Saints Row 2

released on Oct 14, 2008

After the events of the first game, the protagonist awakens from a coma to find that the Third Street Saints have all but disappeared. Much like Saints Row, you are charged with retaking the city from three rival gangs, only this time as the leader of the saints. While fighting the Sons of Samedi, The Brotherhood, and The Ronin, the Saints also antagonize the Ultor Corporation, which seeks to eradicate gang violence in Stilwater once and for all.


Reviews View More

whoa... what an amazing game. i've been clearing out my backlog, and, despite playing over 40 games by now, this one... is by far the best one i've played, or at the very least, the most fun.

i played the WORST version of the game, the PC version, riddled with bugs, crashes, and other technical problems such as lacking resolution support, but fuck it, this game... it's good to the point that i didn't MIND having to retry missions thrice just because the game crashed, for one, missions are usually short and sweet, and well, they're really fun too.

one thing i'll say, in terms of presentation, this game sorta blows, it was made in the "piss and shit" era of games and it shows, but i still think it looks serviceable, some of the cars are pretty cool, and the comedy is actually funny, it has a lot of running gags and otherwise the game creates funny moments by itself, like when you shoot a car trying to steal it, but the owner drives himself off a bridge, this game is fucking amazing dude i laughed my ass off a lot of the playtime.

the whole structure of taking down gangs and getting territory, while you don't feel too much the impact of it, is definitely cool on a subconscious level, and damn these cutscenes go HARD, all the executions are downright amazing, specially the drug-psychic green guy leader i forgot the name of.

if it wasn't for the bugs in the PC version, i might've given this a 4.5/5 stars, if i had to complain about anything, is that the tension never builds up, even the last mission is more or less just another tuesday, which, does fit with the rest of the game, but still you'd expect a bit more for the last send off, no?

goated game tho

I want to apply as a waste disposal employee now

the best saints row game free, IMO 3 is like OK but even then i feel like the series really fell off after this game, stilwater is just a way better setting than what came after and even though it's goofier than the first game still it has a blend of serious and silly that i think works pretty well throughout the story, i dont think its like anything ultra crazy but the characters have charm and the game expands on plotlines from the first game. like any good gta/gta-esque game this game is just an absolute blast to boot up and do whatever in, game is also filled to the brim with side things or minigames to play which is pretty cool. the only real tragedy of this game is that the pc port is really trash (it might work on some peoples setups, it works ok on my steam deck but its still objectively trash port) yet also the easiest way to experience it ATM, besides just the performance issues theres some weird pc exclusive bugs iirc (although there's an older mod to patch some of these it still doesnt completely fix the experience) and no way to play the dlc the console versions had AFAIK. i've never tried it on the port either but i think you need to get through weird hoops to do multiplayer if thats your thing. classic game of the 360/ps3 era that probably won't get it's proper pc version at this point sadly due to volition exploding

And so ends my runthrough of the numbered Saints Row games. Perhaps this is really where my journey should've started, but for a variety of reasons, it ended here. Despite some flaws here and there, this is one I really enjoyed, and it definitely one of the best in the series. I took like 35-40 hours to do just about everything (95%, and I did just about everything except the really hidden collectibles and the non-labeled activities like taxi stuff). I also played on Normal mode, which I felt was very fair. Reminded me of Binary Domain a bit in that you COULD rush in and fight like a tanky badass if you wanted, but knowing how to efficiently take down enemies made those result in not-death much more frequently :P

The premise of this game is similar to what they'd do with the 4th game. Take some big event as an excuse to totally re-do the previous game's city in a much shinier way, and they did a much better job here than they did in 4. Stilwater feels like a totally new city. Even with the 30+ hours in it I spent in the first game, there were only a time or two where I'd recognize that two stores were still close by like they used to be, or that a certain intersection was similar. It really feels fresh despite the reused map, and that's impressive as hell to me. You even have the "You vs. 3 other gangs" trope again, but they redo it in such a way that it feels totally different from the last game. Giving the main character an actual character in their puckish-rogue kind of way makes the whole experience feel so fresh, and adds a wonderful new dimension to the storytelling, but more on that later.

First up, I'm gonna get this out of the way before I forget, but this game runs like ass. it looks pretty good for an '08 360 game, but where I gave SR1 a pass on its lousy performance, this game brings it to a whole other level. The horrible framerate drops during high-action scenes are still very much here, as well as whenever you're using a water vehicle (usually a jetski). But much more egregious are the horrible world loading problems this game has. You'll be driving along, and suddenly the gameplay will just freeze, but the sounds still continue. This is why having a radio helps, because it helps you distinguish loading hiccups, which the game recovers from in a few seconds, from full-blown crashes which have no sound and gotta be hard-reset from. I only had 3 or 4 hard-crashes (mostly during the insurance fraud game, oddly enough), but these loading hiccups happened at least once every hour or so. During a leisurely drive, during a high-speed car chase, during an airplane race, whenever. Saints Row 1 and 2 were both clearly never developed to be run on an Xbox, and everything from their gameplay to the performance on the hardware shows that in spades.

