Saints Row 2 Review

It's pretty good, but it really start to wear thin after a while but I feel that way with so many open world games. Playing this game reminds me why I prefer this series over Grand Theft Auto despite SR having similar tropes that I dislike. One thing I like about Saints Row 2 is the writing and cutscene direction, the cutscenes are pretty well directed and the writing is actually really solid, it feels grounded enough but not way too overly silly. And I even found engaging for the fact that the plot was "episodic" which is something I can't stand Grand Theft Auto 5 for.

The gameplay overall is pretty solid if samey and kind of loses steam after a point. The shooting and damage animations feel decent but nothing outstanding, however the AI in the game is really stupid, all they do is either stand around or move with no sense of preservation or tactics, I know a lot of game AI tend to be like this but I found it really distracting when I was playing this game. The driving feels good and despite the fact that on PS3 you have to cross to accelerate and sqaure to reverse instead of the trigger buttons, I eventually got used to it.

The main missions are pretty good, if a little montonous sometimes especially when so many of the objectives can revolve around the same stuff like chase this guy and shoot his car, go here, shoot x number of guys, timed missions, protect missions, escourt missions and so on. It does a good enough job at breaking up the pace while being a crime open world game that is grounded even if by the 10 hour mark, it can start to wear thin and this is where the next section comes in. Another issue I have with the game is that that all devs know how to do to ramp up challenge is by shoving lots of enemies, having enemies randomly crash into you and have the police setting up roadblocks, the game does this so much that it started to get grating after a point and I kept asking myself, "is this the only way the devs can add more challenge?" I am glad I set the difficulty to "Casual" simpily because I can take a lot more damage rather than dying and reloading a lot or just waiting for long periods of time for my health to regen. I do like that you can carry all your guns to any mission allowing for some degree of choice and using a rocket launcher to easily bypass boss fights and chases sequences was hilarious. The game even gives you some degree of choice to handle the missions like in the Assault on Precint 31 missions where I have the option to escape by car or helicoptor.

Now this aspect might divide people on the game but the "respect" system while interesting on paper and I feel is a decent enough incentive to go looking around the open world instead belining it for the next story mission, and this system is pretty flexible too but at the same time, my big issue is that the "respect" system is more of a progression roadblock then it feels like it naturally ties into the overall story. I eventually reached a point where I grinded for more "respect" to do more story and stronghold missions, and another reason why I played on causal difficulty is that I can take more damage and get more headshots, heavy ordance kills and eventually rack up so many points doing this where I can get respect points inbetween. I eventually started doing this for the Brotherhood and Ultor missions. The story missions have scripted cutscenes and all of them tell a very different story than trying to earn "respect" and get "street cred", it feels so disconnected from the episodic narratives of the main game that I wonder if the devs could've tried making them harmonize better. I don't like using this term but it feels like what Clint Hocking originally tried to bring up with the concept of "ludonarrative dissonace".

Overall, Saints Row 2 is a good game and while I get to some degree why it's considered the best in the series, and I do have my issues with this kind of game in general, but SR2 is a good time regardless.