I should start this by saying I haven’t really played this game to a point where I would feel comfortable reviewing it properly, so consider these opening impressions. However, as all I have been playing lately is endless games of Lumines Live!, and Gears of War co-op on insane, this is what I have for you.

Saints Row has the luxury of being the first Grand Theft Auto knockoff out on the next generation. The game places your create-a-character in a generic-ish American city called Stilwater and charges your multiracial gang with the task of subverting various other gangs that are made of various ethnic stereotypes.

The game is frighteningly derivative of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. There have been Grand Theft Auto clones for a while now, such as True Crime: Streets of LA, but they all generally had their own angle on the formula, even if they sucked. This game literally rips the feature list of the 2004 title right down to buying clothes at stores and changing your haircut, though the game does only feature one city. It does add or change a few things, like being able to aim 360 degrees when shooting out of a vehicle, and removing the auto-targeting system in favor of a first-person shooter style right analog aiming system.

The game is also frighteningly generic in all aspects. The characters in the game look like they were made out of Poser models. (Poser is an easy to use 3D model posing program with famously bad stock artwork.) The game’s city and buildings are generally the same way. There’s just no sense of art direction or style present at all. San Andreas might not have had a gung-ho, omnipresent art style that jumps out at you, but it generally has a feeling of consistency that differentiates the three cities and the countryside, while still having an overall unified feel to it.

The game’s story, though I did not get very far, seemed to be similar to the Los Santos section of San Andreas. You have to take over the city with your gang buddies. The characters I saw were generic and bland, though the game sports an impressive array of voice actors vocalizing this bland story-line. Should’ve dropped the name actors and hired some artists.

Despite this laundry list of complaints, Saints Row is actually a pretty fun game, in a bad movie sort of a way. It’s derivative, but it looks nice, has no frame rate issues, and is fun to play for an afternoon if you’re ready to make fun of it. The best thing about it, at least in my brief experience, was the hilariously awful ragdoll physics on the pedestrian models. It’s hilarious when you can hit an old woman with your stolen VW Bug and she cartwheels 10 feet into the air and bounces off a streetlight.

Saints Row is a rental at best, or one of those games you pick up on clearance for $10 or so. Of note is the game’s omnipresent bugs, none of which are really gamebreaking, but still hilarious in that same bad movie way. Google “Buggy Saints Row” and watch the video.

A quick word about the Xbox 360 game Dead Rising. The idea of taking on a mall full of zombies with whatever I can find there is appealing. Having 800 zombies on-screen at once is fantastic. The game essentially being unplayable on a regular standard definition television because the text is to small to read on anything lower than 720p. Not cool, Capcom, not cool. In fact, I feel pretty damn ripped off. Maybe one day, when I’m cool enough to have an HDTV, I can actually play this game for more than just messing around with zombies and ignoring the missions until I die.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under games, impressions.