Saints Row

Score 7/10

Saints Row is a new game from THQ and Violation with an ok-ish story, good amount of missions and plenty of Stillwater to roam around; this is the first proper game to try and rival Grand Theft Auto.

Difficulty: varies with different missions
Time spent: around 40 hours
The bottom line: GTA should start to worry
Platform: Xbox 360

As you start Saints Row you get to create your own character, something you can’t do in GTA, and you get to control what race you want, the choices are: Hispanic, African-American and Caucasian and Asian, what size of nose, mouth and eyes you want and your head shape, muscularity and fatness as well. This is pretty good as your character is more personalised to you instead of playing as one set character. Ok, the story in the game doesn’t change for the character you have created as you only can play as a male character and your character doesn’t talk at all.

The story starts off with you just being a total stranger, who gets accidently involved in a gang fight in the Saints Row neighbourhood, and he gets hit by a car and nearly shot in the head and this is where we meet Julius, the leader of the 3rd Street saints, and Troy a member of the saints. In the first mission you have to go to the Saints hideout in the abandoned church where you have to get canonised to join the Saints. The next few missions are where you have to “take back the Row” from the other three gangs.

Now the graphics are in basic terms, pretty crap compared to GTA’s graphics and most of the cars are rubbish as they look horrible and explode as soon as you get hit by a cop car but the game is filled with explosions and guns which is quite fun as you aggravate the police force and the FBI with an rocket propelled grenade and a AK-47. You get a decent amount of weapons in the game like the McManus Sniper rifle or the AS-12 riot shotgun which is a Spas-12 but with a different name. My favourite weapon in the game is the RPG as it does a phenomenal amount of damage but it costs a lot for ammo without cheats.

Overall Saints Row is a great game as it has took the fun that was destroyed in GTA and created a game out of it. It may not have the best story for a free roam gangster game but it has made up with it with a nice amount of explosions and bullets whizzing around the place as you take over Stillwater from the other three gangs.

Good:
It is the first real game to contend with Grand theft auto
Plenty of explosions to play with
One of the only games giving you RPG’s to annoy the US army with
Blowing up cars and innocent bystanders could never be more fun
Recharging health system
Good amount of weapons

Bad:
The graphics are crap as hell
The cars are crap
A lot of the missions are nearly impossible to do the first time round
The respect earning system can get confusing with the clothes buying and stuff
The game can get boring

As always - good review. However, there are two flaws that come into mind straight away. One, the choices for your character that you listed are not nationalities (a pretty stupid mistake, but nothing serious since it is clear what you meant). And two, something that is more important: the lack of elaborate explanations. Here's an example; you say that "the cars are crap", but why? What makes you say that, and what is it that makes them crap? Are they too hard to handle and it's a pain in the ass to drive them? Do they look terrible? Are they too easily destroyed? Whatever is the case, you should back up your statements & opinions with examples as often as you can. This is the same when you are writing an argument; if you can't support your point, it becomes invalid. Of course (as this is a review) you do not need to convince with evidence - you just need to say why it is so.

I hope you find this advice useful. Also, thanks for posting so many reviews in such a short period of time - you have proven to be a very valuable member of our not so active community. If we had more people who are as eager to write stuff as you are, this forum would be full of new posts each day.