Saints Row 2 (PC) Review

Sometimes, you really do get what you pay for, and this is one of those cases. I say this because when I picked the game up, it was a free title in celebration of Saints Row 3 and 4 being released on gog.com. I understood it’s reputation when I made this choice, both as the “poor man’s GTA” on console and an abomination of a port on PC, but between the price, curiosity of where the infinitely more praised sequels came from, and a promise from gog.com to have fixed the game, I decided it was worth having. Course when I tried it out at the time, it was still fucked to hell and literally I couldn’t get the game to even run at a consistent speed. Now, I am not sure if more fixes came in or my changes in hardware have made it better, but I was able to actually have it play relatively right. But it still wasn’t worth it. I gave it it’s due 8 hours before walking away but honestly, I did just that… and did so more bored then entertained. Come on in and see.

Story: You’ve been in a coma. How long you’ve been out you do not exactly know, but you do know it’s been a good long while. You are also in prison, likely due to a bomb you yourself set in the name of your gang, “The Saints.” But you are not staying. In fact you are awake all of 5 minutes before a kid who was “dumb enough to get stabbed” to meet you offers help to break you out of prison and get you off the island it’s on.

One quick escape on a stolen boat later and you are back in the city. But things are really not like you remember. And the biggest problem is that the Saints are no more. Taking the suggestion of your young friend who helped you out, you get a change of clothes and hit the nearest bar for a beer and to watch the news. As it so happens, that news story is about Gatt, your old gang leader, being on trial for 300 murders and the question of if he’s getting the death penalty for it. Without another thought, you grab the nearest car to get to the courthouse. Your friend and leader needs your help!

From this point, the two of you will make it your mission to rebuild the gang back to it’s former glory as you take on the other gangs who filled in the vacuum yours left behind. There may be some twists and turns on the way, but I’m afraid I must be honest and say I can not confirm because sadly I didn’t get too far beyond this point for reasons I will get into in the gameplay section. All I can say is I regret this fact simply because Gatt is so amusing.

7/10

Graphics: Saint’s Row 2 came out a few years after the Xbox 360 launched, and as such you can expect the game to look fairly simple and dated compared to modern games. But despite this you can see some real work went into it resulting in a very high detailed and clean looking game overall. Unfortunately this is handicapped by the game being capped at 30 FPS. This was done as part of stability fixes GOG.com made to help more people be able to play what was a notoriously bad port of the game.

That may not sound bad to a lot of people out there, but when most PC gamers have been playing everything (especially 3D rendered games) at 60 FPS or higher for the past several years (and perhaps even when this game came out), it makes everything feel awkward when whipping around aiming with the camera from time to time. It also doesn’t help when the game genuinely dips below the that 30 frame limit once in a while, likely due to how the cap was applied. It doesn’t do so by much, but you are already at such a low enough frame that it’s highly noticeable, especially as blur applies to at those moments.

Frankly put, the graphics just don’t feel right in motion, despite looking very good for their age and creating a very weird die-polar graphical experience.

6/10

Sound: Unlike the graphics, the sound in this game is actually constant pleasure. Ironically, its the weapons that are the weak point, however. Most of them sound a little light, but nothing that prevents them from being enjoying to hear. But in a game like this, there is much more to enjoy when you start driving.

The first thing you are going to notice is the radio, which includes several stations and a descent selection of music to fit the taste each caters to, so you will find stuff to enjoy very easily. And then we can talk about the sounds of cars colliding, which sounds satisfying, be it you smashed head-long into someone else or just seeing two idiots who can’t drive around each other. In either case, enjoy the sound of the chaos.

And then we can get to the voice acting, which is frankly beautiful. Everyone plays their role perfectly, and you will immediately love the “devil may give a fuck” attitude of Gatt in particular, but he’s a stand-out in a sea of brilliant work. Enjoy this.

9/10

Gameplay: Saints Row 2 is a 3rd person open-world game which is both amazing and terrible at the exact same time. When it’s at it’s best, you are playing the actual missions which will have you interacting with the members of the Saints and usually facing off with one opponent or another to put the hurt on them or get help for your own team in their quest for dominance over the city. With this drive in mind, you will do anything from killing gangsters to stealing drugs or blowing up casinos to show the world what your made of. It’s crazy, it’s mad-cap, it’s often irreverent as hell, and it’s simply awesome.

But this is also where the game hits a major snag. You see, in order to gain access to these missions you need to earn reputation. And where most games would treat this reputation as a level which once you reach it, you can access all the missions at that level, this game instead treats it like a currency. Each “level” is in essence a token which once completed, can be turned in to do ONE mission out of whatever ones are currently open at this point in the plot. The result is that while the main story is fun, you have to earn your way to it through the activities you do on the main map, be it killing gang members on the side of the road, creating near-catastrophes of vehicular carnage, collecting cars for the chop-shops, or assassinating specific people on a list.

