest imitator, Saint's Row, would be really concerned with how their own sequel was turning out. But it turns out to have emboldened them, because Saint's Row 2 is turning out to have a unique focus that should really ring true with gamers.
Saint's Row 2 continues the story of the first game where you wake up from a coma and then are able to customize your character to an unprecedented level in games like this. Not only do you get to change the look of your character, but you can change his or her (yes, females are included here) walking style, voice, and fighting style too. This all permeates down into the many cutscenes and all of the gameplay.
After an exciting intro where you break out of the hospital prison and then escape from the facility on a boat, you're re-introduced to the city of Stillwater which has changed quite a bit since the first game. The size of the city is one and half times as big as before, and there are a lot of new buildings and redesigned areas of the city. Your own gang, the Third Street Saints, fell apart after your character went into a coma, and now they're scattered to the winds and your old neighborhood has been entirely repurposed. It's up to you to rebuild the gang, and this time you're the boss. That means you are in command from the start, and are a little more in control of what goes on than in the first game. And it's a lot more control than GTAIV offers in the story, which had excellent cinematics but pretty much always ended with someone you dislike feeding you orders like you're their lapdog.
Sure, Saint's Row 2 doesn't do much to improve on the graphics in its predecessor, aside from improving the frame rate that would falter fairly regularly in the first game. And compared to Rockstar Games' latest, it looks half a generation behind. But where this game lacks in the time and money spent on visuals, THQ and Volition has instead spent those resources on designing missions, giving the player a ton of crazy and fun stuff to do, and taking the game to a ridiculous level. Some of the humor attempted will likely fall flat, as some of it is really over the top; you can't expect that kind of humor to work with everyone all of the time - or even most people most of the time. But overall the new mini-games seem to be genuinely more fun and amusing than in the first game.
Those extra activities you can do are a result of the developers building on what we saw in Saint's Row - insurance fraud (jumping in front of cars) is back along with most of the original activities, along with lots of new stuff like trying to drive a flaming ATV or spraying sewage on people from a truck (to bring down property values, of course). Finishing these bits gets you cash, items, and respect with various factions. There's a lot more, but the high point of the demo for me was when the Volition developer put a hot dog suit on his character and then start a particularly serious cutscene where he got into a fistfight with a particularly tough gang member. The only thing I was left looking for was an Easter Bunny costume so this guy's character could be "accosted" in the cutscene.
But the biggest new feature has got to be the cooperative campaign. While there's no split-screen mode, someone online can jump in with you and you can play all of the game's single player missions together, and your buddy can jump in and out at any time. The developers at Volition have been working on making this easy so that you can pick which player's missions to work on, allowing one person to get caught up so that both can then progress together. While the game has competitive multiplayer modes as well, so far they are staying quiet about it and will release more info later on.
You might be wondering what the point of playing Saint's Row 2 is if GTAIV is out, but I think that most people who completed the latter and quickly found that there was little else to do in the game will be impressed with what Volition and THQ are offering. With a focus on things to do and huge amounts of customization, it really does trump what little you can do other than story missions in Rockstar's newest game. As long as they can make all of that stuff and keep it really crazy without going too far overboard, then they have a hit on their hands. And while Gary Busey isn't going to be in the game itself, keep looking out for more trailers with the legendary insane actor rambling on about goofy stuff in the game. Saint's Row 2 is set for an October 14th release date on both the 360 and PS3.
