Saints Row Two is a 2008 video game made by Volition who are known for their series such as “Red Faction” and nothing else which is interesting. They might as well only be known for making the wonderful Saints Row series and the equally good Red Faction series because they do have other games but I bet no one has heard heard of “Freespace” or “Summoner” but I digress. The game play is simply like any other GTA game which means it’s a third person, open world sandbox where you play as a gangster and do gangster stuff which means lots of shooting and driving. What makes it interesting and not a simple GTA clone is in fact, a couple of things so let’s start with the plot (minor spoilers contained for both SR and SR2).
Set in the fictional city of Stilwater, following the events of SR where you were put into a coma by a failed assassination attempt by undercover cop, Troy and the former boss of the “Third Street Saints”, Julius, the player wakes up five years later in Stilwater’s maximum security prison and then continues to escape from the prison with Calos, a man who is only there to serve as a way to continue the plot but still has character. After you escape by boat with Calos (and killed many people during the process), Calos explains that the city was levelled by a earthquake during the five year period which let the Ultor Corporation come in and pretty much take control of the city. Calos also tells the player that Troy is now the police commissioner, Julius disappeared off the map and the saints have pretty much disappeared as a gang which let three other gangs to roll in again. After getting some clothes, saving Johnny Gat from a trail and recruiting three new lieutenants (including Calos), the player then becomes “The Boss” and continue to take out the new gangs and then Ultor to take control of the city as you rebuild the Saints legacy. A simple plot by all means but I still find it as a fun little romp to play through since the actual storylines is what makes the story one of the best aspects and yes, I did say storylines. In this game, you can jump between which gang related mission you want to do which comes with their own little storyline where we see the wonderful main characters develop in their own way but don’t worry, it doesn’t get in the way of shooting plus each story seems to have its own little theme behind it.
We have “The Brotherhood” which is a gang of tattooed freaks who is lead by Lieutenant Warf - I mean Munroe and who’s storyline is just one of rivalry and closest the game gets to proper street gang fighting but still depressing in its own right. We then have “The Sons Of Samundi” who are just a bunch of drug dealers who is lead by a guy who calls himself “The General” but I would say this storyline to be the weakest of the three available (excluding the main one) since it’s less gang fights and more disabling the trade of drugs but they did give us the seemingly immortal “Mr Sunshine” so I’ll give them that. The final gang is “The Ronin” which just a yakuza gang which is a bit out of place but they do offer some tear jerking moments and are traditionally the final gang you need to defeat. While you do have freedom to do whatever gang you want to do in any order, it feels like the game would rather have you do the gangs in order of “Brotherhood, Sons, Ronin” so it goes “depression, funny romp and then depression” but if you are like me, you do the Brotherhood because they are bellends and therefore deserve to die, the Ronin because they have the good vehicles and then the Sons because they are just boring. The plot does have some callbacks to the original game with old characters making their reappearances in each of the storylines so it can be confusing if you haven’t played the first game but in the end, it’s still a well written series of storylines and although it does go off the wall near to the end (which will soon become the norm for this series as you will see), it’s still a quirky gangsta plot which I still find enjoyable to play through, even if I know all the twists but enough of that. I think I should move onto some gameplay before I lose more readers with this massive wall of text so let’s talk characters because they are interesting enough for a paragraph.
The main ones I want to touch on here is the two of the three lieutenants and Gat since I want to talk about the player character when we reach SR4 . I only going to talk about the mainstays Calos only appears in this game for plot reasons and his character is prett pay standard so let’s talk about Gat. Gat is pretty much the badass of the series and is your right hand man and residential murder enthusiast so just think Trevor from GTA V but with more hair but unlike Trevor, Gat is far more relatable. While Trevor pretty much embodies every single GTA V Online player, Gat is relatable because he is grounded as a character and he isn’t depicted as an insane homicidal maniac. He is just a gangbanger who lives this life because it’s the only thing he knows and when the “dramatic moment” happens in the Ronin story line (I’m not spoiling it), he becomes even more relatable as a human being and that’s why I think he is well thought out and is why he brought back for SR4 despite the events of SR3. There is also Pierce Washington who is the most cocky of the lot and he is brilliant because of it. This guy has style and he is possibly the most sensible thinking person in this game which makes him a great comedical counter to the Player/Gat, even if most of the jokes is the Player dismissing Pierce’s plans for a full frontal assault. There is also Shaundi who is just a drug addict and while she can easily be the damsel in distress type due to her easy going nature, she pulls her weight around and can act as a foil to Player’s sometimes serious nature. There isn’t much to say about Shaundi since she doesn’t get more interesting in SR3 but this version of Shaundi is memorable enough that she gets brought back yet again for SR4. I think that’s enough plot/character analysis so let’s just get stuck into the game play.
The game play is like any other sandbox gangster game and I already described it two paragraphs before but what makes it different in this aspect is mainly two things: Customisation and Side Activities. You may think “Well, what makes customisation so good?” and the answer to that is quite simply, it’s best one around. In fact, I’m ready to martyr myself for the sake of this system being added to all games with customisation options for now on and it’s all because the clothing system has layers. You heard it right, layers. Now, this may not sound exciting since most games do this already but what SR2 do is let you have more layers than usual. Let’s compare it to this game’s predecessor who lost so much of what made this game good but we will get there next week. In SR3, you have two layers which is your underwear (if you want to have one) and then your shirt/pants with very minimal customisation of the clothing which is just colour alteration. In SR2, if we are just to look at the torso area, you have your underwear, you have your undershirt, you have your over shirt and then you have your jacket which all come with various customisable patterns, colours and logos if you desire them. The clothing system is so detailed, you can change the angle of a hat on your head if you want and there is even more to look at in the cosmetic surgery section.
