Saints Row (Xbox 360) Review
Posted by Chris McCarver on 09.06.2006
Rollin' with the next-gen homies feels all too familiar...
Saints Row
Platform: XBox 360 (exclusive)
Publisher: THQ
Developer: Volition
Release Date: August 29, 2006
ESRB Rating: M (blood and gore, intense violence, partial nudity, strong language, strong sexual content, use of drugs and alcohol)
Review by CHRIS McCARVER
Bit of a confession to make here: THQ and Volition's Saints Row was one of the games previewed during the XBox 360 launch that actually made me want to buy the console. As one of the biggest fans of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, particularly San Andreas, I cared less about the fact that this game was ostensibly little more than GTA:SA with much better graphics than I was about Microsoft's next-gen console having a game set in a genre that really spoke to me, minus of course, Rockstar Games' notoriously subpar graphics. So let us pull back the curtain to see if my being a GTA fanboy has blinded me into a lackluster gaming experience, or, God forbid, Saints Row will actually be a good game.
Graphics
If you've ever wondered what a GTA title would look like with a very shiny graphics engine, Saints Row is your one-stop shop. The fictional city of Stilwater is fully realized wth buildings hosed down with grainy granite textures and peppered with nice little accoutrements such as creatively designed signage and bits of internal objects, such as boxes and TVs that can be bumped into and knocked over. The clothing, hair, and skin textures on the character models are just as polished, a leather jacket well gleam with worn grain and a pair of jeans will show off its stitching if looked at closely.
The cityscape streams at a very nice framerate that only hiccups very rarely, though every so often the game glitches into unplayability, leaving the only option being reloading your last save. During my review time on the game, when trying to access a story mission, the game froze for several seconds. Rather than going to the pre-mission cutscene, the game's HUD declared the mission was in progress, but I was given no destination on the map and no on-screen instructions. I had played the mission before and knew where to go, but the mission didn't commence when I arrived. Furthermore, the game's map screen was locked (which it usually is during a mission), and the option was not given to try and restart the mission or do anything else. I also ran into graphics loss at least once, where the entire street I was driving on vanished for a few seconds.
The character animations are serviceable, but at times your character's running animations will look just a little hilarious, especially once he stops moving and stands there with a gangsta head-cock. While the NPC characters have a very wide range of realistic facial expression, your player character (which is completely customizable in terms of facial features and physical build at the beginning of gameplay) is stuck with a featureless blank stare regardless of the situation. What's fun (and unnervingly reminiscent of the recent crap remake of Narc) is that the entire screen will get hazy if the player character knocks back a 40.
The car models (sorry, folks, no motorcycles) are above exceptional in this title, especially in terms of damage modeling. The car bodies distort in ways appropriate to the type of damage they take. Sure, you'll have your average dings and dents from reckless driving and such, but, for example, if a car gets too close to an explosion, it's pockmarked with shrapnel impacts and the paint job is noticeably blackened from the smoke.
Gameplay
Saints Row casts the player as a mute nameless nobody who gets his bacon saved during a multi-gang shootout by members of the 3rd Street Saints, in particular their leader Julius (played to the smooth-talking hilt by veteran voice actor Keith David) and his right-hand man Troy (Michael Rapaport, who voiced Joey Leone in GTA3. Once you've been brought to the Saints' base of operations and have been "canonized" (meaning surviving a mass pounding by the Saints thinly disguised as an unarmed combat tutorial), Julius welcomes you into the fold and you're immediately put to work dealing out the chaos at Julius' direction.
