Saints Row 2

Sep 11, 2008

Last week, we traveled to Las Vegas for a truly epic six-hour gameplay marathon with Saints Row 2. Honestly, we were pleasantly surprised by its performance, running much smoother than we'd seen just a week before at PAX. With Saints Row 2 at about 99% completion, the amount of content contained within this sandbox-style shooter is staggering and we found our mere six hours inadequate to fully sample all of the activities and diversions. Still, we managed to put a bit of a dent in the story and although Saints Row 2 claims to take a grittier and darker approach than the first game, we found the comedic treatment of ruthless gang violence to be among the game's most entertaining features.

Blood Wake

The city of Stilwater, where Saints Row 2 is set, has changed significantly since you went into a coma following the events of the previous game. Essentially, the whole city has been taken over by the gentrifying might of the Ultor corporation, which has stepped in on behalf of the city to combat the rampant gang violence that you helped spread during Saints Row. While you were out, Ultor has been busily dismantling all that you'd built in the first game, so by the time you awaken from your coma with a new face (crafted with Saints Row 2's remarkably rich character creation system), you're back at the bottom of the criminal pile and need to claw your way back to the top.

And it really doesn't take long for the claws to come out, because the introductory tutorial scenario involves breaking out of prison and killing an amazing amount of people along the way. This section should give you your first inkling as to just how ridiculously violent Saints Row 2 is, because throughout at least the first six hours of the game the blinding pace of murder just never lets up. In any given situation, while there may be viable A, B and C options, Saints Row 2 will always ostentatiously promote option D: Shoot a cop and/or innocent bystander in the face.

In fact, in the very next story mission you are tasked with breaking your old pal Johnny Gat out of court... note that you're not breaking him out of jail or anything like that. No, you actually barge into the courthouse and start blasting away at anything with a badge or a gavel (you'll want to hit the judges first because they carry shotguns).

It's all so crazily hyper-violent that it's ultimately pretty entertaining. Perhaps Johnny Cash said it best when he sang, "I shot a man in Stilwater, just to watch him ragdoll."

Saints Row 2 is almost whimsical about bloodletting, providing you with a large arsenal of murderous methods. The new fine-aim mode makes it easier to draw a bead on people and pop off headshots with alarming frequency. Meanwhile, there are plenty of weapons to play around with, even if none of them really stray from the usual shooter standbys like shotguns, pistols, SMGs and rocket launchers. In one nice touch, sticky bombs stick to vehicles, which you can then bail out of to use as a remote-detonated, homebrew cruise missile. Of course, that technique works even better with airplanes and jets, because they come equipped with copious amounts of incredibly flammable jet fuel.

Killing Time

Besides the story missions that move the plot of Saints Row 2, activities are found throughout Stilwater and these smaller, semi-repeatable missions (each one has a few tiers of difficulty that you can progress through in sequence) are great for breaking up the action because they typically have you performing bizarre subversive acts that are played as much for humor as they are for any kind of ham-fisted socio-political commentary.

One of the best activities is called Septic Avenger, and your goal is to besmirch the image of the megacorporation Ultor by hosing down its corporate holdings with poop from a... uh, big tanker truck full of sewage (these don't really exist, do they?). This is one of Saints Row 2's ride-along style activities, where an AI character drives while you man a feces-flinging turret. During the course of this activity, you have to spray buildings, corporate art installations and even the employees of Ultor with filth, but the coup de gras comes when the cops show up and you soak a squad car and watch it spin blindly out of control as the driver screams, "I can't see!"

Another activity is called Trail Blazing, and here you don a fire-resistant suit that is set ablaze. You are then propped up on an ATV and tasked with the job of igniting as many people and vehicles as possible by simply riding into them. Every time you light someone up, you get extra seconds added to your time limit so that you can continue to cause flaming chaos. If you run into a car or a small tank of compressed propane (why these are lying around the college campus where this activity is set is never really explained) it will explode, engulfing nearby pedestrians and other vehicles, trees and buildings in a stygian hellstorm. Objectives aside, the point is that it's a lot of fun to run over people on a flaming ATV.

Flown the Co-op

Saints Row 2 has improved on the multiplayer component from the first game by expanding to include a new mode besides the standard deathmatch. Deathmatch is still in the game though, in the form of a mode called Death Tag.

Both competitive modes can be accessed through the two-player co-op mode simply by killing your friend or having them kill you. Once either you or your friend offs the other, you'll have the option of pressing and holding a trigger to enter either Death Tag or a new mode called Cat and Mouse.

Cat and Mouse places one of you in a super-fast exotic sports car while the other gets a slick attack helicopter. As the name implies, the player in the sports car must speed around Stilwater, evading the chopper while running through luminous checkpoints for points. When the chopper eventually atomizes the sports car, you switch sides and the hunter becomes the hunted. IGN's Nate Ahearn practically wouldn't let us stop playing Cat and Mouse... not that we put up much of a fight considering how much fun it was to tear around in the sports car or launch laser-guided missiles (they track with the helicopter's reticule and land wherever you point it).

Still, if you can manage to be civil for a couple of seconds and not kill each other, you and a friend can charge through tweaked story missions that have been altered to accommodate two players. That means that you'll encounter more enemies that employ more effective tactics that raise the difficulty to an appropriate level for a duo of seriously lethal thugs. Cut-scenes play just as they do in the single-player campaign, except each player will see their own avatar swapped in. Really though, unless you run up against a particularly difficult mission, the only reason for engaging in co-op would be to chat with your pals while blowing stuff up. You technically don't even have to actually play together as you can each accept different missions or play different activities while in co-op.

While the first Saints Row was thought to be special mostly because it was the only sandbox shooter on the 360 (until Crackdown, of course), Saints Row 2 answers this perception by flooding itself with variegated content. Sure, it's mostly variations on the shoot/drive mechanics found in any other game of its type, but Saints Row 2 seems to manage to package them just differently enough to make them entertaining... and, probably most importantly, competitive with the elephant in the room called GTA4.