Metachronos overall score = 8.7 / 10
Positive
- It successfully copies the oft-imitated-but-untouchable Grand Theft Auto formula
- fun, responsive driving controls are as good as on-foot shooting action
- impressive presentation, featuring amazing explosions and great audio
- mostly well-written, well-acted story will compel you to keep playing
- various little why-didn't-someone-think-of-that-sooner features
Negative
- In some ways, it will be familiar to a fault to anyone who's played much GTA
- some noticeable bugs and glitches
- not much variety to the mission design
You begin play by determining your character's appearance, and you have what seems like a limitless number of options to choose from. There are presets for different ethnicities, but you can proceed to make your character look however you want. It seems gimmicky at first, but since your physical appearance--at least your clothes--do end up having some impact on gameplay, the sheer variety during character creation is impressive. The game starts with you nearly getting caught in the cross fire of a gang war. You're saved by Julius (voiced perfectly by Keith David), the charismatic leader of a racially diverse gang called the 3rd Street Saints, one of Stilwater's four biggest criminal groups. And he invites you to join up. The game's introductory cutscene has a couple of lines of painfully bad dialogue in it, suggesting that Saints Row will go on to bombard you with horrible clichés and an appalling fake attitude. But, somehow, somewhere, the story gets really good. Maybe it's the expressive characters and the excellent voice performances by the likes of Michael Clarke Duncan, David Carradine, and others; or maybe it's the choreography of the cutscenes and the quality of the dialogue. It's probably all of these combined. Saints Row isn't always clever or funny, and in the end, the story will leave you hanging. Even so, for its occasional misses, the quality of the game's writing and storytelling turns out to be one of the highlights.
Much like GTA's world, the world of Saints Row looks a lot more realistic than it really is. You can safely ignore all traffic laws, and even if you do start to commit wanton acts of unprovoked violence, there's little real consequence. This doesn't mean it isn't fun to stir up trouble, though, such as by holding up a liquor store or driving down a busy sidewalk. Getting into serious trouble takes a little work, as the cops won't come after you for speeding or running red lights or anything like that. In fact, they'll ignore you even if you jump on the hood of one of their squad cars with a shotgun in hand. It takes a fairly deliberate and violent act to draw the authorities' attention, and you also need to watch out for rival enemy gang members, who may come after you in increasing numbers should you start killing their own. This can make for some exciting pitched battles, when your gang, an enemy gang, and the cops are all having it out. If you've got some gang members with you, they'll shoot automatically while you drive around, and some sequences (predictably) put you in the gunner position while a computer-controlled character does the driving. You can even shoot and drive at the same time, though it's hard to concentrate on both steering and aiming.Games don't have to be different to be great. What makes Saints Row appealing straight off the bat is that, assuming you're familiar with the wildly successful GTA series, you'll know exactly what you're getting into from the moment you jack your first car in this game. And the experience must have been deliberately designed with this in mind. By playing with a few of GTA's storytelling and design conventions, and addressing a few of the gameplay issues we've come to expect as a necessary part of the GTA formula, Saints Row earns its own colors and makes for a welcome addition to just about any R-rated-movie-watching Xbox 360 owner's library.
Subject: Saints Row 
Fri Mar 07, 2008 1:31 pm