Once the initial missions that act as further tutorials are over, you're thrown headlong into the game's primary plotline, the systematic takeover of the town of Stilwater by the Saints, which means taking on the city's other three gangs, Los Carnales (a Latino crew with ties to Colombian druglords), the Vice Kings (an all-black gang with hooks into the city's higher echelons of commerce and government), and the Westside Rollerz (white gangsta-wannabes with import tuning being their main vocation). The story plays out over a number of missions each given to you by a member of the Saints who has been assigned by Julius to handle each of the gangs. These missions do contain a wide level of variety; examples include entering an illegal street race with a rival gang after one of your homies has rigged their cars to blow up once they hit the nitro and rescuing a group of girls abducted by a rival gang for the purpose of pimping them out. And naturally, like any good GTA clone, obtaining transportation is as easy as walking up to a motorist and hitting the Y button, which has your character jack the ride with relative ease. You can also easily call on one of your fellow Saints (upgradeable to three at a time during gameplay) with a single press upwards on the D-pad if you need an extra gun for a task, and if he gets whacked (which he most likely will), reviving him is as simple and approaching him and pressing the Y button, which pours a 40 on him and brings him back to life (there's a message for the kids: malt liquor cures death).
Of course, you can't just do the main story missions whenever you want (God forbid, who would want that?). The game has a number of side missions in which you ust ply your criminal trade in various arenas, from riding shotgun for drug traffickers and hijacking cargo trucks to faking automotive injuries for the purpose of committing insurance fraud and driving a hooker and her high-profile john around while they handle their business in the back seat and you evade TV news vans. The main storyline missions require your experience, sorry, respect meter to be filled up before they are unlocked, so count on having to do one or two of the side missions between each primary mission, since each side mission fills up your respect meter. This sort of forces you into playing the side missions, which can be equal parts entertaining and laborious, so whether or not gamers will like this element of the game will depend on whether they prefer to do everything the game has to offer or they would rather breeze through and get through the game's main story. Also what might pose a headache to players is the fact that the missions are scattered throughout the city of Stilwater, so you will find yourself doing a lot of tedious roadtrips to get from mission to mission. Also, while each story mission means the Saints control a new neighborhood, every so often a rival gang will try to take their territory back, so you'll have to drop what you're doing in order to run in and stop the "pushback," as it is called.
The game heavily stresses customization of your character's outward appearance, as playing the role of a card-carrying O.G. of the 3rd Street Saints means looking the part as much as acting it. Respect awards for completing missions are granted bonuses dependent on your clothing and jewelry, especially if your clothing is colored Saints purple. There are a number of shops from which to spend that paper earned from missions and occupying neighborhoods on clothing, tattoos, weaponry, and food for regaining lost health, though I have to question the intellect of whoever decided calling the in-game burger chain "Freckle Bitch's."
The controls are fairly easy to pick up and play and should pose no learning curve for those who've played GTA and its various imitators time and again. The player character's weapons inventory is structured in a rather interesting, if somewhat cumbersome, manner. Holding down the B button brings up a sort of menu wheel that contains your various weapons. While the B button is held, the player uses the left analog stick towards the desired weapon, and releasing the B button equips that weapon. The problem is that since the left stick is used for both navigating the menu and moving your character, you can't move your character while using the menu. And since the game doesn't pause while you're in the menu and a gun isn't autoswapped once the clip dries out, you'll find yourself taking fire while trying to swap out your weapon. One thing GTA aficionados may also have a problem with is that Saints Row doesn't have that handy feature wherein the camera recenters itself when you move forward, which means if you have to adjust the camera in a direction other than centered forward, the camera will stay aimed there until you right-stick the camera aim back into place. The lack of this feature does make doing drive-by attacks a lot easier though, as you don't have to hold a button down to aim the camera out the window. Players who like an auto-aim feature, however, won't find one in Saints Row.
One thing Saints Row does come to the table with on the positive side is its near-total lack of interruptions of gameplay flow. The game's loading-screen points are few (only before and after cutscenes) and short, and the game's buildings are structured so that when you enter a building, you actually open the door and walk inside with the camera following you in. That's right, no fade to a load screen the instant you walk in the door.
