The Saints Row franchise has unfortunately lived under the microscope as a one-off of the famed Grand Theft Auto series of games.  However, the comparison is unfair, because as we have come to find out, the games may use thugs as their anti-heroes, the two could not be more miles apart.  Saints Row 2 kicks up the mayhem and fun that it started off with in the first title, and adds so much more to the formula, making it one of the best titles I have played all year on the PC.

Saints Row 2 spoils the ending of the first game in the series, so if you have not finished it yet, just skip down to the next paragraph.  With that out of the way, you start off Saints Row 2 in a coma, laid out in a prison hospital bed.  You are awakened by a fellow inmate who wants to help you escape.  You get out only to find Stillwater has been remodeled in the corporate image of Ultor, and the Saints are once again, wiped off the map, with three new gangs moving in to divide up the territory.  Your new foes are The Brotherhood, The Ronin and The Sons of Samedi.

Right after your awakening from the prison bed, you are introduced to the character creator, which allows for some of the best detailing of a character in quite some time.  There are so many sliders here for you to tweak and set, that you could lose hours of gameplay just coming up with a character that suits your fancy.  And if you are coming to the party late like I have, you can find hundreds of celebrity guides out there to help you create your one and only Angelina Jolie gangster.  Saints Row 2 has taken the character creator a step further from the first game, allowing you to create a female character, which gets some of the NPC wise cracking about your “new look”.

While you have main story missions for each gang, Saints Row 2 pushes the concept of respect before you take on a mission.  You have a respect bar that you have to fill up to continue performing main story missions.  To fill up that bar, you will take on a bevy of side missions, ranging from Escorting hookers with clients to shooting septic waste over a section of the city.  There are dozens of different side missions, each with several levels of difficulty.  You can also find races scattered throughout the city, each using a unique style of racing vehicle. Boats and other vehicles have races you can compete in as well.  It’s these side missions that add so much of the charm and enjoyment to Saints Row 2.  You never feel bored, and if you finish the main quest, you still will have so much left over to play through.

After playing through about half of the main story missions, I started to realize that Saints Row 2 actually told a pretty decent story, which surprised me.  I had always heard that when it came to story, it was a backseat item when it came to the zany, over the top stuff that you could do.  But I have to say that the story that is told is pretty well done, along with a few crazy zingers and turns while you play.  It is not Shakespeare, but it is solid throughout the game.

The biggest strength of Saints Row 2 over its competitors is also its weakest link on the PC, and that is the co-op and multiplayer aspects of the game.  The entire campaign in Saints Row 2 can be played in full co-op.  While this sounds great in theory, there are two huge flaws that kill any chance of it being successful.  The first is the clunky system for getting people into a game, which ends up failing connection half the time.  The bigger issue is using a character from a progressed game and having a cheater join your world, thus marking your character as a cheat.  The instruction manual tells you that you can turn off cheats in the phone menu, but the command is lacking in the PC version, so you cannot turn cheats off, thereby ruining a character for you.  Team deathmatch and single player deathmatch along with other modes of play are here, but the lack of players makes getting a decent game of players a chore.

The biggest selling point for Saints Row 2 at the end of the day is that it entertains.  No matter what you do in the world, there are always endless options to try and perform.  Maybe you want to barnstorm, or take up the role of a fake cop in a COPS wannabe.  Sometimes you just need to shoot foul smelling sludge from a septic truck, or just sit back and cruise around.  Add in thousands of clothing and accessories that you can find to purchase in the world, and Saints Row 2 just provides a fun environment for anyone looking to have a great time with a game. 

All that entertainment does not happen flawlessly, however.  After two patches, Saints Row 2 can be horribly unstable at times.  Several times, I will be in the middle of a mission, only to have the game completely crap out and die.  At one point, I finished a mission and before I could save, the game spawned me inside of a building with no walls or doors.  I was stuck inside the building with no way out, which meant reloading and replaying the mission.  Also, little things like botched physics get in the way of playing some of the missions, like having a mission objective clip into the ground, so you can no longer attack the character.  Another patch or two would fix up a lot of these issues, but I have a feeling that Volition has moved on to Saints Row 3 already.

Saints Row 2 takes players on a widely entertaining ride from beginning to end.  After 30+ hours of gameplay, I have no problems with recommending this title for people on any of the three platforms it has shipped on.  Tons of character customizations, an abundance of side missions, and a compelling main storyline have me preaching to the masses that Saints Row 2 is one of the best games you can play on the PC so far this year.  Saints Row 2 gets 4 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out Saints Row 2 and other PC reviews at Test Freaks.