What does improve a little bit on the "not actually a console game" front of SR2 is the controls. You now have a cruise-control feature on your car, and while that doesn't make car-combat nearly as easy as it would be with a mouse and keyboard set-up, it does make things far more easy than the first game where you HAD to take your foot off the pedal in order to aim a shot. Speaking of driving, this game adds new stuff, although not entirely for the better. You get sea and air vehicles now, but I had very mixed feelings about them. The boats and waverunners are just that. They control like shit because it's water, but the framerate death-spiral you get on waves makes them EVEN less fun to use. On top of that, helicopters handle like fucking trash for the most part. There's one single-man helicopter that feels like it's constantly trying to crash YOU when it just decides to start plummeting downward whenever the fuck it feels like. Cars handle fuckin' great though. No longer is EVERY car you drive a fucking Styrofoam block for the AI to push around. Big cars feel heavy, little cars feel light, and power-sliding around corners feels AWESOME B)

However, that said, this game still commits some very stupid mistakes that should've been learned after the first game. For a good point, all types of a gun now share the same ammo! Bad point: There are still 4+ types of each weapon slot, types which are clearly different, but the game tells you NONE of the actual stats of each gun. Same goes for vehicles too. You've gotta go purely off of how each one handles in your personal experience to say how good or bad each one is in anything other than clip size. Now, I guess that does resemble some element of realism, but this is a fucking video game: Tell me which guns are better dammit! Further, there is STILL no way to back out of or retry an activity once you have started it. Only dying will give those prompts. Sometimes I fuck up and wanna just restart, but I can't. Or even more occasionally, I've gotten in an unwinnable situation with no explosives to kill myself with (I got the escort car super stuck) and had to throw myself off of a cliff repeatedly to die to restart the activity. Especially after they did the SAME thing in the first game, that's awful game design, pure and simple.

Activities are actually beatable now, and you won't need to throw untold hours of failure to actually exhaust one like you had to in the first game. Additionally, after beating the 3rd and then 6th (which is the last) instance of a particular activity, you unlock a passive for your character. This can be anything from police/gang notoriety going down faster, to unlocking new exclusive weapons, to infinite ammo for a specific gun type, to discounts at certain types of stores (never better reload speeds though, sadly). However, each activity has a pre-set set of passives it will unlock at each tier. You have NO way of knowing what these will be until you've unlocked them already. Part of the reason I even did some of the more frustrating activities I didn't like as much as the other ones was because I just wanted to see what passives they'd unlock (Like the 2nd to last one I did unlocked infinite sprint time ;_;, and I also wanted to make absolutely sure that none gave you better reload times). Time and time again, SR2's biggest design failing is not giving the player adequate information.

Now, for all the shit I've given this game, you may wonder why I played the shit out of it. That's mostly due to the fact this game is just fucking fun to play. You can actually aim down sights now on EVERY gun, which makes the gunplay actually enjoyable to partake in. The activities have benefited immensely from the revamped controls, and it really shows. Activities like Snatch and Escort, things that used to be bogged down by terrible enemy and vehicle balancing, have been reworked to actually be doable and fun. You do still need to do activities to earn respect to do story missions, but you get FAR more than you used to per activity to the point where that system kinda feels like a waste of time. On top of that, I was having so much fun doing activities, I actually got it past lvl 99 and just up to infinity, even though there are far less than 99 missions you could actually do in the game Xp

The story is definitely one of the best they've ever done in terms of how it relates to gameplay. In contrast to the later games, especially 4, where the high-stakes story had some serious ludo-narrative dissonance with how incredibly fucking powerful you are, this game actually feels like it has stakes. The Sons of Samede are okay and feel a bit more token-weird than anything else, but the Ronin and Brotherhood storylines are actually fantastic with some really great villains who you just love to hate. I was shouting "oh FUCK that's brutal!" far more than I usually do with these games just because of the level of tit-for-tat shit the gangs throw at each other. Some parts of the Brotherhood line especially had me absolutely speechless. This game definitely could've told a much more serious spiral-of-violence/madness story if it wanted to with a lot of these settings, but it still keeps the overall tone of the world very parody. To be honest, even more than the first game, this feels like a much more subtle attempt at parody than anything. Certainly far more subtle than SR3. I'd even forgive someone who thought it was actually taking itself quite seriously at times.

The only slight qualm I have with the story is another booboo they've carried over from the first game (in my opinion). In SR1, you had Los Carnales, a largely Hispanic group whose leaders worked extensively with Columbian drug cartels, and all of whom spoke quite a lot of Spanish that was in no way subtitled. In SR2, you have the Ronin, a Japanese organized crime group whose leading members speak quite a lot of Japanese which isn't subtitled. Now, where I have only knowledge of a few base words in Spanish, I have a much larger training in Japanese, and can mention that there were a decent handful of lines that I felt could be very easily translated and would've added to fleshing out those characters a bit more. It's just not a narrative presentation choice I agree with, and I'm glad they dropped it in later games. One thing I will note, though, is that this game and the first are quite good at depicting these other cultures in ways that are tropey but not outright stereotypical to the point of nonsense. I think Los Carnales did a better job of that kind of portrayal than the Ronin did, but aside from one joke, they damn near never even mention that Johnny Gat is Asian (although one of my bigger complaints of the later games, especially Agents of Mahem, is how un-Asian Johnny looks). For better or worse, for a series that started largely about inner-city gangsters, SR is a series that mentions race far FAR less then it mentions socioeconomic class.

Verdict: Very Recommended. This is where Saints Row really starts finding its apex. It's a little bit of a confused teenager in the first installation, but this is where it begins to find its identity and runs with it. It is definitely one of my new favorite open-world city games, up there with Watchdogs 2 and Saints Row 3. My only caveat would be that you should definitely play it on PC, not console, as previously discussed.

An open-world game in the Grand Theft Auto style, but you can create your own character (the leader of the Saints gang). You can customize your character's gender, voice, skin colour, hairstyle, face, body, etc. I must advise that the game is not optimized for recent Windows operating systems, so to fix its speed we have to use a Cheat Engine to slow it down, otherwise, the dialogues will constantly get cut.

In the co-op mode, there are several bugs, some of which stop us from continuing our missions, but other than that, the game itself is very fun even with your friends.