We all have those games that we miss the first time around. With the busy release schedule of modern gaming, no one has time to play everything. That is why we at WingDamage present to you “Fashionably Late Reviews“. This is our series on games from the current generation of consoles that we may have missed on their initial release, but have gone back to experience now.

Ever since Grand Theft Auto 3, people have been trying to outdo the precedents established by Rockstar. They have had to go bigger and more over-the-top crazy with each game to keep things interesting. With GTA4, Rockstar tried to scale things back and make it a little more serious.

Thank goodness Volition didn’t do the same thing. 2008′s Saints Row 2 continues the tradition of open world games that provide a huge, goofy action experience where the world is your playground; a playground filled with fast cars, giant explosions, and rival gangs to take down. It marks the first time I have stuck with an open world game long enough to finish its story mode.

When I first booted up the game, I was very happy to see that Saints Row 2 lets you create your own character to play with in its virtual sandbox. It makes so much sense, yet it is one of the only open world games to have this feature.

The character creator is one of the best I’ve seen in any game to date. If you choose, you can make someone that looks like she/he belongs in the Saints gang. If you are like me, you have a little more fun with it. I started with an obese redhead. The subsequent tough talking he did was made all the more hilarious when it would show closeups of his misshapen face.

To make it even better, you aren’t stuck with the character you created at the start, since you can always hit up the in-game plastic surgeon to tweak or completely change your character. I played Saints Row 2 off and on over the course of several months, and changed my character several times. At one point, my character was an Asian woman. For the entire second half through to the end, I based him off of Jason Lee in “My Name is Earl“.

What I like about Saints Row 2 is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is a tale of rival gangs, corrupt corporations, and cops being bought off left and right by the highest bidder. But the guys that made it realized that many players just want to run around the city, steal cars, buy new clothes and weapons for their character, and cause as much destruction as possible. On that front, there is plenty to have fun with.

The actual mission structure works in the standard way of most open world games. There are points on the map that trigger quests that deal with a given story line. You can go after the three rival gangs in any order. You don’t even have to focus on one at a time. Unlike most open world games, the entire city is unlocked right from the start.

Most of the missions have pretty generous checkpoints. This is something that was hugely lacking in every open world game I had played up until Saints Row 2. You should never have to start completely over when you just spent five minutes driving across town for the second part of a quest. That is just bad design.

The drawback to the mission structure is that you have to build up your rep to take new missions. At the start of the game, this can take a while.

Rep is gained by doing stunts in cars (driving in the wrong lane, narrowly missing other cars, etc.) or much more quickly by playing the games many “activities”. Activities are mini side-missions that you can take at any time. Each of these has six levels of difficulty, which will give you more money and more rep the higher up you get into them. They also unlock permanent bonuses for your character.

For example, if you compete in the Fight Club activity, you can permanently increase your melee damage. If you beat the destruction derby, you not only get to keep the cars you used, but you also get discounts from the mechanics. There are also races, crowd control (keeping fans from rushing celebrities as they walk the red carpet), and chop shop lists (specific cars to steal and return to the chop shop) to name a few.

As you buy new clothes, cars, and bling for yourself, you will also increase your style. This gives you extra rep when completing activities. This makes filling your rep meter to go to the next main story mission a lot quicker.

The city of Stilwater is broken up into forty-five territories, which are owned by the various gangs. As you complete missions, you will take over a section of the city. All of the businesses within that section can then be purchased. The territories and businesses you own payout protection money on a daily basis (the in-game clock being approximately one hour for every minute played). Because of this mechanic, you may be extremely poor when you first start playing, but by the end you will have too much money to know what to do with. I had a lot of fun just running around buying up everything in Stilwater. When the character would randomly yell “I own this town!” I would mentally add “No, seriously. I just bought out this entire neighborhood. You damn kids get off my lawn!”

Like all open world games, Saints Row 2 has its bugs. Occasionally, I would see a random pedestrian stuck up to their waist in the concrete. Sometimes, especially with my overweight character, certain clothing pieces would clip through other parts of my character and the environment. There were also times when I would get stuck on a story mission and want to give up. But there was something about how much fun it was just to mess around in Stilwater that kept me coming back.

Saints Row 2 has been out for a couple of years now, and Saints Row 3 has been announced (one of the reasons I wanted to finally finish this game). If you have even a passing interest in open world games, it is an easy recommendation to make, especially now that it’s only a $20 game. You can even play the entire game co-op with a friend and their own horrible abomination of a character.

Tags: Fashionably Late Reviews, open world games, PC, ps3, Saints Row, Saints Row 2, sandbox game, THQ, Volition, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.