Ta bien
Saints Row is a blast from the past! It's like Grand Theft Auto on steroids – way more crazy and over-the-top. The story's entertaining, gunplay feels satisfying, and the activities are ridiculous fun (Insurance Fraud, anyone?). It's aged a little – the graphics are dated, and driving takes some getting used to – but if you want that early 2000s open-world chaos with a goofy sense of humor, it still holds up.
Repetitive because of rep. system it's terrible. Game is fun and edgy.
I'm a big fan of the 3rd and 4th games of the series, so I thought it made sense to go back and play the original two. I'm fiiiinally getting around to that. I'm a big fan of open-world big-city games like this, so I figured I'd enjoy it at least a bit no matter what, and that's more or less what happened. This game has some clever and at points quite chuckle-worthy writing, but the gaping holes in the gameplay just really hold it down.
I was genuinely engaged in the story. It's a lot of the tongue-in-cheek humor and writing the series would later become infamous for, but here it comes off more like a slightly more silly and quippy Grand Theft Auto. Of the three gangs you gotta take down, I liked the Vice King's plot the best, mostly just because Ben King is a really cool dude. I thought the other two gang's stories were quite fun as well, but I felt they were a little short and underdeveloped compared to the VC's. It came off a bit like they were trying to have too many characters in those, and ended up having to cut out more exposition bits that really fleshed out the characters a bit more between each other. It seems like you meet people just to watch them die a mission or two later at times, especially for the Los Carnales missions. The comedy is often very well done though. The way they handle your (mostly) silent protagonist always had me giggling to myself, even though it might come off as eventually getting a little old to some. No really big complaints here.
Then you have the gameplay, oh GOD the gameplay. This game REALLY goes out of its way to make you do missions that really aren't that fun just for the sake of diversity of mission objectives, which is a design philosophy I really can't stand. It makes a lot of missions (like several that involve moving a big truck or bulldozer around very quickly before the relentless tide of baddies blow it up or get it stuck) just a miserable slog to do because of how difficult they are. The enemy cars can push you around SO fucking much, no matter how big the car you're in it. The FBI cars especially can fling you around like no one's business. Not to mention you NEVER get checkpoints in the middle of a mission, so a LOT of this game is failing a mission and then driving back to the location of that mission.
The game very frequently thinks it has better mechanics than it actually does, and bases missions around you fangling through those. Basically every single mission you do to take down the Riders involves some car-to-car combat, something this game really struggles with. You can ONLY use pistols, SMG's, and grenades from your driver's seat. With SO many missions that involve incapacitating or taking out an enemy vehicle as it flees from you, that just got so endlessly frustrating and tedious. A last nail in just the poor mechanics making the game worse is there's no aim-down-sights at ALL. One rifle has a scope. Other than that, you're hip-firing absolutely everything, and there are some missions where this REALLY sucks ass (including one where you gotta do a 2 minute drive to the airport to then struggle to AK-fire down an ariplane only with hip-fire from a moving vehicle. That sucks ass).
You also gotta do "respect" activities to earn a kind of non-exp, whose only purpose is to unlock your ability to do more story missions. This wouldn't be so bad if a lot of the side activities weren't so arduous. With how bad the gun-play and car-combat can be at times, it makes the higher levels of these things absolutely impossible, and I have no idea how some were ever intended to be accomplished in single-player. They're okay fun though, and a decent enough way to break up the action. I'd much prefer they just be optional ways to earn EXP or cash and you could just spam story missions as much as you wanted. Those babies are the real highlights of the game for the most part.
Granted, money doesn't really serve that much of a purpose. You're more or less as powerful as you'll ever be as a character when you start the game. Other than which flavor of gun you like most, there's really nothing power-wise to spend money on. Guns are crazy expensive and not usually actually different enough to matter, so I never spent money on guns (especially as you can't just buy ammo, you've gotta buy many of the same gun to get more ammo for that gun). Given that you lose like 20% of your cash every time you die, I found it prudent to find SOME way to get value of my money before I lost it dying (for every time you fail a respect activity, it counts as a real death, and even a cop pulling you out of your car will instantly kill you). The only way I found to do this was pimping out my character.
Now you can buy and upgrade cars and such, but there's no phone service to call them like in later games, so it's SUCH a bitch to go out of your way to get your custom cars, I always just stole one. It's easy and harmless enough. Literally, unless you do it within a foot of a cop, you'll never get in trouble for it (this ain't Mafia II, folks). As you buy clothes and jewelry for your character, you'll get more style points. These style points give you a respect multiplier for the respect activities you do, so I found it very prudent to invest in them so I could get to story missions faster. The best way to accumulate these bonuses is through jewelry, as you can wear a LOT (like 6 ear piercings, 3 nose, 2 eyebrow, 4 lip, 4 rings, 3 necklaces and a separate pendant on each, a watch on each wrist). If you opt for the most expensive option on each, you'll get those extra bonuses rollin' in quick. But this does kinda force you to have a piercing-happy character to actually play most optimally, which I felt kinda sucked (I never really wanted any :? ).
As a final note, the game also runs pretty poorly. The Xbox ain't the biggest powerhouse, and this game didn't try to hide that. The game's framerate is linked to how fast it runs, so it just feels like the game gets slowdown occasionally. This is really present when you have several cars with aggro'd passengers inside fighting at once on the screen. Not something that's a problem all the time, but given you gotta do every mission to beat the game, enough missions have this problem that it becomes very hard not to notice. The game also has some problems loading in textures and, at times, entire buildings and city-blocks. There was a time or two where I'd be followed by a bunch of dudes, just to turn the camera to see that the city block I was approaching was just a flat texture on the ground, and it took a second for the city itself to pop in. Speaking of pop-in, this game has it SO fuckin' bad. If ANY non-aggro'd car gets behind you for any length of time, you better kiss that bitch goodbye. Not only is that pop-out really annoying, but you can see enemies pop-in well inside your line of vision a LOT. It's not game-breaking, but definitely immersion breaking and annoying more often than not.
Verdict: Not recommended. If this game had really repetitive on-foot gunplay missions, I'd honestly think it'd be a lot better. It focuses too hard on things it doesn't do well, and it really suffers for it. No amount of clever writing can save it from that. I'd only play this one if you're both a big fan of city open-world games AND a big Saints Row fan, because that'll be the only way you'll be able to trudge through all the sins this game commits :/
I was genuinely engaged in the story. It's a lot of the tongue-in-cheek humor and writing the series would later become infamous for, but here it comes off more like a slightly more silly and quippy Grand Theft Auto. Of the three gangs you gotta take down, I liked the Vice King's plot the best, mostly just because Ben King is a really cool dude. I thought the other two gang's stories were quite fun as well, but I felt they were a little short and underdeveloped compared to the VC's. It came off a bit like they were trying to have too many characters in those, and ended up having to cut out more exposition bits that really fleshed out the characters a bit more between each other. It seems like you meet people just to watch them die a mission or two later at times, especially for the Los Carnales missions. The comedy is often very well done though. The way they handle your (mostly) silent protagonist always had me giggling to myself, even though it might come off as eventually getting a little old to some. No really big complaints here.
Then you have the gameplay, oh GOD the gameplay. This game REALLY goes out of its way to make you do missions that really aren't that fun just for the sake of diversity of mission objectives, which is a design philosophy I really can't stand. It makes a lot of missions (like several that involve moving a big truck or bulldozer around very quickly before the relentless tide of baddies blow it up or get it stuck) just a miserable slog to do because of how difficult they are. The enemy cars can push you around SO fucking much, no matter how big the car you're in it. The FBI cars especially can fling you around like no one's business. Not to mention you NEVER get checkpoints in the middle of a mission, so a LOT of this game is failing a mission and then driving back to the location of that mission.
The game very frequently thinks it has better mechanics than it actually does, and bases missions around you fangling through those. Basically every single mission you do to take down the Riders involves some car-to-car combat, something this game really struggles with. You can ONLY use pistols, SMG's, and grenades from your driver's seat. With SO many missions that involve incapacitating or taking out an enemy vehicle as it flees from you, that just got so endlessly frustrating and tedious. A last nail in just the poor mechanics making the game worse is there's no aim-down-sights at ALL. One rifle has a scope. Other than that, you're hip-firing absolutely everything, and there are some missions where this REALLY sucks ass (including one where you gotta do a 2 minute drive to the airport to then struggle to AK-fire down an ariplane only with hip-fire from a moving vehicle. That sucks ass).
You also gotta do "respect" activities to earn a kind of non-exp, whose only purpose is to unlock your ability to do more story missions. This wouldn't be so bad if a lot of the side activities weren't so arduous. With how bad the gun-play and car-combat can be at times, it makes the higher levels of these things absolutely impossible, and I have no idea how some were ever intended to be accomplished in single-player. They're okay fun though, and a decent enough way to break up the action. I'd much prefer they just be optional ways to earn EXP or cash and you could just spam story missions as much as you wanted. Those babies are the real highlights of the game for the most part.
Granted, money doesn't really serve that much of a purpose. You're more or less as powerful as you'll ever be as a character when you start the game. Other than which flavor of gun you like most, there's really nothing power-wise to spend money on. Guns are crazy expensive and not usually actually different enough to matter, so I never spent money on guns (especially as you can't just buy ammo, you've gotta buy many of the same gun to get more ammo for that gun). Given that you lose like 20% of your cash every time you die, I found it prudent to find SOME way to get value of my money before I lost it dying (for every time you fail a respect activity, it counts as a real death, and even a cop pulling you out of your car will instantly kill you). The only way I found to do this was pimping out my character.
Now you can buy and upgrade cars and such, but there's no phone service to call them like in later games, so it's SUCH a bitch to go out of your way to get your custom cars, I always just stole one. It's easy and harmless enough. Literally, unless you do it within a foot of a cop, you'll never get in trouble for it (this ain't Mafia II, folks). As you buy clothes and jewelry for your character, you'll get more style points. These style points give you a respect multiplier for the respect activities you do, so I found it very prudent to invest in them so I could get to story missions faster. The best way to accumulate these bonuses is through jewelry, as you can wear a LOT (like 6 ear piercings, 3 nose, 2 eyebrow, 4 lip, 4 rings, 3 necklaces and a separate pendant on each, a watch on each wrist). If you opt for the most expensive option on each, you'll get those extra bonuses rollin' in quick. But this does kinda force you to have a piercing-happy character to actually play most optimally, which I felt kinda sucked (I never really wanted any :? ).
As a final note, the game also runs pretty poorly. The Xbox ain't the biggest powerhouse, and this game didn't try to hide that. The game's framerate is linked to how fast it runs, so it just feels like the game gets slowdown occasionally. This is really present when you have several cars with aggro'd passengers inside fighting at once on the screen. Not something that's a problem all the time, but given you gotta do every mission to beat the game, enough missions have this problem that it becomes very hard not to notice. The game also has some problems loading in textures and, at times, entire buildings and city-blocks. There was a time or two where I'd be followed by a bunch of dudes, just to turn the camera to see that the city block I was approaching was just a flat texture on the ground, and it took a second for the city itself to pop in. Speaking of pop-in, this game has it SO fuckin' bad. If ANY non-aggro'd car gets behind you for any length of time, you better kiss that bitch goodbye. Not only is that pop-out really annoying, but you can see enemies pop-in well inside your line of vision a LOT. It's not game-breaking, but definitely immersion breaking and annoying more often than not.
Verdict: Not recommended. If this game had really repetitive on-foot gunplay missions, I'd honestly think it'd be a lot better. It focuses too hard on things it doesn't do well, and it really suffers for it. No amount of clever writing can save it from that. I'd only play this one if you're both a big fan of city open-world games AND a big Saints Row fan, because that'll be the only way you'll be able to trudge through all the sins this game commits :/
I was fully expecting to write this off as some generic trash but this really was a lot of dumb fun
its a good game but its kinda a pain in the ass to play
The first Saints Row game is as funny and unhinged as the other saints row games, only without dildos as weapons because.. well, it was 2006.
The dialogues are incredibly funny, specially if you're bilingual and know Spanish because the pedestrians have so much personality and charm and so does the main characters!
I loved the main plots and the secondary characters shown in activities, but sadly this game locks the main story in the activities, forcing you to play through boring minigames over and over.
After playing saints row for three days and barely progressing in the story, I decided I had enough and finished the game on youtube like some Persona fan because the grind you need to do is insane to the point it makes the main story feel bad because "really? I grinded for three hours just to play two missions that were barely fifteen minutes?" I don't know.
This game fucks and was really fun to experience and play, but the grind of the activities is a major turn off. I still recommend it, because I know some people that LOVE the activities of this game. Sadly I don't.
The dialogues are incredibly funny, specially if you're bilingual and know Spanish because the pedestrians have so much personality and charm and so does the main characters!
I loved the main plots and the secondary characters shown in activities, but sadly this game locks the main story in the activities, forcing you to play through boring minigames over and over.
After playing saints row for three days and barely progressing in the story, I decided I had enough and finished the game on youtube like some Persona fan because the grind you need to do is insane to the point it makes the main story feel bad because "really? I grinded for three hours just to play two missions that were barely fifteen minutes?" I don't know.
This game fucks and was really fun to experience and play, but the grind of the activities is a major turn off. I still recommend it, because I know some people that LOVE the activities of this game. Sadly I don't.
i have no memories of playing this, Im assuming I had to since Ive played every other SR game
The vives of this game are really unmatched and the characters are hilarious.
The Best "GTA clone" imo
The Best "GTA clone" imo
An overall great GTA Clone
At a time when GTA was more about immersion features that caused the game to feel real but clunky, this game decided to lean more into being a video game. Many quality-of-life features added to make gameplay less frustrating than its inspiration by being more smooth and highly customizable. The story is just surface level with being a gangster taking out rival gangs, not very memorable. You'll find most enjoyment from the side missions that are more like minigames that give satisfying rewards for completing.
At a time when GTA was more about immersion features that caused the game to feel real but clunky, this game decided to lean more into being a video game. Many quality-of-life features added to make gameplay less frustrating than its inspiration by being more smooth and highly customizable. The story is just surface level with being a gangster taking out rival gangs, not very memorable. You'll find most enjoyment from the side missions that are more like minigames that give satisfying rewards for completing.
GTA for the kid down the street who wasn't allowed red cordial.
A start to something beautiful.
