Saint’s Row Review

Saint’s Row Review
Written by Anchorman Mr. Mazda

Platform: Xbox 360 Genre: Action-Adventure Publisher: THQ Learning Curve: About an hour

Welcome to Stillwater, a city of gang activity and corrupt officials. With the city under near destruction, you must join the 3rd Street Saints and take control of Stillwater before you become another victim of the already increasing death toll. With a variety of missions and activities, you will rise up against the other gangs, take over the city and become the most notorious gangster the world has ever seen. Throughout the game you will complete activities and missions to earn money and the respect of other members of your gang as they help you along the way.

Saints Row has been set-out extremely well. The Game Menus and Modes truly enforce the “Gangster” feel that the game is trying to communicate. The game includes a Character Sculpting Interface that allows you to manually create your player, using either preset setting or tweaking almost every part of your character, from hair to body weight. The game is composed of three rival gangs:

Vice Kings (Yellow)
Westside Rollerz (Blue)
Los Carnales (Red)
Will the Fourth be The 3rd Street Saints?

It is up to you to take over their territory, one at a time until Stillwater is yours.

!WARNING: VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED!

Just as with any gang you must be canonized (jumped) to be in the crew.

In-game graphics are impressive, but are not truly, “perfect”. The details on the world map, surroundings, car details and accessories and characters are clear and impressive but there is definitely room for improvement. The cut-scenes, as interesting as they are, definitely lack detail as you can see areas such as fingers of the characters being “square” and “blockish”. Overall however, I do believe that this game does have graphics suitable to the Xbox 360 and in no way compromises the enjoyment of the game. I would like to see in the sequel, major improvements to the graphics in the cut-scenes, and some minor improvements to the in-game graphics.

The music of Saints Row varies in genre to appeal to all types of players. Despite the fact that some of the artists are not “well-known” they do enforce to “thug” theme that the game is about. To make the music even more interactive, game developers have programmed a series of Radio Stations, each which one plays a specific genre so that players listen to what they like. To further improve the music of this game, gamers are able to “purchase” in-game music to make their own custom music playlist. Sound effects (especially guns and cars) are not perfectly realistic, but they are decent enough. Voices of characters and civilians in the game have responses which react to your actions around them. So when you attack a bystander, they will cuss and curse you back. Overall, the music and sound in Saints Row, is great and definitely improves the feel when playing.

As for gameplay, Saints Row has plenty of it. Offline Single Player offers gamers hours and hours of activities and missions. With 11 different activity types, each with three locations and eight levels of difficulty at each, this alone provides a fun, but challenging experience. Once you have completed all the activities, there are over 30 missions to complete, which involve you in gang activity against the city’s most ruthless gangsters. However, what makes this even better is the freedom to complete any aspect of the game, whenever you like. So, when you are bored with one activity or mission, simply head to the next. Hopefully, in the next series, there will be more activities and more missions to complete.

You can hit up the clubs with your homies and start fights if you’d like.

Unfortunately, the line “Gameplay may change during online play” applies heavily to this game. Unlike the great campaign mode, online can be at times, extremely disappointing. Despite the different game modes, online gamers are known to be extremely racists and discriminative. In addition, due to poor online development, numerous glitches have resulted in more than 10 cheats which allow gamers to unfairly win game matches, both in player and ranked games. Searching for players is also a time consuming effort. On the plus side though, you are able to create your own gang and recruit gamers on your Friends List to join.

With what will hopefully be the start of an awesome series, Saints Row right now, has poor replay value. The offline mode may offer a long and challenging campaign, but online mode has not enough game types to try out and stick to, and due to the large amount of cheaters, there is not real bonus to try and reach the top of the Online Leaderboards. Overall, the replay value of Saints Row is average, with offline being great, but offline being poor.

You can acquire homies like this fatso and take them with you into battle.

In conclusion, I personally believe that this is an absolutely great game, if not both offline and online, then definitely offline. With a list of Achievements that test the skill of both offline and online play, I recommend that you buy this game, as it will definitely make a nice addition to your game library.