Reviews// Saints Row 2

What's that? Is someone at the back muttering "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"? Well, okay, it ain't broke, but it's not altogether right. Having to earn Respect to move on to another missions when moments ago you've taken out several waves of gang members, not to mention the helicopters and boats that ferried them in, is absurd. The missions themselves deserve some bloody respect, dammit. So the whole 'Respect' thing is just a feeble mechanism to get you to carry out the activities or play dress-up with your player character. The cynic might even dare to suggest it's a just a means to add some low grade, water saturated filler to the pie, giving the impression that the missions and surrounding narrative play a much larger part of the game than, in fact, they do.

All this doesn't stop the activities being entertaining: collecting cars for the chop shop, playing driver for hookers and johns, riding around on blazing quad bikes - it's all good wholesome fun. It's just that I'd rather play them at my own leisure rather than being manhandled into them so I can move on to the next missions. I like to get through the meat of a game and then mop up the casual sideline stuff, but that's just the kind of guy I am - the kind who will scarf the beef first and leave the Yorkshire puds 'til last ... but there I go again with the food analogies. The point being that if you're happy being led around like a puppy on a leash, you're not going to grumble.

When the Respect is up, you can move on to a gang-related mission, which is really where the story lies. Let's make no bones - the plot is 100% disposable. This isn't necessarily a problem. After all, you have to consider how deep can a story about turf wars get without getting in the way of the turf war?

At it's most basic, the narrative introduces the gangs and Ultor corp, shows some interaction between them, and fleshes out of the key characters; painting a bit of a picture around the string of missions and so on. The bonus here is that Saints Row 2 doesn't throw its back trying to snatch GTA4's award for the 'Most Number of Gang Movie-Derived Script Elements Rammed into a Single Production'. Yes, that is an 'up side'.

The down side? Without fault, I wanted to just skip the preamble and get to the details of the mission. I never felt like I was going to miss some key plot development, just that my impatience might cause me to miss something important in the mission brief.

The mission objectives fall on the predictable side of the fence. They're certainly varied but they do tend to stem from a hand full of common themes, and there's a sense of deja vu that can't be avoided if you're a seasoned fan of this genre. One particular mission comes to mind where you must board a cargo ship, take out the enemy gang and commandeer the cargo.

The mission set-up is very reminiscent a similar mission in GTA IV. As the mission progressed the similarities continued - I couldn't tell if this was a joke, homage, unfortunate likeness or plain laziness.