There are idea here. In hindsight you can see the origins, but it wasn't there yet.
Jogo incrivelmente bom, serio, a fama de "GTA Quirky" ou "GTA sem sentido e maluco" não é o suficiente pra descrever esse jogo, tu gosta de sandbox ? Gosta de humor sádico ? Sabe apreciar piadas tanto escrotas quanto implicitas ? Faça me um favor, esqueça o terceiro jogo em diante desta serie, e jogue o primeiro e o segundo.
O Primeiro jogo é um 4/5.
A Gameplay hoje em dia envelheceu um pouco mal, recomendo jogarem num emulador de 360 com controle, não da no teclado.
O Primeiro jogo é um 4/5.
A Gameplay hoje em dia envelheceu um pouco mal, recomendo jogarem num emulador de 360 com controle, não da no teclado.
text by tim rogers
☆☆☆☆
“THE VIDEOGAME EQUIVALENT OF A HATE CRIME.”
Here’s a videogame made by a team of men whose strongest dream must be that someday a doctor will prescribe them bacon. Not everyone has the innate talent required to craft entertainment masterpieces, and Saints’ Row illustrates quite masterfully, in the form of many psychological accidents, that it is possible to assemble a room full of three hundred randomly selected human beings, each of them lacking in sense, artistic conscience, and competence at judging the value of entertainment.
The first clue in this who-shot-modern-society season cliffhanger comes in the form of the game’s title: according to the Volition Inc. website, the proper rendering is “Saints Row”. Now, “Row” seems to indicate we’re talking about a street of some sort, a thoroughfare if you will. So how many saints are there presiding over this thoroughfare? If it were one, the game would be “Saint’s Row”; two or more and it would be “Saints’ Row”. The developers at Volition must have left the naming conventions for last, thinking that they would decide how many saints we were dealing with toward the end of the “dev cycle”, and then hire someone to airbrush an apostrophe onto the package design. Maybe they’d even make it a graffitti-style apostrophe, for extra “street cred”.
Seeing as the game involves a gang called the “Saints”, I take it that the title is supposed to be rendered “Saints’ Row”, so I will call it thus in this review. Volition should pay me a proofreader’s fee. At New York rates, what I just did here, in the back of my head, is worth six dollars.
I’m not going to deride the developers’ choice to let players make their own characters. In the end, it doesn’t matter. My character is a vaguely Hispanic looking white man of imploding anorexia and soppy cornrows. His facial hair looks like someone applied it with Mario Paint. He looks like a wet rat at a job interview, minus a stack of A4-sized print-outs bearing the names and URLs of all the Wikipedia articles he’s contributed to. Hey, it was either this or make “‘Before’ Jared” from the Subway commercials, now African-American and with purple hair. (You know, I ate lunch with Jared in high school, a couple of times. He was my big brother’s best friend. He graduated two years ahead of me. My brother was into kung-fu. He once beat the stuff out of some kid who threw a rock at Jared after school. No kidding.)
The game lets you make your own character because it wants you to identify with the character. Right at the beginning, your creation is standing on a street corner in a magic city where everyone has access to violence, and he gets meaninglessly gunned down by thugs riding a gaudy automobile, probably because he looks like Boy George wearing FUBU by order of a witness protection program, and that stuff just don’t belong in our hood. Some other gangsters, in purple, show up and heck up the motherheckers who just tried to heck you the heck up. They blast those motherheckers. You’re rescued by a man in a backward hat, voiced by a black actor I think I’ve seen before in a movie that wasn’t very good. He helps you up and takes you in to his gang, the Saints, who are dedicated to cleaning up the streets by murdering anyone who even thinks once about murdering anyone else. They want to clean up the drugs, and the gangs, and the hookers — the cops in this town aren’t worth stuff, we’re told, and stuff, that means we can blow up a car and probably not be chased around like in Grand Theft Auto. Shit yeah!
Previous games have used perhaps-political authority figures as thug-blasters: Final Fight, for example, stars Mayor Mike Haggar, former pro-wrestler (in the 80s, it seemed like such casual, hilarious irreverence), who will kill any pixelated sons of bitches between him and his kidnapped daughter. Now that we’re putting this sort of thing into 3D, with realistic vehicle physics and “evolutionary” (their words) aiming controls for gun firing — now that there’s voice acting by the Hollywood B-Team, it feels kind of fake and breathtakingly insulting. There’s a tiny twinge of subtext that a fourteen-year-old boy could pick up on if he was lucky enough to not have a distracting erection during world history class yesterday — that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that this leader-guy might possess ulterior motives for wanting to kill the other gangs. Still, that’s neither here nor there — the gang underlings listen to this man like church attendees. They behold him as a walking religion.
So when I’m on a mission, and I feel like shooting an old woman in the head for no reason, and my partner — indicated in cut-scenes as the most devout follower of the gang — pulls out his gun and starts shooting the police instead of turning me in for being a raving psychopath, hundreds of red flags fly up in the back of my brain. I don’t even get a “Dude, that’s not cool!” out of the guy. I punch an innocent pedestrian on the street, and my man whips out his pistol when the pedestrian throws a single punch back. How hard is it to program these AI scripts? Why wouldn’t my guy, I don’t know, punch me, scream at me, pull out his gun and shoot me in the kneecaps, call the cops, or something?
The game is an acrobat when it comes to tripping over itself. On the one hand, the street-cleaning Saints are a gang of religious proportions; on the other hand, when the police are following you for doing something you shouldn’t do in real life, the way you clear your criminal rating is by driving your car through a drive-thru church. In Grand Theft Auto, you drive into a seedy auto shop and get your car painted a different color, and the license plates changed. Here, you ask forgiveness at a drive-thru church, and “donate” them some money. Get it? Ha ha! Religion is a commodity, get it? Get it? The game is just a skin for Grand Theft Auto, made by people who thought that putting an FPS-style right-analog-stick gun aiming system (very nice, actually) and some crunchier vehicle physics (again, pretty nice, good sense of weight) into it would suffice for “innovation”.
Yet it is the dynamic physics of the game that commit its greatest act of evil. When a realistic innocent human is murdered in cold blood in the street, his corpse disappears within one click of a watch’s second hand. However, when your character purchases a soft drink from a restaurant (absolutely unthinkingly named “Freckle Bitch’s” — yeah, profanity in the name of a fast-food restaurant! that’s right around the corner! let’s get in on that one on the ground floor!), and then drinks that soft drink, and then litters the empty cup on the ground, the cup rolls around for a full thirty seconds. That’s the developers saying, “Hey, we hired guys to work out that physics engine! We’re not going to waste that research!” If pressed in an interview, someone in charge of decision-making in this game could say that the corpses disappear so that players can’t be overly cruel by continuing to pop caps in the dead person’s head and/or ass and watching the corpse flinch realistically. A skilled interviewer would then ask them why they let you kill innocent people at all, and the interviewee would reply that they want the players to “have fun” and/or “enjoy themselves” and/or “express themselves” through the videogame, which is a hell of an audacious answer. I’d say, when there’s no better way to have fun or enjoy yourself or express yourself in a game than by destroying the people-shaped targets the game does not explicitly ask you to destroy, then maybe your game is just a big empty husk, as cheap and tacky as the Styrofoam sculpture of the history of hip-hop that makes up its soundtrack.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for one, stars a young man whose mother has been killed. When he starts getting revenge, he has a reason. All we know about him is that he left his hometown because he was tired of gang violence. He comes back when the violence claims his moms, and he wants to heck up the heckers that hecked his moms up. Good enough reason. If Carl “CJ” Johnson slays a hooker in his quest for revenge, it’s just something that happens. It’s a tendency within him as an angry, wronged young person; it’s your choice to bring it out in him, you sick heck, you. If you want to play San Andreas as a story of an honest man getting revenge for the death of his moms and subsequently getting caught neck-deep in some serious stuff, you can do that. You are playing a role. You are free to interpret it as you will. In Saints’ Row, you’re a blank slate who gets knocked on his ass in a drive-by. Maybe this blank slate is a raving psychotic motherhecker who had just never been privy to a stash of weaponry the likes of which the Saints’ gang possesses. That’s all well and good: that the characters in the game are not appropriately shocked and/or appalled when you do horrible things is something of a mortal sin.
I am a liberal enough person to admit that, if I had an identical twin sister and if she wasn’t actively repulsive I’d probably have had at least cooperative oral sex with her by now, so when I say that you have no idea quite how deeply your game offends me, you should know that you’re in deep stuff. How dare you put this presumptuous trash out on the market. Quit your jobs producing entertainment software, abandon the lucky break that scored you a “connection” to the “industry”, and take up a job at a Denny’s or a Starbucks, to see what real people look like and how they walk and how they gesture with their hands.
Or maybe the problem’s not you. Maybe it’s the whole hecking “industry”. Or maybe it’s not. Though Rockstar, who shat the gold brick called Grand Theft Auto, has begun to use their “sandbox” genre as a rough outline, a checklist of “things one can do, if so inclined, in 3D action videogames”, on which to base more dynamic levels of storytelling — as evidenced in 2006’s conceptually excellent Bully — the rest of the world seems to be turning the wrong way. Why, in Saints’ Row, there’s a mission early on where you have to kill “evil pimps” to steal their hos for another pimp, a good pimp, who also happens to be friends with your gang, which, yes, is a gang devoted to killing all of the other gangs as a means of “cleaning up the streets”. It’s obvious at this point that the “story” of Saints’ Row was shunted in at the latest possible moment, and that the ho-snatching mission was drafted during a meeting in which some coke-fiend producer jumped up and down on the boardroom table with his polka-dot necktie clipped uncomfortably to a wrinkle on his forehead: “GTA lets you pimp hos! We need to let you pimp hos! GTA lets you pimp hos! Let’s let players pimp some hos!”
Where Volition hangs its fuzzy hat, the gene pool is heated to the temperature of a cesspool. Within the marble halls of its psychological accident of game development, a man actually speaks the words “Complete missions to earn respect. Fill your respect meter to unlock more missions.” Yes, he actually uses the word “unlock” with regard to content existing in the game world he occupies. On another corner of this cube-shaped world called the videogame industry, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas opens with a difficulty selection screen: “Difficulty select: Select the difficulty level of the game: NORMAL / REALISTIC”. Witness this and feel years of current events rip from the top of your skull to the soles of your feet, like rollercoaster g-forces. The War in Iraq, the grin of the current mongrel president of America, the shootings in Columbine, foaming media feeding frenzies smothering out the sparks of introspection that might have had the chance to fan into a bonfire of renaissance, Jack Thompson. “REALITY IS NOT NORMAL”, games are saying, in a sideways subliminal way.
Could you imagine a dramatic television show about a rugged cop, a great man at heart, maybe one whose wife had been gunned down by thugs, who lives only to drink whiskey, eat at the same sad diner every golden sunlit morning, and keep the streets clean — who, for some reason, the sixth episode in, pulls out his gun, fires it out the window of his patrol car, and kills a young boy riding a bike, only to have his partner keep rattling on about the drug dealer they’re looking for, only to have the writers seem to forget such a thing happened and let the show go on through eight more Emmy-winning seasons? Of course you can’t. It’d be hecking &^#$#ed, disgusting. It’s not even the senseless violence that gets my goat: it’s the internal inconsistency. It’s the complete and utter lack of artistic conscience. At least, whether you can admit that “American Idol” is actually beneficial to society or not, you have to agree with me that the television and film industries currently possess many more individuals able to competently judge the worth content than the videogame industry has perhaps ever seen. You can spin it out all you want and say that videogames are a young industry, and that’s where I flip you off and tell you that yeah, they’re a young industry, though it’s a pretty mature hecking world we live in, and these people went to school, where they very well should have read books about the hecking world and learned just how mature it is.
(Oh for heck’s sake — according to GameStop.com, the PlayStation 3 version of this game is being released on the Fourth of July. Ain’t that America.)
We are all philosophically doomed as creatures that dream because we can’t physically handle being happy all the time; we have to be happy sometimes and sad sometimes; we believe shadow lends context to light, or whatever. I say yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. Though I’d also like to be the first to admit that, maybe, this is a fundamental problem in the world it may take us centuries to work out. In the Zen buddhist sense, which is convenient and kind of a cop-out because it’s pretty much every sense rolled into one, Saints’ Row just isn’t hecking helping, and the next patch released for it should do more than just cut down the lag in the online multiplayer — it should render the disc hecking unreadable by my Xbox 360.
☆☆☆☆
“THE VIDEOGAME EQUIVALENT OF A HATE CRIME.”
Here’s a videogame made by a team of men whose strongest dream must be that someday a doctor will prescribe them bacon. Not everyone has the innate talent required to craft entertainment masterpieces, and Saints’ Row illustrates quite masterfully, in the form of many psychological accidents, that it is possible to assemble a room full of three hundred randomly selected human beings, each of them lacking in sense, artistic conscience, and competence at judging the value of entertainment.
The first clue in this who-shot-modern-society season cliffhanger comes in the form of the game’s title: according to the Volition Inc. website, the proper rendering is “Saints Row”. Now, “Row” seems to indicate we’re talking about a street of some sort, a thoroughfare if you will. So how many saints are there presiding over this thoroughfare? If it were one, the game would be “Saint’s Row”; two or more and it would be “Saints’ Row”. The developers at Volition must have left the naming conventions for last, thinking that they would decide how many saints we were dealing with toward the end of the “dev cycle”, and then hire someone to airbrush an apostrophe onto the package design. Maybe they’d even make it a graffitti-style apostrophe, for extra “street cred”.
Seeing as the game involves a gang called the “Saints”, I take it that the title is supposed to be rendered “Saints’ Row”, so I will call it thus in this review. Volition should pay me a proofreader’s fee. At New York rates, what I just did here, in the back of my head, is worth six dollars.
I’m not going to deride the developers’ choice to let players make their own characters. In the end, it doesn’t matter. My character is a vaguely Hispanic looking white man of imploding anorexia and soppy cornrows. His facial hair looks like someone applied it with Mario Paint. He looks like a wet rat at a job interview, minus a stack of A4-sized print-outs bearing the names and URLs of all the Wikipedia articles he’s contributed to. Hey, it was either this or make “‘Before’ Jared” from the Subway commercials, now African-American and with purple hair. (You know, I ate lunch with Jared in high school, a couple of times. He was my big brother’s best friend. He graduated two years ahead of me. My brother was into kung-fu. He once beat the stuff out of some kid who threw a rock at Jared after school. No kidding.)
