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 :/