Sound
Saints Row has one magnificent audio package going for it, with as much attention paid to the background character barks as the main cast's vocal dialogue. In addition to the aforementioned Keith David and Michael Rapaport, the game's voice cast boasts the likes of Michael Clarke Duncan as the Vice Kings' leader, Tia Carrere as a female Saint working undercover with the Rollerz, Lost's Daniel Dae Kim as the Saint that walks you through the Vice Kings missions, and Highlander's own Clancy Brown as a corrupt alderman. A quick warning to parents, Saints Row's dialogue is heavily peppered with profanity and adult content, arguably many times more than and much more unapologetic than even GTA, so it might be a good idea to keep this one out of your kids' game library unless you're in a hurry to have something new to blame for their antisocial behavior. The ESRB is your friend, y'know.
To no one's surprise, the game comes equipped with a number of radio stations playable while your character inhabits a vehicle. Station formats include the usual variety of musical and other audio fare, including rock, punk, classical, techno, reggae, talk radio, and of course, multiple hip-hop stations. (Though I wonder why Volition felt it necessary to add two tracks each from 80's hair bands Ratt, Slaughter, and Winger.) New to this type of music system is the character's personal MP3 player through which you can play any track from the game's soundtrack or your 360's hard drive, as well as unlockable songs findable via sixty CD icons hidden throughout the city. The music selections aren't exactly top-40 in any of the offered genres, with many of the tracks leaning towards the heavily obscure, so those clamoring for an all-star music selection may be find themselves a few shades of disappointed. Thankfully, the radio commercials run during music breaks are several shades of hilarious, though some, rife with less-than-subtle innuendo, will illicit more groaning than chuckling.
Lasting Appeal
The game contains dozens of hours of gameplay when plowing through the main storyline, and the variety of both the primary and side missions provide enough replay potential to keep players coming back, but where the replay value really lies is in online play. Through XBox Live, players can engage in online skirmishes in straight-up deathmatches or a variation where you take the chains off your capped opponents and return them to their base for points. Players can also assemble their own gang comprised of their player characters and take on other such online gangs in team deathmatches or in other more varied online fare, such as a team-based version of the aforementioned bling-collecting match or a team-based match where one team tries to protect a pimp while the other tries to take him out. The lobbies themselves are dumb fun in their own right, wherein you'll be able to get some target practice against other players for no points, just the sheer enjoyment of pullin' that strap.
Fun Factor
Saints Row is a very blatant ripoff of Grand Theft Auto, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The game contains a vast urban playground in which nearly every inch can be explored, and the variety of the various missions, types of which GTA never touched, is sure to make this one of the better XBox 360-exclusive titles. The problem lies largely in the content. While the GTA series does contain a major chunk of M-rated content, Saints Row's level of mature themes reach gratuitous levels, almost too offensive for even the most desensitized. The mature humor and gangsta ambience of the title seems forced and saturated, as if simply being urban for urban's sake. The game is still a lot of fun and one of the better open-sandbox titles on the market, and it definitely a step up in many areas over the game franchise and genre it so blatantly copies, but that hanging feeling of been-there-done-that will plague gamers at least once during a test-drive of this title.
The 411
In a growing virtual sea of Grand Theft Auto imitators, Saints Row is probably one of the better offering in the genre-blend GTA made famous. It's definitely a look into the future of this sort of game, and it's a lot of fun in both the short and long term. Sadly, the game's derivative nature and nearly gratuitous level of focus on the thug-life motif may turn off gamers who've done this so many times before, and parents wanting to screen their kids' game choices will definitely place this on their no-chance-in-hell list. Still, Saints Row is as addictive and guilty-as-sin fun as the game it imitates, and this is one case where imitation is the best form of flattery.
Graphics
9.0
Excellent character modeling, realistic car damage, occasional game-stopping glitches
Gameplay
8.5
Easy controls, wide variety of missions, tricky camera
Sound
7.5
Excellent voice acting, choppy humor, varied but obscure music offerings
Lasting Appeal
9.0
Many hours of offline gameplay, unique variations on online skirmish play
Fun Factor
7.0
Vast game world, derivative and forced mature content, ultimately yet another GTA clone