The game lets you make your own character because it wants you to identify with the character. Right at the beginning, your creation is standing on a street corner in a magic city where everyone has access to violence, and he gets meaninglessly gunned down by thugs riding a gaudy automobile, probably because he looks like Boy George wearing FUBU by order of a witness protection program, and that stuff just don’t belong in our hood. Some other gangsters, in purple, show up and heck up the motherheckers who just tried to heck you the heck up. They blast those motherheckers. You’re rescued by a man in a backward hat, voiced by a black actor I think I’ve seen before in a movie that wasn’t very good. He helps you up and takes you in to his gang, the Saints, who are dedicated to cleaning up the streets by murdering anyone who even thinks once about murdering anyone else. They want to clean up the drugs, and the gangs, and the hookers — the cops in this town aren’t worth stuff, we’re told, and stuff, that means we can blow up a car and probably not be chased around like in Grand Theft Auto. Shit yeah!
Previous games have used perhaps-political authority figures as thug-blasters: Final Fight, for example, stars Mayor Mike Haggar, former pro-wrestler (in the 80s, it seemed like such casual, hilarious irreverence), who will kill any pixelated sons of bitches between him and his kidnapped daughter. Now that we’re putting this sort of thing into 3D, with realistic vehicle physics and “evolutionary” (their words) aiming controls for gun firing — now that there’s voice acting by the Hollywood B-Team, it feels kind of fake and breathtakingly insulting. There’s a tiny twinge of subtext that a fourteen-year-old boy could pick up on if he was lucky enough to not have a distracting erection during world history class yesterday — that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that this leader-guy might possess ulterior motives for wanting to kill the other gangs. Still, that’s neither here nor there — the gang underlings listen to this man like church attendees. They behold him as a walking religion.
So when I’m on a mission, and I feel like shooting an old woman in the head for no reason, and my partner — indicated in cut-scenes as the most devout follower of the gang — pulls out his gun and starts shooting the police instead of turning me in for being a raving psychopath, hundreds of red flags fly up in the back of my brain. I don’t even get a “Dude, that’s not cool!” out of the guy. I punch an innocent pedestrian on the street, and my man whips out his pistol when the pedestrian throws a single punch back. How hard is it to program these AI scripts? Why wouldn’t my guy, I don’t know, punch me, scream at me, pull out his gun and shoot me in the kneecaps, call the cops, or something?
The game is an acrobat when it comes to tripping over itself. On the one hand, the street-cleaning Saints are a gang of religious proportions; on the other hand, when the police are following you for doing something you shouldn’t do in real life, the way you clear your criminal rating is by driving your car through a drive-thru church. In Grand Theft Auto, you drive into a seedy auto shop and get your car painted a different color, and the license plates changed. Here, you ask forgiveness at a drive-thru church, and “donate” them some money. Get it? Ha ha! Religion is a commodity, get it? Get it? The game is just a skin for Grand Theft Auto, made by people who thought that putting an FPS-style right-analog-stick gun aiming system (very nice, actually) and some crunchier vehicle physics (again, pretty nice, good sense of weight) into it would suffice for “innovation”.
Yet it is the dynamic physics of the game that commit its greatest act of evil. When a realistic innocent human is murdered in cold blood in the street, his corpse disappears within one click of a watch’s second hand. However, when your character purchases a soft drink from a restaurant (absolutely unthinkingly named “Freckle Bitch’s” — yeah, profanity in the name of a fast-food restaurant! that’s right around the corner! let’s get in on that one on the ground floor!), and then drinks that soft drink, and then litters the empty cup on the ground, the cup rolls around for a full thirty seconds. That’s the developers saying, “Hey, we hired guys to work out that physics engine! We’re not going to waste that research!” If pressed in an interview, someone in charge of decision-making in this game could say that the corpses disappear so that players can’t be overly cruel by continuing to pop caps in the dead person’s head and/or ass and watching the corpse flinch realistically. A skilled interviewer would then ask them why they let you kill innocent people at all, and the interviewee would reply that they want the players to “have fun” and/or “enjoy themselves” and/or “express themselves” through the videogame, which is a hell of an audacious answer. I’d say, when there’s no better way to have fun or enjoy yourself or express yourself in a game than by destroying the people-shaped targets the game does not explicitly ask you to destroy, then maybe your game is just a big empty husk, as cheap and tacky as the Styrofoam sculpture of the history of hip-hop that makes up its soundtrack.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for one, stars a young man whose mother has been killed. When he starts getting revenge, he has a reason. All we know about him is that he left his hometown because he was tired of gang violence. He comes back when the violence claims his moms, and he wants to heck up the heckers that hecked his moms up. Good enough reason. If Carl “CJ” Johnson slays a hooker in his quest for revenge, it’s just something that happens. It’s a tendency within him as an angry, wronged young person; it’s your choice to bring it out in him, you sick heck, you. If you want to play San Andreas as a story of an honest man getting revenge for the death of his moms and subsequently getting caught neck-deep in some serious stuff, you can do that. You are playing a role. You are free to interpret it as you will. In Saints’ Row, you’re a blank slate who gets knocked on his ass in a drive-by. Maybe this blank slate is a raving psychotic motherhecker who had just never been privy to a stash of weaponry the likes of which the Saints’ gang possesses. That’s all well and good: that the characters in the game are not appropriately shocked and/or appalled when you do horrible things is something of a mortal sin.
I am a liberal enough person to admit that, if I had an identical twin sister and if she wasn’t actively repulsive I’d probably have had at least cooperative oral sex with her by now, so when I say that you have no idea quite how deeply your game offends me, you should know that you’re in deep stuff. How dare you put this presumptuous trash out on the market. Quit your jobs producing entertainment software, abandon the lucky break that scored you a “connection” to the “industry”, and take up a job at a Denny’s or a Starbucks, to see what real people look like and how they walk and how they gesture with their hands.
Or maybe the problem’s not you. Maybe it’s the whole hecking “industry”. Or maybe it’s not. Though Rockstar, who shat the gold brick called Grand Theft Auto, has begun to use their “sandbox” genre as a rough outline, a checklist of “things one can do, if so inclined, in 3D action videogames”, on which to base more dynamic levels of storytelling — as evidenced in 2006’s conceptually excellent Bully — the rest of the world seems to be turning the wrong way. Why, in Saints’ Row, there’s a mission early on where you have to kill “evil pimps” to steal their hos for another pimp, a good pimp, who also happens to be friends with your gang, which, yes, is a gang devoted to killing all of the other gangs as a means of “cleaning up the streets”. It’s obvious at this point that the “story” of Saints’ Row was shunted in at the latest possible moment, and that the ho-snatching mission was drafted during a meeting in which some coke-fiend producer jumped up and down on the boardroom table with his polka-dot necktie clipped uncomfortably to a wrinkle on his forehead: “GTA lets you pimp hos! We need to let you pimp hos! GTA lets you pimp hos! Let’s let players pimp some hos!”
Where Volition hangs its fuzzy hat, the gene pool is heated to the temperature of a cesspool. Within the marble halls of its psychological accident of game development, a man actually speaks the words “Complete missions to earn respect. Fill your respect meter to unlock more missions.” Yes, he actually uses the word “unlock” with regard to content existing in the game world he occupies. On another corner of this cube-shaped world called the videogame industry, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas opens with a difficulty selection screen: “Difficulty select: Select the difficulty level of the game: NORMAL / REALISTIC”. Witness this and feel years of current events rip from the top of your skull to the soles of your feet, like rollercoaster g-forces. The War in Iraq, the grin of the current mongrel president of America, the shootings in Columbine, foaming media feeding frenzies smothering out the sparks of introspection that might have had the chance to fan into a bonfire of renaissance, Jack Thompson. “REALITY IS NOT NORMAL”, games are saying, in a sideways subliminal way.
Could you imagine a dramatic television show about a rugged cop, a great man at heart, maybe one whose wife had been gunned down by thugs, who lives only to drink whiskey, eat at the same sad diner every golden sunlit morning, and keep the streets clean — who, for some reason, the sixth episode in, pulls out his gun, fires it out the window of his patrol car, and kills a young boy riding a bike, only to have his partner keep rattling on about the drug dealer they’re looking for, only to have the writers seem to forget such a thing happened and let the show go on through eight more Emmy-winning seasons? Of course you can’t. It’d be hecking &^#$#ed, disgusting. It’s not even the senseless violence that gets my goat: it’s the internal inconsistency. It’s the complete and utter lack of artistic conscience. At least, whether you can admit that “American Idol” is actually beneficial to society or not, you have to agree with me that the television and film industries currently possess many more individuals able to competently judge the worth content than the videogame industry has perhaps ever seen. You can spin it out all you want and say that videogames are a young industry, and that’s where I flip you off and tell you that yeah, they’re a young industry, though it’s a pretty mature hecking world we live in, and these people went to school, where they very well should have read books about the hecking world and learned just how mature it is.
(Oh for heck’s sake — according to GameStop.com, the PlayStation 3 version of this game is being released on the Fourth of July. Ain’t that America.)
We are all philosophically doomed as creatures that dream because we can’t physically handle being happy all the time; we have to be happy sometimes and sad sometimes; we believe shadow lends context to light, or whatever. I say yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. Though I’d also like to be the first to admit that, maybe, this is a fundamental problem in the world it may take us centuries to work out. In the Zen buddhist sense, which is convenient and kind of a cop-out because it’s pretty much every sense rolled into one, Saints’ Row just isn’t hecking helping, and the next patch released for it should do more than just cut down the lag in the online multiplayer — it should render the disc hecking unreadable by my Xbox 360.
A competent but derivative GTA clone. There's absolutely zero mission checkpointing which sucks a ton. Keith David is in it which is pretty fun.
Look, I worked at Volition for almost 9 years. I didn't start working until after Gat out of Hell was released, so I have no involvement in any of the SR games that people like.
Look, I worked at Volition for almost 9 years. I didn't start working until after Gat out of Hell was released, so I have no involvement in any of the SR games that people like.
The story, artstyle and atmospehere are good but the sequel is better in literally EVERY aspect, while the first game gets very repetitive due to underwhelming side content. It's still saints row though, very fun anyway
Nunca uma missão secundária foi tão chata
Saints Row sem dúvida é uma franquia com a qual eu já me diverti, pois me lembro de ter bons momentos com o 3 o 4. Agora, pegando o primeiro game pra conhecer eu me frustrei DEMAIS.
Sério, quem teve a brilhante ideia de fazer com que as “missões” secundárias fossem obrigatórias? E eu coloco entre aspas pq elas são verdadeiros minigames né. Eles até colocam ali um contexto pra situação, mas nada faz jus, pq é puramente galhofa. Além do que, para fazer missões principais vc precisa de encher a barra do “nível de respeito” aí se vc enche ela 3 vezes, vc consegue jogar 3 missões principais e por aí vai.
Acontece que se vc completa as missões principais vc não ganha nenhum respeito. Cara isso se contradiz tanto com a proposta de gangue do game pq vc mata outros inimigos, prejudica rivais e não ganha “respeito”, mas ai vc ganha em um minigames - missão secundária de ter que ficar se jogando na frente de carros para pontuar sendo arremessado longe (esse é só um exemplo de uma missão secundária).
No final o seu “respeito” é consumido através das missões. Então a perspectiva de ser membro de uma gangue não existe uma vez que o respeito é meramente uma barrinha do quanto vc pode ou não seguir no jogo. Fora que todo o plot tbm se perde quando o personagem passa 99% do tempo mudo (até onde joguei ele DO NADA falou uma parada em uma missão e foi algo pra ser cômico pq o GAT toma um susto).
A franquia é galhofa afinal temos invasão alienígena e inferno em títulos futuros, mas eu imaginei que aqui as coisas fossem ser mais roots ou “normais” e divertidas. Perdi total minha paciência em ter que quebrar o ritmo de gameplay indo fazer missão secundária chata. Pq das duas uma: ou tu vai alternando secundária com principal ou tu mete um grind nas secundárias logo de início. Mas tipo, se tu meter um grind tu vai ficar papo de umas 4 horas só jogando coisa totalmente aleatoria pra aí então ir pra gameplay e história que “vale a pena”. Pq tbm tem isso, a história é fraquíssima. Até onde joguei a parte da gangue do King foi o ponto alto (única gangue que conclui).
Resumo: jogo chato, sem amor, sem graça, longe de ser cômico e divertido igual os futuros e com uma obrigatoriedade de gameplay completamente sem sentido. Quer saber sobre a história? Joga não, prefira ler um resumo com spoiler por ai, pq é oq eu vou fazer.
Duas estrelas só pra não negativar tudo tbm, pq a história msm que ruim tem um ponto alto como eu falei, o combate é tosco, mas funcional e o jogo funciona de forma minimamente fluída.
Saints Row sem dúvida é uma franquia com a qual eu já me diverti, pois me lembro de ter bons momentos com o 3 o 4. Agora, pegando o primeiro game pra conhecer eu me frustrei DEMAIS.
Sério, quem teve a brilhante ideia de fazer com que as “missões” secundárias fossem obrigatórias? E eu coloco entre aspas pq elas são verdadeiros minigames né. Eles até colocam ali um contexto pra situação, mas nada faz jus, pq é puramente galhofa. Além do que, para fazer missões principais vc precisa de encher a barra do “nível de respeito” aí se vc enche ela 3 vezes, vc consegue jogar 3 missões principais e por aí vai.
Acontece que se vc completa as missões principais vc não ganha nenhum respeito. Cara isso se contradiz tanto com a proposta de gangue do game pq vc mata outros inimigos, prejudica rivais e não ganha “respeito”, mas ai vc ganha em um minigames - missão secundária de ter que ficar se jogando na frente de carros para pontuar sendo arremessado longe (esse é só um exemplo de uma missão secundária).
No final o seu “respeito” é consumido através das missões. Então a perspectiva de ser membro de uma gangue não existe uma vez que o respeito é meramente uma barrinha do quanto vc pode ou não seguir no jogo. Fora que todo o plot tbm se perde quando o personagem passa 99% do tempo mudo (até onde joguei ele DO NADA falou uma parada em uma missão e foi algo pra ser cômico pq o GAT toma um susto).
