I think this is another Portal 1 situation where I totally get why this game is so beloved and influential, but I came out of it thinking 'yeah, that was pretty good'

At a time where GTA was trying to have nerd shit like 'stories' with 'relatable characters' and 'thought provoking social commentary' Saints Row dared to ask "what if you were a menace to society trying to take over a city? As a guy with bright magenta hair and green womens booty shorts?"

And it's fun as hell. If you've ever played a GTA game, you know the score. Cause mayhem (like an agent dedicated to it, perhaps? IDK a game with that title has potential) drive vehicles, and shoot anything because you feel like it. The minigames also add to this, my favorites being 'mayhem' where the whole point is having unlimited ammo and dealing as much damage as possible, and the one where you have a small four wheeler and a path littered with explosives. And also the really funny COPS parody where you literally just maim people for TV footage (me watching police brutality at 5 years old because the theme was a bop) The games quite frankly amazing soundtrack adds to this, because it's cool to do the mentioned things, but randomly getting into a car only to now be doing it to Teenagers by MCR? That's a peak gaming experience right there.

And while the side content is superb, the main missions are...mostly decent. The story is pretty simple, just taking out rival gangs for control and ending with stopping a small conspiracy, with all rival characters being unique variations on the theme of 'utter bastard' and some serious scenes that do manage to hit hard (RIP that one guy you didn't deserve that) But the actual missions themselves are pretty repetitive. Mostly just going around a base and shooting a wave of dudes to progress, or chasing down a moving target trying to escape your wrath. And while fun, they do have an issue with (sometimes literally) throwing things at you when you think you're in the clear (the amount of times I think I'm done only for a car to swerve in and take 75% of my health only to get the rest shot off as I'm trying to stand I swear to god)

But the worst part is probably anything requiring partner AI. From the mission where Pierce drives opposite the helicopters you're supposed to shoot down, to some guy in your recruitable gang having an RPG they just really gotta show off in an enclosed space, leading to them blowing you up, it definitely shows off a lot of 360 era jank.

And the final issue, the godawful PC port. Why is my less than a year old 1k+ rig randomly dropping frames in a large building? Why are the objects characters are supposed to hold in cutscenes floating five feet away from them? Why does a game with a large focus on driving seem to have a 10% chance of crashing whenever I try to get into a car?

But at the end, it's a fun GTA-like, probably better than GTA 4 (IDK I haven't played it since I was eight and even that was just fucking with my uncle's completed save trying to find the funniest ways to kill myself) and I'm hoping this is like Portal 1 where I see the first (okay it's the first one people care about and can actually easily go back to) one as a good jumping off point, and then adore what came after it. So with that said, off to Steelport!

SR2 is really really good. It feels like a refined Saints Row 1 in all the best ways. The guns feel better, a lot of the mechanics are improved, and most of what made SR1 so good is here too and better. The humor in SR2 is top notch and all the music available hits the nostalgia points with things from MCR to P!atD and other hits from the time. The world has so much more to do and so many ways to customize a lot more things, it's incredible.

However, the PC port is horrible and barely playable.

Let me start off by saying that I tried every patch known to man to get this horrible piece of software to not crash constantly. You name it I've applied it. Not to mention how horribly optimized it is, which is something I am willing to overlook. Game runs like garbage, has tons of animation bugs, and crashes so often that it's sometimes hard to even finish a mission without it crashing and needing to constantly restart. I got to a point where you had to wheel a certain main character out of a hospital, just for the game to crash at the end and I had to redo the last two missions. That was where I lost any motivation to keep playing and instead looked up the ending cutscenes for each gang as well as the final ending. That is why I am abandoning it.