If these constants sound like fun, they can be, but the only things worth any real amount of reputation to help you build your next token are the last two, which rather then being fun are often trials of patience and frustration as you have to find exactly the right car on the list or know what the hell the clue of the location of your target actually means and finding them properly.

But on top of this there are activities you can activate and play like races (which I did not try based on how badly vehicles traditionally work when driving with absolutes like the arrow keys), or other less traditional stints like mayhem in which you are given a time limit to do at least $XXX of damage. Sounds like fun, but it can be a huge waste of time as you don’t get any reputation if you fail and it doesn’t take long for this kind of mission to get really hard. Same thing goes for the other varied activities the game offers, ranging from taking a septic truck and literally dousing the city in shit to jumping into traffic for insurance fraud schemes. These can be fun for a time, but the volume of times you will likely have to redo them for any real reward will likely sour the experience quickly, making it just more time between you and the real meat of the game. This is in fact why after giving the game it’s due 8 hours to see if I enjoy the game, that I just quit. I was getting bored repeating the same stupid shit for no reward when I need that reward to get to the part of the game I really wanted to play: the actual main game. It was just not worth it.

5/10

Bugs: Saints Row 2 for the PC was notorious for bugs when it came out, being next to impossible to run on anything at the time. Since then, it has been fixed up somewhat, at least on gog.com, but that is not to say the game is perfect, or even really up to snuff. Not by a long shot.

• Hope your CPU is the right speed: This game is an absolutely terrible port of a console game. Enough so that it seems the speed of your CPU will directly effect the speed of your game. I realized this as even my poor APU based media center ran the game at piss-poor framerates, things like the subtitles seemed to stay up the correct length of time and the actual actions happened at about the right time. I opted for my gaming rig, however, since to get the max frames this game would let me so I could play well, but it felt off on that machine. That extra speed in my gaming rig’s CPU made everything run just a little bit too fast… not too fast to be able to play, but noticable between the machines.
• NO real controller support: If you plan on playing this with a controller, you can, but it’s completely up to you to figure out what you are doing. All controls in the game and in the manual are described in keyboard/mouse input only and the options list by button number, rendering lookups for a 360 controller or anything modeling after it completely pointless. The ONLY documentation for this is a text file telling you that if you played the 360 version, the button layout is the same. No explanation to what that is (since you know, people apparently buy multiple copies of the same game on a regular basis), just that single statement. I have never seen such lazy controller documentation in ANY game ever.
• Weapon wheel SUCKS: This is actually so bad I have to give it it’s own bug. When you play this game, it will only show you the weapon wheel like the consoles use to switch weapons, but when using it with a mouse, it is EXTREMELY sensitive to the up/down/left/right movements. Enough so in fact that if the weapon you want is in a diagonal position, you are in for a fight to be able to use them. Now thankfully you CAN use the mouse wheel like any modern game, but it would have been nice for them to tell you this.
• Glitchy missions: This only happened to me once, but the fact that I got through only a handful of missions in the time I played this (again, why I walked away) I definitely needed to mention this game doesn’t always work right. In my case, I was doing a mission to collect the drug samples from the Sons of Samedi and they had a specific dealer I was supposed to kill… which I did… and it did not register since I got him before he could get in his car. As a result I spent the next hour hunting down where he might be thinking I had missed him and ultimately had to find a way to kill myself so the mission would restart (quite ironic how hard a job that was). Doesn’t happen often, but it can ruin your day since you can’t reset the mission through any other means.

Overall: I REALLY wish I could be nicer to this game. There is serious greatness here that a lot of people would love to enjoy. The problem is it’s buried under a terrible port reworked so that it at least runs without crashing in some ridiculously crude ways (like the frame cap) and a whole lot of boring between missions as you are forced to earn the right to play what is supposed to be the main point of the entire game. That design choice, even if you get past the technical issues, is simply baffling and outright ruins the game. I wanted to like this game, but I wound up only liking a part of it, and bored with the rest.

Score:

5/10

System Requirements:

• 2Ghz dual core Pentium IV o AMD Dual Core Athlon XP
• 1 GB RAM
• NVidia Geforce 7600 or ATI X1300 with 128 MB VRAM
• 15GB hard drive space
• Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10

System Specs:

• AMD FX 8350
• 16 GB RAM
• Nvidia Geforce 960 with 4GB VRAM
• Windows 10

Source: gog.com