A franquia é galhofa afinal temos invasão alienígena e inferno em títulos futuros, mas eu imaginei que aqui as coisas fossem ser mais roots ou “normais” e divertidas. Perdi total minha paciência em ter que quebrar o ritmo de gameplay indo fazer missão secundária chata. Pq das duas uma: ou tu vai alternando secundária com principal ou tu mete um grind nas secundárias logo de início. Mas tipo, se tu meter um grind tu vai ficar papo de umas 4 horas só jogando coisa totalmente aleatoria pra aí então ir pra gameplay e história que “vale a pena”. Pq tbm tem isso, a história é fraquíssima. Até onde joguei a parte da gangue do King foi o ponto alto (única gangue que conclui).
Resumo: jogo chato, sem amor, sem graça, longe de ser cômico e divertido igual os futuros e com uma obrigatoriedade de gameplay completamente sem sentido. Quer saber sobre a história? Joga não, prefira ler um resumo com spoiler por ai, pq é oq eu vou fazer.
Duas estrelas só pra não negativar tudo tbm, pq a história msm que ruim tem um ponto alto como eu falei, o combate é tosco, mas funcional e o jogo funciona de forma minimamente fluída.
time has NOT been kind to this one
cool for one playthrough, although i don't think i'll go back for a WHILE
cool for one playthrough, although i don't think i'll go back for a WHILE
i had poo on my pants when dis came out
Save me Keith David
Keith David save me
Keith David save me
This review contains spoilers
Saints Row is a “gangbanging set trippin” simulator/open world crime game developed by Volition (rest in peace), who before creating Saints Row had developed the Descent series of games as well Red Faction 1 & 2 as well as the notorious Punisher video game. Saints Row had started its foundations as a Playstation 2 game titled “Bling Bling”. The game was announced at E3 2005 with the new name, Saints Row, as an Xbox 360 title with supposed PC and PS3 ports to follow later. These ports however were canned to focus more on the sequel, WHICH IT SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN, but nonetheless they were. I remember seeing a beta trailer where the Saints were green and I had watched a mrsaintsgodzilla21 video where apparently a sequel to the aforementioned Punisher game was being developed with a lot of Saints Row mechanics in mind as an open world style game? I’ll put both of these down in the links below but otherwise development. As far as I’m aware though, I can’t seem to find anything in terms of crazy development stories so I believe the game went off pretty well other than switching from Playstation 2 to the Xbox 360.
I originally encountered Saints Row through playing it at my Mom’s friend's house. As a young child, I didn’t have an Xbox 360 or any next gen games so I was mainly used to playing the previous generation for the longest time. This same friend of my mother’s funny enough is where I also got introduced to my love of horror, because she gave me Condemned: Criminal Origins as an Xbox 360 game but that’s a different story. I had played Saints Row pretty much all the damn time when I was over there along with Grand Theft Auto 4 and I was always really excited to go over and play the game. Afterwards for the longest time, I hadn’t really played too much of the Saints Row series at all, in fact I think I had played Saints Row 2 before playing the first one again after remembering the game’s existence. I would repeatedly play it on and off once I got my Xbox 360, and would be one of my main go-to games for entertainment as I messed about offline. I ended up replaying this a little while ago for the first time backwards compatible via the Xbox One after Microsoft made the game compatible around 2018. I believed I had finished it last year or the year before, and so I’m writing this review now because my buddy BFD Survivor enlisted me for a future playthrough on Saints Row 2’s port for PC (after we fix the damn thing of course). Saints Row as a series would become mixed in my eyes but I can safely say to this day that this and the second game are some of my favorite open world crime games of all time, in fact they’re two of my favorite games of all time. This review isn’t going to be a supercritical one as much as it’s just going to be me sucking this game’s cock and verbalizing how much I truly enjoyed my time with this game, while maybe offering a critique here and there.
The plot begins with your created character (aka Playa; clever Volition, clever) as you walk down the streets of Saints Row, a district in the city of Stilwater. Stilwater is a city rampant with crime, drugs, prostitution, all the good shit you’d love in a city overrun with criminal issues. Passing by someone selling stolen watches and a hooker, a gang war unfolds in the district over unclaimed territory over a gang tag on a nearby wall between three gangs: the Vice Kings (Yellow clad gangsters led by the well connected record executive CEO named Benjamin King and involved in lots of prostitution which Julius used to roll with), the Westside Rollerz (a blue gang mostly led by white boys who love underground racing and are led by Joseph Price and his uncle, William Sharp, a wealthy financier, and Los Carnales (not THE Los Carnales, are a red-clad latino gang who deals with drugs and guns led by the Lopez brothers along with their colombian backers). It nearly ends badly for you, a bullet in the forehead by some lone Vice King dweeb when you’re saved by two people: Julius Little and Troy Bradshaw. Looking to stop the gangs once and for all from destroying their neighborhood, Julius tells “Playa” to come by the church in the middle of the district if they want to take back the neighborhood from the gangs. It’s here where they get “canonized”, and are thrown into the middle of a gang initiation which you could either win or lose depending on if you get stomped out while meeting some of the other lieutenants in the Saints, mainly Johnny Gat and Dex. After this you sort of get used to the basics: buy a gun, kill some Vice Kings, and take over some territory (while doing some optional objectives like strongholds or stealing hoes from other pimps). Afterwords, the district is yours and Julius comes up with game plans for every gang in the city: Johnny Gat is set on the Vice Kings (which Troy backs out of aggressively), Lin is sent to infiltrate the Rollerz (first time seeing her of course) and Dex is told to come up with a way to take down “the” Los Carnales.
The Vice Kings story arc starts off with meeting up with Johnny Gat and his girlfriend Aisha, who reports that her sister’s been kidnapped off the street, presumably by Vice Kings lieutenant Tanya Winters who heads up the prostitution ring of the gang. This culminates in Aisha and Gat coming up with a plan for a big fuck you to the Vice Kings. See, Aisha is actually an R&B artist (whose songs you can listen to on the radio stations) and she signed to Kingdom Come Records, Benjamin King’s record company. However extortion is at play and with the kidnapping of her sister, all bets are off the table so the two come up with a plan to fake her death by bringing her to the session before blowing up the entire building with a car bomb (with a nice little 2Pac “7 Day Theory” reference to go. That goes off surprisingly without a hitch, and Gat’s next plan is a very simple one: kill Tanya Winters, and emphasis is placed on how she slept with both Anthony Green (King’s bodyguard) as well as Warren Williams (a former rapper named EZ Money as well as the guy who managed Kingdom Come Records) behind Green’s back. This dynamic will come into play later but for now, but Gat tells the Playa to take over her brothel at Prawn Court, which will mess up the prostitution business King has going on. Prawn Court is conquered but no Tanya, and a cutscene that follows shows King’s inner circles (including Tanya) bitching about the Saints. King tells them all to calm down as he’s going to rebuild the record company and that he’ll put pressure on police chief Monroe to crack down on the Saints so they can retake the brothel. The cops crack down on the Saints, but after Johnny hears that the Vice Kings are attempting to retake the brothel, sends the Playa back to Prawn Court to kill the invaders. Afterwards, Gat calls to let him know that Tanya is holding up in the old Sunnyvale Gardens police station and to drop by the church later as they have “murdering to do”. This “murdering” plan doesn’t go too well as the raid ends in an ambush where Gat gets shot in the leg with a shotgun and is kidnapped by Anthony Green while the Playa has to jump out of the top floor window to survive.
The gang meet up at the church and Julius comes up with a plan for the Playa to pose as Tanya’s chauffeur so she can lead them back to where Anthony Green is holding Gat. It works and the Playa raids the condo where Johnny is being held, killing Anthony Green in the process and saving Johnny, though Tanya escapes AGAIN. Rendezvousing back to the church, Dex comes up with a plan to force the police to put pressure on the Vice Kings…by making Johnny and the Playa dress up as them and cause chaos. They do so, killing all sorts of people and destroying public property and bringing about news attention. There’s also this growing tension between Warren Williams and Benjamin King over their clashing ideologies: Warren just wants to kill and go for the throat while Ben is thinking about the long game with their political connections and they have an argument over what to do with the Saints again. To put even more pressure on the police/Vice King relationship, Johnny decides to blow up the cops working with the gang using RPGs looted from Anthony’s crib and the fallout (which includes blowing up Kingdom Come Records AGAIN) leads to Warren Williams and Tanya leading a coup against King. King fights his way out but barely survives, calling his old buddy Julius for help and the Playa is sent to rescue King from his own men. Warren also attempts to kill him in a drive-by but this ends up with Warren out of commission and betrayed by Tanya who kills him while he’s down, ascending to the Vice King’s throne. King and the Playa lure the rest of the Vice Kings to their death via police ambush before they lead an attack on the penthouse Tanya is in. In order to get the codes to get inside, they interrogate “eurotrash” clothing guy and Tanya’s fashion stylist Stefan before raiding and shooting Tanya out of her own office onto the streets below. Gat, the Playa and King split up with King thanking the Playa for their help and giving him the keys to the penthouse.
Quote of the Section: “Hope you don’t mind Hepatitis”.
The Westside Rollerz story arc begins with the Playa meeting up with Lin, whose first job is you stealing a shipment of vehicles and bringing them to a garage for a “special surprise”. This surprise involves tampering with them to where if they hit up a high speed then it explodes, and Troy joins up with you on this job to taunt them enough to activate their nitrous. The whole race goes up in smoke and the Playa leaves with satisfaction, though things still aren’t going fast enough for Lin. Lin’s next plan is simple: attack a Westside Rollerz mechanic named Donnie, who’s friends with the co-commander Joseph Price. However, this is a ruse so that Lin can save him so she can get introduced into the inner circle faster. The plan works, and Lin gets to meet with Joseph Price and his uncle William Sharp, who discusses some of their other plans. How the Playa is able to eavesdrop outside the house to hear about it all without any guards around I’m not sure, but Donnie lets loose info about a car shipment. The Playa protects this shipment from the gang, which forces them to find another way to get the parts. Fun fact, Steve Jaros (the lead writer) posted on Twitter or X or whatever the fuck that “The Buyers” ominously mentioned were apparently Shogo Akuji and the Ronin from the second game so fun stuff. The group decides to strip a bunch of different cars for parts instead, and the Playa fucks that plan up as well. However, Price and Sharp deduce that the Third Street Saints must be getting their info from somewhere, and who did they recently introduced into the circle? Lin. Lin calls the Playa and tells them that something is going down at a pool hall, but this turns into a Rollerz ambush which ends up in you getting knocked out, a bunch of dead bodies and you in the trunk of a car with Lin. The two hear Sharp talking to Donnie about loose ends and shoots both of them with a .44 before kicking the car into the river. Lin is able to set you free before dying, and the Playa escapes to cut off and kill William Sharp as revenge. Price sets up a meeting with his gang and organizes a convoy to raze Saints Row to the ground, however Troy intercepts the call and Julius goes with the Playa to raze them instead with a rocket launcher. Afterwards, Price calls demanding a final showdown and instead attempts to run over the Playa but fails. Chasing him down on the highway, the Playa finally kills Price and the Rollerz are smashed to nothing.
Quote of the Section: “I almost got ran over by a motherfucking truck, whatchu think?”
Los Carnale’s story arc (It’s not THE, Los means…fuck it) starts with the Playa meeting up with Dex who gives a rundown of the gang. Los Carnales is ran by Hector and Angelo Lopez and is backed by the biggest drug cartel in the world, so Dex wants to play it safe and cut out the profits. Two drug labs and a Carnales truck hijacking later (with plans to use it for some unknown purpose against the main drug plant) and the higher ups notice almost immediately. Hector instructs Angelo and their enforcer, the feared Victor Rodriguez, to launch an attack on Saints Row. The Carnales do that though Victor and Angelo soon leave while the rest of the gang is wiped out by the Playa. Afterwards, Dex gathers Troy and the Playa and reveals his plan: use the truck they hijacked to sneak into the main Carnales drug plant in a sort of Trojan Horse move in an attempt to take it over. It works, which leads to Manuel Orjuela (the Cartel representative) to question Hector’s speed in wiping out the Saints. This questioning comes to fruition when Dex brings the Playa to a Friendly Fire gun shop to pick up a sniper rifle to assassinate Hector during a meeting with the Columbians, intending to frame them as the perpetrators. The plan goes off again without a hitch, and Victor relays the news to Angelo who is in the middle of getting head from his girlfriend Luz. There’s also a little subplot around Manuel having his eye on Luz, intending to take her for himself but that’s not really followed up on too much. Dex, Troy and the Playa gather around for the next stage of the plan: Troy wants to kill Manuel but Dex wants to meet with him first then decide what to do. They attempt to meet up with Manuel at a strip club, but Victor is there and chases them all the way back to Saints Row before losing them entirely. Fun fact about this mission, Victor is invincible the entire way so don’t bother shooting to kill him.
Meeting back at the church, Julius is furious at Dex for attempting to meet with the Colombians without consulting him but Victor storms the church with goons. One violent shootout later and the legendary enforcer is dead, with Troy using his burning body as a lighter for his cigarette. Angelo is furious and intends to kill the Saints himself before slapping his girlfriend Luz over Manuel’s romantic interests and storms off. Julius later gets back from a meeting with Manuel with a proposal: the assassination at the shipyard led to a lot of drugs being confiscated by police. If the Saints can get the drugs back, the Colombians will drop Los Carnales and back them instead. Using a plan from Troy to blow a hole in the evidence room with a car bomb, the Saints raid the station while the Playa defends from the outside and they get the drugs back. After a handshake meeting between Julius and Manuel gets ambushed by Angelo who shoots up the place, Manuel gives them the location of the Lopez Mansion but tells them to “leave the senorita alone”. Dex and the Playa raid Angelo’s mansion to kill him before giving chase via vehicle, though Angelo escapes by driving over an open bridge. The final mission has Dex pulling up beside you at the church, telling you that Angelo plans to escape the city via the airport, and the two of you drive off to finish him off once and for all. The two manage to kill all of his armed guards as well as destroy his airplane, finishing him off once and for all. Luz arrives too late, having missed her flight arrives with constant questions before almost getting shot by the two. Dex gives him the keys to Angelo’s ride and tells him that Julius was right about him and they split off.
Quote of the section: “Bullshit, that was last year’s fall collection!”