You got the standard stuff like hair, eye colour and facial/body alteration but then you have options to change your walk cycle, what permanent facial expression is on your face and you can even change your melee fighting style. While you have to unlock the new fighting styles by doing story missions, it’s still something you rarely see in our more modern games and here is a decade old game, being more innovative with less processing power from a older console generation doing things better than games of our current generation are trying to attempt. The customisation system displayed here is arguably the best of its kind until someone in the game industry pull their head out of their ass and actually try to be innovative again and improve on this system but the likelihood of that happening is about as high as getting catgirls as pets (and maybe as wives) in the next year. There is of course some limitations like not being able to precisely decide what angles or what colours you want since this is an old game but this system is still the best of its kind which is just like the side activities available.
While some activities are somewhat standard like drug trafficking where you just protect a dealer while you keep enemy gangs and police off your back and there is different kind of races but we aren’t here to talk about that. You are probably more interested in the activities like Septic Avenger where you drive around in a septic truck and spray literal shit all over houses and people in order to rack enough property damage to complete the mission. If spraying sewage on people isn’t your thing, what about pretending you are a cop and continue to bring “peace” to the streets with some very violent methods for a TV show in “Fuzz”, or what about being a bodyguard for some celebrity and just spend time throwing fans into scenery. For every race and equally uninteresting activities, there is a Septic Avenger or a Destruction Derby and I really like these sort of things. Sure GTA V has golfing and skydiving but that’s boring and don’t give me the realism excuse. I play video games to escape reality, not to be constantly reminded of it and that’s what the Saints Row series does best and SR2 is the peak of that within the series. It's also a good thing that these activities are fun because they not only tied to other unlockables but also story progress and oh no, I just passively aggressively started the criticism. Time to unpack the rest of the criticism because despite how good this game is, it has its downsides so let’s start by talking about the respect system.
The respect system is a double edge sword on this game. While the next two entries will tie the respect system to a leveling up mechanic, the respect system here is tied to story progression and depending on how you feel about the activities, you will either not mind this system or want to shred it to pieces. Since I love most of these activities, you would think I wouldn’t mind but I do because I think it’s a bit of a pace breaker. You see, you gain respect from doing all sorts of things like killing people and all that jazz but you get the most by doing the activities and story missions require at least one bar of respect to start them. While this mechanic forces the player to try out everything else in the game, I think it’s a poorly thought out idea which will be better done in the upcoming game. This forces players to either spend the start of the game going around and doing activities in the hopes they get enough respect to get through the whole game without having to stop and grind again or just do activities between missions which breaks the flow of the game. You can increase your respect gain rate by spending cash on getting cars, clothes and cribs but that requires cash and the missions have the highest payout rate and they are locked behind the respect system so it becomes an endless loop. The respect system in this game is just bad in general despite being an interesting idea and if we are going to talk about bad things, let’s talk the graphics because they are dated.
This game is a PS3/Xbox 360 title so it’s just baffling that this game looks and plays like a PS2/Xbox game. This game looks like crap and it plays like crap. The game just seems horribly dated and it doesn’t help that it’s sequel, SR3, would be released on the same hardware a few years later and actually look and play like a proper PS3/Xbox 360 game. The controls are awfully stiff and the graphics are just horribly done and if we are talking about horribly done things, let’s talk about the PC port. Yes, I am smooshing in the PC port section here because I’m not making a separate paragraph for it plus it’s about as buggy as any early bootleg PS1 game is. The PC port is a buggy pile of ass and it makes you wonder if they actually hired people to port it or got some chimps from the local zoo to wipe their arses on the keyboards to make it. It’s full of crash zones, it has out of sync cut scenes, there is speed up bugs everywhere and it was so bad, Volition and Deep Silver didn’t even try to fix it and left it to modders to make pretty much an unofficial patch to fix the whole thing for them. Because of this, I would not recommend the PC port to anyone unless they have some basic knowledge of modding but I will say, the PC port with the mod might as well be the definitive version of the game due to it adding even more content on top of the bug fixes and that’s just black mark on Volition’s record.
Even if the game is dated piece of crap, I still think to this day that this is the best Saints Row game in the series by far and has the most appeal to a general audience. It went from being a GTA clone to trying to do its own thing which is crazy gangster shenanigans so here is an 8/10 for the game. If you want to play the game, track down a copy for the consoles for maximum consumer friendliness but if you want the best experience, get a copy for the PC from Steam or Good Old Games and learn how to install the Gentlemen Of The Row mod since it fixes a lot and overhauls the whole game with a load of new stuff as well as adds replayability. I'm sorry that I didn’t upload last week but I had a lot of assignments due during that week so I didn’t have enough time to write this up. I already have some plans for the reviews after this series of reviews so get your body ready for the manga double feature coming up after this. I will also be covering the Black Panther in the future and the new Mama Mia sequel because I can’t resist ABBA and you might get lucky, I might rant about Infinity Wars because I think it’s a good enough excuse to murder a fandom. Also for those looking for video content, I have started editing and uploading my own videos on my YouTube channel so link down below (and on the side bar if I sort it out) but anyway, see you next week for Saints Row 3.
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