Saints Row

I'll preface my review by saying that I don't usually continue playing many games I find difficult and don't get much enjoyment out of throwing myself against a game until I beat it. However, the fact remains that Saints Row is one of the most difficult games I've ever played. Or, at least, it felt that way. It's not even because of what it's asking you to do, but how it asks you to do it. The game has terrible checkpointing with very few missions even having any checkpoints mid-mission. Most of the time, if you die, you have to start over from the beginning, including the often minutes-long ride from where the mission is picked up to where the mission takes place. During this travel time, NPCs will repeat what they have to say every time. "We only get one shot at this" has never been so frustrating. The side activities, which have to be done in order to gain Respect to play the story missions, don't have any sort of Restart option. If you die or fail or get busted, you have to go to the mission marker and start again.

Respect was one of the things I found most frustrating about the mission structure. You gain Respect by completing side activities or, as I found out later in the game, by collecting certain collectables. Your Respect is then spent by completing story missions or Strongholds, which also have to be completed to unlock more story missions. I got to a point where the side activities were just too difficult for me to complete the next level for any of them, so I set up my laptop next to me and collected 60 tag locations in order to have enough Respect to complete the game. It took hours and wasn't fun. While I'm talking about the mission structure, I'll let you in on a secret that I don't consider a spoiler and is not revealed anywhere in the game or any walkthrough I found: In order to unlock the last three missions, you have to clear all gang pushbacks.

Saints Row is a game from 2006 and controls like one. On the 360, where I played, A is accelerate, X is reverse, etc. Shooting is on the triggers, but the controls are something one has to adjust to when going back to games of this era. That in itself is not too bad, but when most of the missions consist of driving while shooting and the aiming while in cars is kind of broken-feeling, it doesn't make for a great time. Since A is accelerate and the right-stick is for aiming, you can't aim and accelerate at the same time. If you aim behind you, it takes a few seconds for the camera to revert back to a normal driving position, so you're driving blind for that time. It just doesn't feel right compared to today's games.

During some driving and shooting missions, mostly ones where you're not the one driving, it gives you unlimited ammo. Some of them don't. Some of them seem to supply ammo for you until you exit the mission and realise you've depleted your own supply. This is a problem because Saints Row is a game with survival horror levels of ammo. Never before in an open world game have I bought so much ammo. I know I wasn't getting much pistol ammo because I was using a different pistol to the gangs, but any other weapon doesn't really drop at all. There will be some snipers you don't own because the ammo is way more expensive and the shotguns are easy enough to get from police, but most of the time I was just buying the cheapest ammo I could get when it was on sale.

Sales are a cool part of the game, mostly because they're announced on the radio. Stefan is a great character and I liked a lot of the commercials and stuff on the radio. Talk radio is particularly important to me in a GTA-style game, since I don't like music, and this is where the radio disappointed me in this game. The Mike and David show on 108.0 WMD KBOOM FM felt very lacking. It's two people talking about what feels like one topic for what feels like not very much time. No guests, no variety, no nothing. Still, Mike and David's voices sound good and it feels a little like listening to a podcast, with their casual, conversational tones. They're very much characters, but they're not caricatures.

It's a shame I hated playing the game so much, because the story and the world are actually okay. I enjoyed the characters and the cutscenes were sometimes a lot of fun. It's just not worth playing through all of the challenges the game presents to get to that stuff. If you have to play the game for some reason, take this as a warning and remember that it only gets better from here. Take all the help you need to beat the game and enjoy what you can of it. If you don't feel the need to play this game and want something fun, skip it. Watch all the cutscenes online and jump straight into Saints Row 2. That game doesn't fix everything, but it feels so much more fun to play. This game should be played for historical value only, either to enjoy the Saints Row series for what is was and what it came from or to see for yourself just what open world games were like back in 2006.

Still, much more playable than GTA III.