After you take down all three gangs, Stilwater is finally yours. You’re promoted to right hand man and the Third Street Saints have become the most dominant gang in the city. However, Julius is pulled over by the police and disappears permanently, becoming the last time your character hears from him in game. A voice calls you up, a voice belonging to Chief of Police Richard Monroe. See he has his own game plan, and his is to use Julius as leverage against the Saints to make them do his dirty work for him. This dirty work involves assassinating mayoral candidate Marshall Winslow, himself a citizen hailing from Saints Row, for his boss. How do you do this? You literally hijack his campaign bus and leave it on some train tracks, leading to a fiery death and an explosion. If you’re paying attention throughout the entire game to radio ads you’ll learn of an upcoming election between (pretty sure) Democrat Marshall Winslow and Republican Alderman Richard Hughes where they attack each other viciously over various political beliefs. Of course, the chief of police decides to renege on his deal to let Julius go and tells the Saints that he’ll be in contact soon with more work. The Playa, Gat and Dex decide that enough is enough and that there’s no way the gang is going to be the police chief’s lapdog, so they decide to assassinate him publicly at Winslow’s funeral. This almost fails but ends with a whole bunch of dead police officers and the Saints escape away from the carnage. The final mission, just a cutscene really, involves Playa getting called to meet Monroe’s boss Hughes (with Julius supposedly meeting him there) on his yacht. Meeting up with him, Hughes thanks the Playa smugly for handing him the election and covering up any loose ends with the chief of police. Hughes has an “urban city renewal plan” that he plans to use to wipe out the Saints as the last gang in the city, having previously been criticized for displacing poor people. You’ll get a montage of the other characters in the game before Hughes decides to have you killed and here is where you’ll get three final reveals. Troy reveals himself to be an undercover cop and all of the previous hints become relevant in context (for example, his refusal to go after the Vice Kings, his knowledge of how police stations have evidence lock up, the constant questioning and even clues that you could piece together by reading the manual to the game). Julius is also revealed to be alive, and looks over the yacht at the river and looks at his watch before walking away. The final part has Hughes attempting to walk away as he tries to get his guards to kill the Playa before the yacht explodes in a fiery blaze, being the final twist in the game. No context, nothing; just a giant explosion and the feeling that Julius blew up the both of you.
Final Quote: “Can you hurry this up? I wanna go to Freckle Bitch’s.”
The plot to Saints Row is very much a “from rags to riches' ' sort of story, where you start out as a small fry and make your way up through the food chain as you wipe out each and every gang in their own storylines. The characters in this game are unique and memorable, and I don’t think a day will go by where I won’t think about iconic gangsters like the loose cannon Johnny Gat, the sophisticated gangster Benjamin King, the elder statesmen Julius Little or even smaller characters like Luz from Los Carnales, Stefan the annoying Eurotrash or Donnie from the Westside Rollerz. Each and every character adds a bit of flavor to the game that I appreciate, and culminates in a fun storyline that ends with a bang (literally). If I were to say anything about the campaigns it’s that I feel like the Vice Kings is the top one in terms of quality, with Los Carnales being my personal favorite and second one with quality. Both of them have their moments, their arcs and honestly connect to each other with little brick jokes that make it seem like it has a chronological order (Vice Kings first and Carnales last) that I just love. My least favorite is the Rollerz, mainly due to the fact that everything seems rushed and kind of out of order sometimes. The first two missions with the racing and car hijacking feels like could happen after rescuing Donnie, none of the missions feel particularly impactful aside from Lin’s death and truthfully I guess it just doesn’t interest me as well as I wanted it to. It’s not that it’s bad it’s just that it pales in comparison, and probably should be beaten first just to get it out of the way (even if I always go against Los Carnales first).
It’s a simple plot, not really filled with too many twists until the very last moment though a lot of this was due to development issues (though Troy being an undercover cop apparently was always a thing that was going to happen). For example, the only reason that Julius Little ended up becoming an antagonist was due to the fact that the animation for the cutscene ended up being shit, and so they had to reuse an Aisha animation where she checks her watch and this ultimately pushed the franchise into a different direction entirely. The character development for your character isn’t really huge in an emotional way as much as a financial way, though you do get a hint at your future snarkiness with classic lines like “I almost got hit by a motherfucking truck, whatchu think?” and “Bullshit! Those are last year’s fall collection!” referring to shoes that Luz is wearing. I don’t really know what else I can fill out here, there’s just so much personality to this game, little comedic moments wrapped around an actual serious gangster story where you take the central role in growing your small-time street gang into something much bigger. It’s a tale that’s simple but effective and one that I can appreciate with the little details as well as the sense of humor that it brings to the table, while also probably being the most serious that this franchise has ever been. Honestly, I miss this version of Saints Row even if I liked 2 and 3 a lot and I wish they would’ve gone back to this.
The gameplay is an open world crime based game where you can complete activities, shoot people, steal cars and engage in lots of customization and other activities that they don’t exactly spell out for you. What I’ll start with gameplay wise is the driving, which I’ll be straight up feels consistent and fantastic. It doesn’t feel as weighty and bloated as say Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5 would later feel, chasing some desire to be realistic with its behind the wheel escapades. I couldn’t give less than a fuck about that, if I’m going to drive a car in game then I want the handling to be smooth and when I actually make a drift that I don’t make a fat U-turn the other direction sideways and the Saints Row series I feel has almost always done a good job with that with pretty much any vehicle you drive. Keep in mind though, there aren’t any drivable boats, motorcycles or helicopters unlike the sequels so you’ll basically be going between “Cheap ass car”, “Cheap gangster ass car” and “Holy shit this is a ferrari” level of quality in cars (not just sports cars of course, they have Rolls Royces but they have their own names for copyright reasons). The gunplay is really simple, painfully so: you literally have a weapons wheel you hold B to open, and you use the right thumbstick to pick one of the weapons you want. There is no reloading sadly unless you’re idle or out of ammo but there is a melee button you can use to hit people with whether it’s a pistol whip or an assault rifle swing that knocks people dead in the face but that’s also it. There’s also melee weapons like baseball bats, knives you know the usual shit in these games that work just as well for low level goons. Best part about combat is how smooth everything feels, and the ragdolls are just the icing on top. You can consume all sorts of stuff from fast food at your local Freckle Bitch’s for health purposes or go to the liquor store to pick up booze and blunts, though the booze and blunts is more for the show than to add any benefits.
In order to do main missions you need to get respect, and respect can be obtained in many different ways: killing rival gangster is a sure way of doing it, so is customizing yourself and buying clothes and cars (obviously if it’s purple you get more of a boost to your respect) but the main way is to do side activities. Side activities range from Insurance Fraud, where you jump in front of cars in order to get a lot of bank to drug trafficking, where you ride alongside someone and protect them as they deal drugs from both cops and rival gangs to hitman and chop shop activities. They’re all varied and different enough to where if you have trouble with one, you can hop over to another activity and gain enough respect for multiple different missions if need be. If I remember correctly, during my playthroughs there were ones that I didn’t even touch at all. However, unlike the future Saints Rows, they go past 6 levels to 8 levels instead. There are no mid-rewards like Saints Row 2, it’s just one straight shot to the end for the final reward instead; however you don’t have to complete everything in one go thankfully so you can always come back later. Some of these rewards include losing notoriety faster (Drug Trafficking), reduced damage (Insurance Fraud), pimp outfits and the Pimp Cane shotgun (Snatch), and weapons in your weapon cache (Mayhem) along with others I’m sure I didn’t list. Other side activities that are smaller but have rewards include collecting CDs (which every ten or so gives you a new track created for the game) and tagging, which requires quick time events and rewards you with unlimited sprint for all of them. If you’re a completionist, it’s recommended to get all the activities done before you complete the story (or at least the drug trafficking stuff) because otherwise some of the rewards are pointless. Other smaller activities that don't really give you much in the way of reputation but can get you a quick buck involves taking hostages, which involves stealing a car with a passenger inside of it and holding them for a certain amount of time for a cash bonus with cops chasing you. Another one you can do is robbing shops: you can either break into the safe yourself and open it up with quick time events; if you rob it during the day you just get cash, but if you rob it during nighttime you can steal a box to put it in the trunk of a car to deliver to a fence to sell.
When you play the game, you originally start out with a beat up house (called a “Crib”) in the Saints Row district, where you can access any clothes bought or weapons in your cache and even money you collect from your various districts. When you take down each of the gangs, you own their cribs (like Benjamin King’s penthouse or Angelo Lopez’s mansion) for example and these are a lot more flamboyant and stylish. They aren’t like Saints Row 2 where you can buy up a bunch and customize them but they’re nice places to save your progress and drive cars out of your garage. You can also save at every stronghold you unlock in the game and that’s pretty cool too but doesn't really have extra features like cribs do. Not for customization, there’s a lot to work with here from character customization at the beginning (though you can always change it with plastic surgery at Image As Designed), you can buy clothes and change different colors (though finding a belt to work with an outfit can be a giant pain in the ass in my opinion), and repair/customize cars at the local garages which you can save for your crib for later. I won’t go too into detail on this as there’s a lot you can do with it but it all looks and feels incredible getting your own style down, whether you’re trying to look like somebody or if you’re trying to make the most cursed character alive. The only downside to this is that there’s no female characters to play as, so it feels kind of weird and inconsistent if you’re trying to create one character to play from the beginning to the end of the series.
The last main thing I’d like to bring up are homies: these are recruitable companions (lol) that you can either hit up on the cell phone (once you unlock them), or mostly whistle for on the street that will follow you on command. The ones on the street are the easiest, have their own weapons and the more of the story you go through, their weapons get better. There are also special homies, ones which you unlock either through completing certain side quests (like getting Will from completing Snatch in the Saints Row district, or Mr. Wong from the Chinatown hitman activities for example), while there are two you can unlock from calling certain numbers. If you call 555-2445 on your in-game phone (from the pause menu) you can get a homie named “Chicken Ned” who shows up with a baseball bat. You can also unlock Zombie Lin after you complete the mission involving her death by calling the business “Eye for an Eye”. I like these little easter eggs as they add a little bit of flavor in the game, and there are more easter eggs and callable numbers to boot. You can call up numbers like 911 for the usual response from paramedics and even get healing, calling Big Willy’s Cab sends a cab out to your way for a pickup (though you can also travel via trains at train stops), or call up random numbers you see in the city for funny voice messages and nothing else. There are also numbers you can call up to unlock cheat codes as well as little easter eggs you can find here and there like civilian suicide hotspots, the teddy bear full of money in the Lopez mansion, or just little references that add to the world of the game. Also, you can blow up trains and I think that’s fucking hilarious. That’s about it for the gameplay that I can think of but I’m sure there’s more I’m missing out on describing.
The sound design for Saints Row is something that’s painfully easy to describe, and I’ll start with the music here because the music slaps. Granted, I’ll sit down here and say that I have listened to all of it? No, in fact I mostly listened (and still listen) to KRHYME FM, and let me tell you something man that radio station has all the fucking hits. There are songs that I’ve discovered off of that soundtrack that I STILL listen to today, from Masta Ace’s Soda & Soap, DJ Mathematic’s Real Nillaz, The Alchemist’s & Lloyd Bank’s Bangers track. That’s not to say that there aren’t any other good radio stations, in fact I bounced a lot between KRhyme, TheKronic and Sizzurp and bumped tracks like Eric B. and Rakim’s I Ain’t No Joke, R.A. the Rugged Man’s Black & White, Mathematic’s Spotlite and a whole bunch of other tracks I don’t remember off the top of my head. In fact, I’m genuinely surprised that there were three separate rap stations, not that I would complain about rap, hip hop and R&B but I’m surprised they didn’t try to condense it down since apparently there are three tracks spread across at least two stations (from Aisha in-universe of course) and tracks from artists that come from the SAME ALBUM (Mathematics mostly) that are put on different stations. I think so at least, shit’s strange as hell. Other tracks you mostly get from unlocking them by collecting CDs as mentioned before (shoutout to David Banner’s Saints Row, one of the most addicting tracks to listen to in game) for exclusive tracks or Masta Ace’s Take a Walk (which you can only buy from Scratch That, a record store in game). I can’t and won’t speak for the other radio stations, though next time I play it I really need to try the drum & bass channel because I love me some drum & bass but besides the point, the culture of Saints Row is heavily influenced by the hippity hops and the rippety raps and I’m always weak for it, especially considering it came out in the mid 2000s.
What I’ll say about the sound effects and sound design is that they bring the game to life in a way that feels great and unique. I’ll start with guns because by god do the guns sound amazing; the shotguns feel impactful, the M16 has this smooth and buttery sound that I could probably listen to forever and would make me fall asleep in a strange way while the AK sounds crunchy and menacing. Pistols for the most part sound like starter weapons (except the GDHC which hot damn) but again they feel and sound like they have impact and if you want your weapons to sound great they need that impact. The noises that the submachine guns make sound pretty similar for the most part but are nice either way while the special weapons are great in the case of the Rocket Launcher, though I’ll say that I wish the McManus sniper rifle had a little bit more oomph to it? I don’t know, it’s not bad but It doesn’t always have the feel that I need, though the grenades more than make up for it to me. Cars screeches, footsteps, and the city surrounding you all sound bustling with life in a way that just feels and sounds good! I don’t know if I had really much else to say about the sound effects because I’d just be repetitive and stale at a certain point but what I can say is that the random pedestrians and some of their voice lines are also hilarious and are honestly so random but not crazy enough to be GTA levels of satire (which to be honest can be kind of annoying sometimes).
The voice acting for Saints Row is pretty impressive in all honesty, considering the presumably smaller budget compared to a titan like Rockstar Games was able to pull some impressive talents. Keith David plays Julius Little with a smooth and deep gravelly voice which oozes charisma; I'd basically let him narrate my sex tape (if I ever had sex that is LOL). Daniel Dae Kim is someone whom I didn’t know before Saints Row but he plays Johnny Gat so effectively as this sociopathic murderous gangster that I certainly knew who he was AFTER I played the game. Michael Clark Duncan plays Benjamin “Motherfucking” King and for those who don’t know him, he also played Kingpin in 2004’s Daredevil along with John Coffey in The Green Mile and his acting credibility is phenomenal whether he’s playing an innocent man or a cold and calculated motherfucker (rest in peace by the way, why do the good ones always pass man?). Michael Rapaport (whom GTA guys know as Joey Leone) plays Troy Bradshaw here and does it pretty well, sounding honestly like an undercover detective from the Boston area and he just kind of fits the mold and makes it feel believable. Mila Kunis plays Tanya pretty well too, and while it’s easy to recognize Mila from pretty much everything she’s in, she plays backstabber in this game pretty slick. I could go on and on and on about the voice acting but the truth is that I legit can’t think of a performance that was bad, or didn’t really fit or anything to those lines. They did a stellar job with this game and I hope these guys got paid handsomely for this as there was never a time where I WASN’T immersed. If they had a line that was supposed to make me laugh, I laughed. If it was supposed to be hardcore gangster shit, it was exactly that. Granted there won’t be any emotional crying or anything but that was never this game’s vibe to be honest.
Graphically speaking the game is honestly pretty good looking, with a lot of bright colors and smooth models compared to the bleak and ugly (but iconic) look of Saints Row 2. Cars look fresh as hell, the animations on the characters involve A LOT of ragdolls and honestly looks pretty good. In fact, everything just feels pretty consistently great and I feel that the game takes full advantage of the power of the Xbox 360. There’s a lot of unique and interesting models for different pedestrians that add to the liveliness of the city; from dudes in giant soda and hotdog mascot costumes to people actually dressed up like pimps and driving dinky little ass pimpmobile muscle cars. I’ve never really been great at describing graphics but again everything is just smooth and shiny, and when it’s not everything blends it in perfectly so it’s not visually unappealing. When I say it looks good, I don’t mean like Playstation 5 graphically amazing, that shit wasn’t possible back then. But stylistically it’s just pristine, clean yet dirty and gritty at the same time. Let’s take (not the Los LOL) Los Carnales territory for example; as a grimy ass cartel with huge stakes in drug trafficking, you could go from their gated community in Ezpata to their dirtier dock operations in Poseidon Alley and up to their industrial territory in Black Bottom. You’re probably thinking, “yeah no shit, it’s an open world game of course you can do that”. But there’s something so consistent about how you can have so many different environments blend in together so well to create a perfect city like Stilwater while also fitting the personalities of the gangs inhabiting it. Westside Rollerz for example, a bunch of rich white preppy boys who love Fast & Furious right? Of course they’re going to control the stadiums area, their little upper class suburbs and down into places like Chinatown because aesthetically that’s just how their gang would operate trying to copy something like Fast & Furious. The Vice Kings on the upper hand, while they have their territory in lower income neighborhoods (like their old turf in Sunnyvale), their leader Benjamin King has so much influence and power in the city that he’s basically taking over all the rich neighborhoods.
I could go into more obvious shit like how the top of the map and the bottom of the map are separated by wealth gaps, the rich being on top and all the popular metaphors and shit I couldn’t properly explain. However, for me this is moreso a place for me to gush about how atmospherically Stilwater just feels like the perfect sort of playground, everything just lines up perfectly for the gangs, the structure, the variation. It’s a place that FEELS like a place (and apparently was inspired by the likes of Detroit and other midwestern cities), where Saints Row 2’s atmosphere represents corporate gentrification that infiltrates the communities later on. If Stilwater in SR2 is coming home to realize everything’s changed, Saints Row the original feels like home. That’s just the environment of course, I also appreciate how in this game the gangs actually feel like street gangs and not just an eclectic bunch of different dudes from different races and such with extreme differences. I say that not as a diss to Saints Row 2’s gangs, because I actually really like them and how they pop out. But these gangs actually feel like gangs with different street styles with their pant legs rolled up, bandanas and the whole nine yards; like it actually feels faithful to what a gang would act like back then. This is an atmosphere I really enjoy in my gangster games, an atmosphere that was really popular in the early to mid 2000s that I honestly really miss. There’s a weakness that I have for what I dub the “G-Unit Era” with the flashy clothes, the backwards caps, the chains and all that shit. I love it, I can’t get enough of it; this is the kind of vibe that I wanted with the Saints Row reboot. I love the vibes from each of the gangs, their colors and identities are unique and make them feel special and natural in their environment. If you want a fun fact about the Saints themselves, they used to be green in their older iterations until Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out and Voltition decided to switch to purple to make them more unique.
The last section I’ll put down is multiplayer, one which I haven’t played other than jumping into one empty lobby and walking around the warehouse as a curiosity. There were several different game modes, such as Co-op missions which only had two to three missions with a cap of two players and others like Team Deathmatch, Protect the Pimp is basically a VIP mode and Big Ass Chains for example I believe is like Capture the Flag? It’s the usual set of game modes and while I feel like there’s some unique Saints Row content I’d love to experience once or twice, overall it was one of those “shoehorned in multiplayer grabs” that kind of got abandoned after a little while if I remember correctly. It’s weird because they decided to do one for the sequel too for some reason before dropping it right after that.
Saints Row is a classic open world crime game that I honestly both thoroughly enjoy and I feel more than matches up with the reputation that the Grand Theft Auto series has developed. Both have interesting gang dynamics, multiple open world activities, a sense of humor that makes me chuckle, fun gunplay and overall is 100 percent a recommended time. I love me some open world crime games but I personally feel that the only games that have ever been truly able to match up with the GTA franchise in terms of quality are the first two Saints Row games. The Getaway was fantastic but the replayability and the hardcore feeling of the series made it a once and done deal, Driver is cool as a Hollywood car chase movie but doesn’t have that oomph for me, True Crime as a series is okay but a little bit janky in certain instances. People give the first Saints Row game shit for not being more humorous and over the top like the second game, or for having really frustrating difficulty spikes. I love this game, and always will and every once in a while I sit down and I replay this game because everything about the first game to me is immaculate as fuck.
As for the future (or now lack thereof) for the franchise, there was a lot of hope. The sequel to this game would become the most popular title in the franchise as both staples and the pillars of the entire franchise. The sequel would release on every console and catapult the series as a legitimate rival to Rockstar’s franchise, and soon after that came all forms of plans for the series which included canceled handheld games (which I’ll get to after Saints Row 2) as well as a canceled movie with 50 Cent. However, over time to differentiate itself from the semi-serious tone of Grand Theft Auto, Volition pivoted towards a goofier approach, one that worked with the third title but began to lose steam from the fourth one and on. One failed spin-off and a really shitty reboot later, and sadly Volition has closed. It’s a damn shame, because the truth is these guys made a really solid foundation for a fantastic future, one that was cut up and crushed due to budget constraints and a vision that seemed destined to fail. Overall, that shit sucks, especially considering the fact that there was a group at Volition (more like a duo) that had planned to repair the Saints Row 2 PC port (a port notorious for glitches and bad connections) after they found the source code as well as fixing it up in general with the “Gentlemen of the Row” pack. Again, I’m just going to lament here and say that I’m very much sad that the game’s source code wasn’t found, because the game is great and deserves to be ported to PC for all the fans in the series to play if they didn’t play it before.
Links:
http://xbox360.gamespy.com/xbox-360/saints-row/717127p1.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fPyaIZLws8&ab_channel=mrsaintsgodzilla21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1hDuC7dTPM&ab_channel=MafiaGameVideos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Row_(2006_video_game)
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SaintsRow1
https://archive.org/details/saints-row-dump (Behind the scenes stuff from Volition themselves)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udo3ZAuZOW4&ab_channel=NeoGamer-TheVideoGameArchive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-heKzYYGC3I&ab_channel=mrsaintsgodzilla21
I originally encountered Saints Row through playing it at my Mom’s friend's house. As a young child, I didn’t have an Xbox 360 or any next gen games so I was mainly used to playing the previous generation for the longest time. This same friend of my mother’s funny enough is where I also got introduced to my love of horror, because she gave me Condemned: Criminal Origins as an Xbox 360 game but that’s a different story. I had played Saints Row pretty much all the damn time when I was over there along with Grand Theft Auto 4 and I was always really excited to go over and play the game. Afterwards for the longest time, I hadn’t really played too much of the Saints Row series at all, in fact I think I had played Saints Row 2 before playing the first one again after remembering the game’s existence. I would repeatedly play it on and off once I got my Xbox 360, and would be one of my main go-to games for entertainment as I messed about offline. I ended up replaying this a little while ago for the first time backwards compatible via the Xbox One after Microsoft made the game compatible around 2018. I believed I had finished it last year or the year before, and so I’m writing this review now because my buddy BFD Survivor enlisted me for a future playthrough on Saints Row 2’s port for PC (after we fix the damn thing of course). Saints Row as a series would become mixed in my eyes but I can safely say to this day that this and the second game are some of my favorite open world crime games of all time, in fact they’re two of my favorite games of all time. This review isn’t going to be a supercritical one as much as it’s just going to be me sucking this game’s cock and verbalizing how much I truly enjoyed my time with this game, while maybe offering a critique here and there.
The plot begins with your created character (aka Playa; clever Volition, clever) as you walk down the streets of Saints Row, a district in the city of Stilwater. Stilwater is a city rampant with crime, drugs, prostitution, all the good shit you’d love in a city overrun with criminal issues. Passing by someone selling stolen watches and a hooker, a gang war unfolds in the district over unclaimed territory over a gang tag on a nearby wall between three gangs: the Vice Kings (Yellow clad gangsters led by the well connected record executive CEO named Benjamin King and involved in lots of prostitution which Julius used to roll with), the Westside Rollerz (a blue gang mostly led by white boys who love underground racing and are led by Joseph Price and his uncle, William Sharp, a wealthy financier, and Los Carnales (not THE Los Carnales, are a red-clad latino gang who deals with drugs and guns led by the Lopez brothers along with their colombian backers). It nearly ends badly for you, a bullet in the forehead by some lone Vice King dweeb when you’re saved by two people: Julius Little and Troy Bradshaw. Looking to stop the gangs once and for all from destroying their neighborhood, Julius tells “Playa” to come by the church in the middle of the district if they want to take back the neighborhood from the gangs. It’s here where they get “canonized”, and are thrown into the middle of a gang initiation which you could either win or lose depending on if you get stomped out while meeting some of the other lieutenants in the Saints, mainly Johnny Gat and Dex. After this you sort of get used to the basics: buy a gun, kill some Vice Kings, and take over some territory (while doing some optional objectives like strongholds or stealing hoes from other pimps). Afterwords, the district is yours and Julius comes up with game plans for every gang in the city: Johnny Gat is set on the Vice Kings (which Troy backs out of aggressively), Lin is sent to infiltrate the Rollerz (first time seeing her of course) and Dex is told to come up with a way to take down “the” Los Carnales.
The Vice Kings story arc starts off with meeting up with Johnny Gat and his girlfriend Aisha, who reports that her sister’s been kidnapped off the street, presumably by Vice Kings lieutenant Tanya Winters who heads up the prostitution ring of the gang. This culminates in Aisha and Gat coming up with a plan for a big fuck you to the Vice Kings. See, Aisha is actually an R&B artist (whose songs you can listen to on the radio stations) and she signed to Kingdom Come Records, Benjamin King’s record company. However extortion is at play and with the kidnapping of her sister, all bets are off the table so the two come up with a plan to fake her death by bringing her to the session before blowing up the entire building with a car bomb (with a nice little 2Pac “7 Day Theory” reference to go. That goes off surprisingly without a hitch, and Gat’s next plan is a very simple one: kill Tanya Winters, and emphasis is placed on how she slept with both Anthony Green (King’s bodyguard) as well as Warren Williams (a former rapper named EZ Money as well as the guy who managed Kingdom Come Records) behind Green’s back. This dynamic will come into play later but for now, but Gat tells the Playa to take over her brothel at Prawn Court, which will mess up the prostitution business King has going on. Prawn Court is conquered but no Tanya, and a cutscene that follows shows King’s inner circles (including Tanya) bitching about the Saints. King tells them all to calm down as he’s going to rebuild the record company and that he’ll put pressure on police chief Monroe to crack down on the Saints so they can retake the brothel. The cops crack down on the Saints, but after Johnny hears that the Vice Kings are attempting to retake the brothel, sends the Playa back to Prawn Court to kill the invaders. Afterwards, Gat calls to let him know that Tanya is holding up in the old Sunnyvale Gardens police station and to drop by the church later as they have “murdering to do”. This “murdering” plan doesn’t go too well as the raid ends in an ambush where Gat gets shot in the leg with a shotgun and is kidnapped by Anthony Green while the Playa has to jump out of the top floor window to survive.
The gang meet up at the church and Julius comes up with a plan for the Playa to pose as Tanya’s chauffeur so she can lead them back to where Anthony Green is holding Gat. It works and the Playa raids the condo where Johnny is being held, killing Anthony Green in the process and saving Johnny, though Tanya escapes AGAIN. Rendezvousing back to the church, Dex comes up with a plan to force the police to put pressure on the Vice Kings…by making Johnny and the Playa dress up as them and cause chaos. They do so, killing all sorts of people and destroying public property and bringing about news attention. There’s also this growing tension between Warren Williams and Benjamin King over their clashing ideologies: Warren just wants to kill and go for the throat while Ben is thinking about the long game with their political connections and they have an argument over what to do with the Saints again. To put even more pressure on the police/Vice King relationship, Johnny decides to blow up the cops working with the gang using RPGs looted from Anthony’s crib and the fallout (which includes blowing up Kingdom Come Records AGAIN) leads to Warren Williams and Tanya leading a coup against King. King fights his way out but barely survives, calling his old buddy Julius for help and the Playa is sent to rescue King from his own men. Warren also attempts to kill him in a drive-by but this ends up with Warren out of commission and betrayed by Tanya who kills him while he’s down, ascending to the Vice King’s throne. King and the Playa lure the rest of the Vice Kings to their death via police ambush before they lead an attack on the penthouse Tanya is in. In order to get the codes to get inside, they interrogate “eurotrash” clothing guy and Tanya’s fashion stylist Stefan before raiding and shooting Tanya out of her own office onto the streets below. Gat, the Playa and King split up with King thanking the Playa for their help and giving him the keys to the penthouse.
Quote of the Section: “Hope you don’t mind Hepatitis”.
The Westside Rollerz story arc begins with the Playa meeting up with Lin, whose first job is you stealing a shipment of vehicles and bringing them to a garage for a “special surprise”. This surprise involves tampering with them to where if they hit up a high speed then it explodes, and Troy joins up with you on this job to taunt them enough to activate their nitrous. The whole race goes up in smoke and the Playa leaves with satisfaction, though things still aren’t going fast enough for Lin. Lin’s next plan is simple: attack a Westside Rollerz mechanic named Donnie, who’s friends with the co-commander Joseph Price. However, this is a ruse so that Lin can save him so she can get introduced into the inner circle faster. The plan works, and Lin gets to meet with Joseph Price and his uncle William Sharp, who discusses some of their other plans. How the Playa is able to eavesdrop outside the house to hear about it all without any guards around I’m not sure, but Donnie lets loose info about a car shipment. The Playa protects this shipment from the gang, which forces them to find another way to get the parts. Fun fact, Steve Jaros (the lead writer) posted on Twitter or X or whatever the fuck that “The Buyers” ominously mentioned were apparently Shogo Akuji and the Ronin from the second game so fun stuff. The group decides to strip a bunch of different cars for parts instead, and the Playa fucks that plan up as well. However, Price and Sharp deduce that the Third Street Saints must be getting their info from somewhere, and who did they recently introduced into the circle? Lin. Lin calls the Playa and tells them that something is going down at a pool hall, but this turns into a Rollerz ambush which ends up in you getting knocked out, a bunch of dead bodies and you in the trunk of a car with Lin. The two hear Sharp talking to Donnie about loose ends and shoots both of them with a .44 before kicking the car into the river. Lin is able to set you free before dying, and the Playa escapes to cut off and kill William Sharp as revenge. Price sets up a meeting with his gang and organizes a convoy to raze Saints Row to the ground, however Troy intercepts the call and Julius goes with the Playa to raze them instead with a rocket launcher. Afterwards, Price calls demanding a final showdown and instead attempts to run over the Playa but fails. Chasing him down on the highway, the Playa finally kills Price and the Rollerz are smashed to nothing.
Quote of the Section: “I almost got ran over by a motherfucking truck, whatchu think?”
Los Carnale’s story arc (It’s not THE, Los means…fuck it) starts with the Playa meeting up with Dex who gives a rundown of the gang. Los Carnales is ran by Hector and Angelo Lopez and is backed by the biggest drug cartel in the world, so Dex wants to play it safe and cut out the profits. Two drug labs and a Carnales truck hijacking later (with plans to use it for some unknown purpose against the main drug plant) and the higher ups notice almost immediately. Hector instructs Angelo and their enforcer, the feared Victor Rodriguez, to launch an attack on Saints Row. The Carnales do that though Victor and Angelo soon leave while the rest of the gang is wiped out by the Playa. Afterwards, Dex gathers Troy and the Playa and reveals his plan: use the truck they hijacked to sneak into the main Carnales drug plant in a sort of Trojan Horse move in an attempt to take it over. It works, which leads to Manuel Orjuela (the Cartel representative) to question Hector’s speed in wiping out the Saints. This questioning comes to fruition when Dex brings the Playa to a Friendly Fire gun shop to pick up a sniper rifle to assassinate Hector during a meeting with the Columbians, intending to frame them as the perpetrators. The plan goes off again without a hitch, and Victor relays the news to Angelo who is in the middle of getting head from his girlfriend Luz. There’s also a little subplot around Manuel having his eye on Luz, intending to take her for himself but that’s not really followed up on too much. Dex, Troy and the Playa gather around for the next stage of the plan: Troy wants to kill Manuel but Dex wants to meet with him first then decide what to do. They attempt to meet up with Manuel at a strip club, but Victor is there and chases them all the way back to Saints Row before losing them entirely. Fun fact about this mission, Victor is invincible the entire way so don’t bother shooting to kill him.
Meeting back at the church, Julius is furious at Dex for attempting to meet with the Colombians without consulting him but Victor storms the church with goons. One violent shootout later and the legendary enforcer is dead, with Troy using his burning body as a lighter for his cigarette. Angelo is furious and intends to kill the Saints himself before slapping his girlfriend Luz over Manuel’s romantic interests and storms off. Julius later gets back from a meeting with Manuel with a proposal: the assassination at the shipyard led to a lot of drugs being confiscated by police. If the Saints can get the drugs back, the Colombians will drop Los Carnales and back them instead. Using a plan from Troy to blow a hole in the evidence room with a car bomb, the Saints raid the station while the Playa defends from the outside and they get the drugs back. After a handshake meeting between Julius and Manuel gets ambushed by Angelo who shoots up the place, Manuel gives them the location of the Lopez Mansion but tells them to “leave the senorita alone”. Dex and the Playa raid Angelo’s mansion to kill him before giving chase via vehicle, though Angelo escapes by driving over an open bridge. The final mission has Dex pulling up beside you at the church, telling you that Angelo plans to escape the city via the airport, and the two of you drive off to finish him off once and for all. The two manage to kill all of his armed guards as well as destroy his airplane, finishing him off once and for all. Luz arrives too late, having missed her flight arrives with constant questions before almost getting shot by the two. Dex gives him the keys to Angelo’s ride and tells him that Julius was right about him and they split off.
Quote of the section: “Bullshit, that was last year’s fall collection!”
After you take down all three gangs, Stilwater is finally yours. You’re promoted to right hand man and the Third Street Saints have become the most dominant gang in the city. However, Julius is pulled over by the police and disappears permanently, becoming the last time your character hears from him in game. A voice calls you up, a voice belonging to Chief of Police Richard Monroe. See he has his own game plan, and his is to use Julius as leverage against the Saints to make them do his dirty work for him. This dirty work involves assassinating mayoral candidate Marshall Winslow, himself a citizen hailing from Saints Row, for his boss. How do you do this? You literally hijack his campaign bus and leave it on some train tracks, leading to a fiery death and an explosion. If you’re paying attention throughout the entire game to radio ads you’ll learn of an upcoming election between (pretty sure) Democrat Marshall Winslow and Republican Alderman Richard Hughes where they attack each other viciously over various political beliefs. Of course, the chief of police decides to renege on his deal to let Julius go and tells the Saints that he’ll be in contact soon with more work. The Playa, Gat and Dex decide that enough is enough and that there’s no way the gang is going to be the police chief’s lapdog, so they decide to assassinate him publicly at Winslow’s funeral. This almost fails but ends with a whole bunch of dead police officers and the Saints escape away from the carnage. The final mission, just a cutscene really, involves Playa getting called to meet Monroe’s boss Hughes (with Julius supposedly meeting him there) on his yacht. Meeting up with him, Hughes thanks the Playa smugly for handing him the election and covering up any loose ends with the chief of police. Hughes has an “urban city renewal plan” that he plans to use to wipe out the Saints as the last gang in the city, having previously been criticized for displacing poor people. You’ll get a montage of the other characters in the game before Hughes decides to have you killed and here is where you’ll get three final reveals. Troy reveals himself to be an undercover cop and all of the previous hints become relevant in context (for example, his refusal to go after the Vice Kings, his knowledge of how police stations have evidence lock up, the constant questioning and even clues that you could piece together by reading the manual to the game). Julius is also revealed to be alive, and looks over the yacht at the river and looks at his watch before walking away. The final part has Hughes attempting to walk away as he tries to get his guards to kill the Playa before the yacht explodes in a fiery blaze, being the final twist in the game. No context, nothing; just a giant explosion and the feeling that Julius blew up the both of you.
Final Quote: “Can you hurry this up? I wanna go to Freckle Bitch’s.”
The plot to Saints Row is very much a “from rags to riches' ' sort of story, where you start out as a small fry and make your way up through the food chain as you wipe out each and every gang in their own storylines. The characters in this game are unique and memorable, and I don’t think a day will go by where I won’t think about iconic gangsters like the loose cannon Johnny Gat, the sophisticated gangster Benjamin King, the elder statesmen Julius Little or even smaller characters like Luz from Los Carnales, Stefan the annoying Eurotrash or Donnie from the Westside Rollerz. Each and every character adds a bit of flavor to the game that I appreciate, and culminates in a fun storyline that ends with a bang (literally). If I were to say anything about the campaigns it’s that I feel like the Vice Kings is the top one in terms of quality, with Los Carnales being my personal favorite and second one with quality. Both of them have their moments, their arcs and honestly connect to each other with little brick jokes that make it seem like it has a chronological order (Vice Kings first and Carnales last) that I just love. My least favorite is the Rollerz, mainly due to the fact that everything seems rushed and kind of out of order sometimes. The first two missions with the racing and car hijacking feels like could happen after rescuing Donnie, none of the missions feel particularly impactful aside from Lin’s death and truthfully I guess it just doesn’t interest me as well as I wanted it to. It’s not that it’s bad it’s just that it pales in comparison, and probably should be beaten first just to get it out of the way (even if I always go against Los Carnales first).
It’s a simple plot, not really filled with too many twists until the very last moment though a lot of this was due to development issues (though Troy being an undercover cop apparently was always a thing that was going to happen). For example, the only reason that Julius Little ended up becoming an antagonist was due to the fact that the animation for the cutscene ended up being shit, and so they had to reuse an Aisha animation where she checks her watch and this ultimately pushed the franchise into a different direction entirely. The character development for your character isn’t really huge in an emotional way as much as a financial way, though you do get a hint at your future snarkiness with classic lines like “I almost got hit by a motherfucking truck, whatchu think?” and “Bullshit! Those are last year’s fall collection!” referring to shoes that Luz is wearing. I don’t really know what else I can fill out here, there’s just so much personality to this game, little comedic moments wrapped around an actual serious gangster story where you take the central role in growing your small-time street gang into something much bigger. It’s a tale that’s simple but effective and one that I can appreciate with the little details as well as the sense of humor that it brings to the table, while also probably being the most serious that this franchise has ever been. Honestly, I miss this version of Saints Row even if I liked 2 and 3 a lot and I wish they would’ve gone back to this.
The gameplay is an open world crime based game where you can complete activities, shoot people, steal cars and engage in lots of customization and other activities that they don’t exactly spell out for you. What I’ll start with gameplay wise is the driving, which I’ll be straight up feels consistent and fantastic. It doesn’t feel as weighty and bloated as say Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5 would later feel, chasing some desire to be realistic with its behind the wheel escapades. I couldn’t give less than a fuck about that, if I’m going to drive a car in game then I want the handling to be smooth and when I actually make a drift that I don’t make a fat U-turn the other direction sideways and the Saints Row series I feel has almost always done a good job with that with pretty much any vehicle you drive. Keep in mind though, there aren’t any drivable boats, motorcycles or helicopters unlike the sequels so you’ll basically be going between “Cheap ass car”, “Cheap gangster ass car” and “Holy shit this is a ferrari” level of quality in cars (not just sports cars of course, they have Rolls Royces but they have their own names for copyright reasons). The gunplay is really simple, painfully so: you literally have a weapons wheel you hold B to open, and you use the right thumbstick to pick one of the weapons you want. There is no reloading sadly unless you’re idle or out of ammo but there is a melee button you can use to hit people with whether it’s a pistol whip or an assault rifle swing that knocks people dead in the face but that’s also it. There’s also melee weapons like baseball bats, knives you know the usual shit in these games that work just as well for low level goons. Best part about combat is how smooth everything feels, and the ragdolls are just the icing on top. You can consume all sorts of stuff from fast food at your local Freckle Bitch’s for health purposes or go to the liquor store to pick up booze and blunts, though the booze and blunts is more for the show than to add any benefits.
In order to do main missions you need to get respect, and respect can be obtained in many different ways: killing rival gangster is a sure way of doing it, so is customizing yourself and buying clothes and cars (obviously if it’s purple you get more of a boost to your respect) but the main way is to do side activities. Side activities range from Insurance Fraud, where you jump in front of cars in order to get a lot of bank to drug trafficking, where you ride alongside someone and protect them as they deal drugs from both cops and rival gangs to hitman and chop shop activities. They’re all varied and different enough to where if you have trouble with one, you can hop over to another activity and gain enough respect for multiple different missions if need be. If I remember correctly, during my playthroughs there were ones that I didn’t even touch at all. However, unlike the future Saints Rows, they go past 6 levels to 8 levels instead. There are no mid-rewards like Saints Row 2, it’s just one straight shot to the end for the final reward instead; however you don’t have to complete everything in one go thankfully so you can always come back later. Some of these rewards include losing notoriety faster (Drug Trafficking), reduced damage (Insurance Fraud), pimp outfits and the Pimp Cane shotgun (Snatch), and weapons in your weapon cache (Mayhem) along with others I’m sure I didn’t list. Other side activities that are smaller but have rewards include collecting CDs (which every ten or so gives you a new track created for the game) and tagging, which requires quick time events and rewards you with unlimited sprint for all of them. If you’re a completionist, it’s recommended to get all the activities done before you complete the story (or at least the drug trafficking stuff) because otherwise some of the rewards are pointless. Other smaller activities that don't really give you much in the way of reputation but can get you a quick buck involves taking hostages, which involves stealing a car with a passenger inside of it and holding them for a certain amount of time for a cash bonus with cops chasing you. Another one you can do is robbing shops: you can either break into the safe yourself and open it up with quick time events; if you rob it during the day you just get cash, but if you rob it during nighttime you can steal a box to put it in the trunk of a car to deliver to a fence to sell.
When you play the game, you originally start out with a beat up house (called a “Crib”) in the Saints Row district, where you can access any clothes bought or weapons in your cache and even money you collect from your various districts. When you take down each of the gangs, you own their cribs (like Benjamin King’s penthouse or Angelo Lopez’s mansion) for example and these are a lot more flamboyant and stylish. They aren’t like Saints Row 2 where you can buy up a bunch and customize them but they’re nice places to save your progress and drive cars out of your garage. You can also save at every stronghold you unlock in the game and that’s pretty cool too but doesn't really have extra features like cribs do. Not for customization, there’s a lot to work with here from character customization at the beginning (though you can always change it with plastic surgery at Image As Designed), you can buy clothes and change different colors (though finding a belt to work with an outfit can be a giant pain in the ass in my opinion), and repair/customize cars at the local garages which you can save for your crib for later. I won’t go too into detail on this as there’s a lot you can do with it but it all looks and feels incredible getting your own style down, whether you’re trying to look like somebody or if you’re trying to make the most cursed character alive. The only downside to this is that there’s no female characters to play as, so it feels kind of weird and inconsistent if you’re trying to create one character to play from the beginning to the end of the series.
The last main thing I’d like to bring up are homies: these are recruitable companions (lol) that you can either hit up on the cell phone (once you unlock them), or mostly whistle for on the street that will follow you on command. The ones on the street are the easiest, have their own weapons and the more of the story you go through, their weapons get better. There are also special homies, ones which you unlock either through completing certain side quests (like getting Will from completing Snatch in the Saints Row district, or Mr. Wong from the Chinatown hitman activities for example), while there are two you can unlock from calling certain numbers. If you call 555-2445 on your in-game phone (from the pause menu) you can get a homie named “Chicken Ned” who shows up with a baseball bat. You can also unlock Zombie Lin after you complete the mission involving her death by calling the business “Eye for an Eye”. I like these little easter eggs as they add a little bit of flavor in the game, and there are more easter eggs and callable numbers to boot. You can call up numbers like 911 for the usual response from paramedics and even get healing, calling Big Willy’s Cab sends a cab out to your way for a pickup (though you can also travel via trains at train stops), or call up random numbers you see in the city for funny voice messages and nothing else. There are also numbers you can call up to unlock cheat codes as well as little easter eggs you can find here and there like civilian suicide hotspots, the teddy bear full of money in the Lopez mansion, or just little references that add to the world of the game. Also, you can blow up trains and I think that’s fucking hilarious. That’s about it for the gameplay that I can think of but I’m sure there’s more I’m missing out on describing.
The sound design for Saints Row is something that’s painfully easy to describe, and I’ll start with the music here because the music slaps. Granted, I’ll sit down here and say that I have listened to all of it? No, in fact I mostly listened (and still listen) to KRHYME FM, and let me tell you something man that radio station has all the fucking hits. There are songs that I’ve discovered off of that soundtrack that I STILL listen to today, from Masta Ace’s Soda & Soap, DJ Mathematic’s Real Nillaz, The Alchemist’s & Lloyd Bank’s Bangers track. That’s not to say that there aren’t any other good radio stations, in fact I bounced a lot between KRhyme, TheKronic and Sizzurp and bumped tracks like Eric B. and Rakim’s I Ain’t No Joke, R.A. the Rugged Man’s Black & White, Mathematic’s Spotlite and a whole bunch of other tracks I don’t remember off the top of my head. In fact, I’m genuinely surprised that there were three separate rap stations, not that I would complain about rap, hip hop and R&B but I’m surprised they didn’t try to condense it down since apparently there are three tracks spread across at least two stations (from Aisha in-universe of course) and tracks from artists that come from the SAME ALBUM (Mathematics mostly) that are put on different stations. I think so at least, shit’s strange as hell. Other tracks you mostly get from unlocking them by collecting CDs as mentioned before (shoutout to David Banner’s Saints Row, one of the most addicting tracks to listen to in game) for exclusive tracks or Masta Ace’s Take a Walk (which you can only buy from Scratch That, a record store in game). I can’t and won’t speak for the other radio stations, though next time I play it I really need to try the drum & bass channel because I love me some drum & bass but besides the point, the culture of Saints Row is heavily influenced by the hippity hops and the rippety raps and I’m always weak for it, especially considering it came out in the mid 2000s.
What I’ll say about the sound effects and sound design is that they bring the game to life in a way that feels great and unique. I’ll start with guns because by god do the guns sound amazing; the shotguns feel impactful, the M16 has this smooth and buttery sound that I could probably listen to forever and would make me fall asleep in a strange way while the AK sounds crunchy and menacing. Pistols for the most part sound like starter weapons (except the GDHC which hot damn) but again they feel and sound like they have impact and if you want your weapons to sound great they need that impact. The noises that the submachine guns make sound pretty similar for the most part but are nice either way while the special weapons are great in the case of the Rocket Launcher, though I’ll say that I wish the McManus sniper rifle had a little bit more oomph to it? I don’t know, it’s not bad but It doesn’t always have the feel that I need, though the grenades more than make up for it to me. Cars screeches, footsteps, and the city surrounding you all sound bustling with life in a way that just feels and sounds good! I don’t know if I had really much else to say about the sound effects because I’d just be repetitive and stale at a certain point but what I can say is that the random pedestrians and some of their voice lines are also hilarious and are honestly so random but not crazy enough to be GTA levels of satire (which to be honest can be kind of annoying sometimes).
The voice acting for Saints Row is pretty impressive in all honesty, considering the presumably smaller budget compared to a titan like Rockstar Games was able to pull some impressive talents. Keith David plays Julius Little with a smooth and deep gravelly voice which oozes charisma; I'd basically let him narrate my sex tape (if I ever had sex that is LOL). Daniel Dae Kim is someone whom I didn’t know before Saints Row but he plays Johnny Gat so effectively as this sociopathic murderous gangster that I certainly knew who he was AFTER I played the game. Michael Clark Duncan plays Benjamin “Motherfucking” King and for those who don’t know him, he also played Kingpin in 2004’s Daredevil along with John Coffey in The Green Mile and his acting credibility is phenomenal whether he’s playing an innocent man or a cold and calculated motherfucker (rest in peace by the way, why do the good ones always pass man?). Michael Rapaport (whom GTA guys know as Joey Leone) plays Troy Bradshaw here and does it pretty well, sounding honestly like an undercover detective from the Boston area and he just kind of fits the mold and makes it feel believable. Mila Kunis plays Tanya pretty well too, and while it’s easy to recognize Mila from pretty much everything she’s in, she plays backstabber in this game pretty slick. I could go on and on and on about the voice acting but the truth is that I legit can’t think of a performance that was bad, or didn’t really fit or anything to those lines. They did a stellar job with this game and I hope these guys got paid handsomely for this as there was never a time where I WASN’T immersed. If they had a line that was supposed to make me laugh, I laughed. If it was supposed to be hardcore gangster shit, it was exactly that. Granted there won’t be any emotional crying or anything but that was never this game’s vibe to be honest.
Graphically speaking the game is honestly pretty good looking, with a lot of bright colors and smooth models compared to the bleak and ugly (but iconic) look of Saints Row 2. Cars look fresh as hell, the animations on the characters involve A LOT of ragdolls and honestly looks pretty good. In fact, everything just feels pretty consistently great and I feel that the game takes full advantage of the power of the Xbox 360. There’s a lot of unique and interesting models for different pedestrians that add to the liveliness of the city; from dudes in giant soda and hotdog mascot costumes to people actually dressed up like pimps and driving dinky little ass pimpmobile muscle cars. I’ve never really been great at describing graphics but again everything is just smooth and shiny, and when it’s not everything blends it in perfectly so it’s not visually unappealing. When I say it looks good, I don’t mean like Playstation 5 graphically amazing, that shit wasn’t possible back then. But stylistically it’s just pristine, clean yet dirty and gritty at the same time. Let’s take (not the Los LOL) Los Carnales territory for example; as a grimy ass cartel with huge stakes in drug trafficking, you could go from their gated community in Ezpata to their dirtier dock operations in Poseidon Alley and up to their industrial territory in Black Bottom. You’re probably thinking, “yeah no shit, it’s an open world game of course you can do that”. But there’s something so consistent about how you can have so many different environments blend in together so well to create a perfect city like Stilwater while also fitting the personalities of the gangs inhabiting it. Westside Rollerz for example, a bunch of rich white preppy boys who love Fast & Furious right? Of course they’re going to control the stadiums area, their little upper class suburbs and down into places like Chinatown because aesthetically that’s just how their gang would operate trying to copy something like Fast & Furious. The Vice Kings on the upper hand, while they have their territory in lower income neighborhoods (like their old turf in Sunnyvale), their leader Benjamin King has so much influence and power in the city that he’s basically taking over all the rich neighborhoods.
I could go into more obvious shit like how the top of the map and the bottom of the map are separated by wealth gaps, the rich being on top and all the popular metaphors and shit I couldn’t properly explain. However, for me this is moreso a place for me to gush about how atmospherically Stilwater just feels like the perfect sort of playground, everything just lines up perfectly for the gangs, the structure, the variation. It’s a place that FEELS like a place (and apparently was inspired by the likes of Detroit and other midwestern cities), where Saints Row 2’s atmosphere represents corporate gentrification that infiltrates the communities later on. If Stilwater in SR2 is coming home to realize everything’s changed, Saints Row the original feels like home. That’s just the environment of course, I also appreciate how in this game the gangs actually feel like street gangs and not just an eclectic bunch of different dudes from different races and such with extreme differences. I say that not as a diss to Saints Row 2’s gangs, because I actually really like them and how they pop out. But these gangs actually feel like gangs with different street styles with their pant legs rolled up, bandanas and the whole nine yards; like it actually feels faithful to what a gang would act like back then. This is an atmosphere I really enjoy in my gangster games, an atmosphere that was really popular in the early to mid 2000s that I honestly really miss. There’s a weakness that I have for what I dub the “G-Unit Era” with the flashy clothes, the backwards caps, the chains and all that shit. I love it, I can’t get enough of it; this is the kind of vibe that I wanted with the Saints Row reboot. I love the vibes from each of the gangs, their colors and identities are unique and make them feel special and natural in their environment. If you want a fun fact about the Saints themselves, they used to be green in their older iterations until Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out and Voltition decided to switch to purple to make them more unique.
The last section I’ll put down is multiplayer, one which I haven’t played other than jumping into one empty lobby and walking around the warehouse as a curiosity. There were several different game modes, such as Co-op missions which only had two to three missions with a cap of two players and others like Team Deathmatch, Protect the Pimp is basically a VIP mode and Big Ass Chains for example I believe is like Capture the Flag? It’s the usual set of game modes and while I feel like there’s some unique Saints Row content I’d love to experience once or twice, overall it was one of those “shoehorned in multiplayer grabs” that kind of got abandoned after a little while if I remember correctly. It’s weird because they decided to do one for the sequel too for some reason before dropping it right after that.
Saints Row is a classic open world crime game that I honestly both thoroughly enjoy and I feel more than matches up with the reputation that the Grand Theft Auto series has developed. Both have interesting gang dynamics, multiple open world activities, a sense of humor that makes me chuckle, fun gunplay and overall is 100 percent a recommended time. I love me some open world crime games but I personally feel that the only games that have ever been truly able to match up with the GTA franchise in terms of quality are the first two Saints Row games. The Getaway was fantastic but the replayability and the hardcore feeling of the series made it a once and done deal, Driver is cool as a Hollywood car chase movie but doesn’t have that oomph for me, True Crime as a series is okay but a little bit janky in certain instances. People give the first Saints Row game shit for not being more humorous and over the top like the second game, or for having really frustrating difficulty spikes. I love this game, and always will and every once in a while I sit down and I replay this game because everything about the first game to me is immaculate as fuck.
As for the future (or now lack thereof) for the franchise, there was a lot of hope. The sequel to this game would become the most popular title in the franchise as both staples and the pillars of the entire franchise. The sequel would release on every console and catapult the series as a legitimate rival to Rockstar’s franchise, and soon after that came all forms of plans for the series which included canceled handheld games (which I’ll get to after Saints Row 2) as well as a canceled movie with 50 Cent. However, over time to differentiate itself from the semi-serious tone of Grand Theft Auto, Volition pivoted towards a goofier approach, one that worked with the third title but began to lose steam from the fourth one and on. One failed spin-off and a really shitty reboot later, and sadly Volition has closed. It’s a damn shame, because the truth is these guys made a really solid foundation for a fantastic future, one that was cut up and crushed due to budget constraints and a vision that seemed destined to fail. Overall, that shit sucks, especially considering the fact that there was a group at Volition (more like a duo) that had planned to repair the Saints Row 2 PC port (a port notorious for glitches and bad connections) after they found the source code as well as fixing it up in general with the “Gentlemen of the Row” pack. Again, I’m just going to lament here and say that I’m very much sad that the game’s source code wasn’t found, because the game is great and deserves to be ported to PC for all the fans in the series to play if they didn’t play it before.
Links:
http://xbox360.gamespy.com/xbox-360/saints-row/717127p1.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fPyaIZLws8&ab_channel=mrsaintsgodzilla21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1hDuC7dTPM&ab_channel=MafiaGameVideos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Row_(2006_video_game)
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/SaintsRow1
https://archive.org/details/saints-row-dump (Behind the scenes stuff from Volition themselves)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udo3ZAuZOW4&ab_channel=NeoGamer-TheVideoGameArchive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-heKzYYGC3I&ab_channel=mrsaintsgodzilla21
Tek l ile yazılıyor la poser gavatoğlu seni
The respect system bogs this game down a lot, but everything else about it is very charming.
Imagine a San Andreas knock off with a decent city, interesting mechanics and no bikes anywhere for some reason... That's pretty much Saints Row 1. A humble first entry like many games don't really do anymore.
shame that this game was never released outside of Xbox 360 as far as i know. It's not perfect but very charming and fun.
Note: the character customization here is really really good and it just gets better with every entry in the series.
shame that this game was never released outside of Xbox 360 as far as i know. It's not perfect but very charming and fun.
Note: the character customization here is really really good and it just gets better with every entry in the series.
I understand that the Reputation System makes you feel part of the gang and all that stuff, but it feels annoying each time you have to stop the story because you have to grind reputation to star the mission.
But after all, i can't say i hadn't fun with this Saints Row. And i heard that the sequel is better in many ways, so I'll be looking forward to that.
But after all, i can't say i hadn't fun with this Saints Row. And i heard that the sequel is better in many ways, so I'll be looking forward to that.
Good characters and fun for the most part. Your cars blow up in every five seconds though just like in gta3
Product of it's Time™
Did you know less than 2 years prior, San Andreas (the best GTA) came out? Time sure is weird. I swear I'll play through Saint's Row 2 one of these days.
Did you know less than 2 years prior, San Andreas (the best GTA) came out? Time sure is weird. I swear I'll play through Saint's Row 2 one of these days.
Pimp. Cane. Shotgun.
Not a bad first attempt at a GTA clone, I had a surprising amount of fun with this.
Gameplay was still plenty fun despite showing its age real hard, the cutscenes even with some dates humour were still pretty funny and I actually liked the system of needing to do a certain amount of side content before you can play the next story mission.
Gameplay was still plenty fun despite showing its age real hard, the cutscenes even with some dates humour were still pretty funny and I actually liked the system of needing to do a certain amount of side content before you can play the next story mission.