Saint's Row

[Spitfire]

A long time ago I bought the first Saint's Row game and for some reason after a few missions it ended up collecting dust on my shelf. Recently I bought SR 2 and I just completed it last night. Wanting some new material I decided to play though the first game and see it through to the end. There's several references to the first game in it so I figured beating it would help me to enjoy the story of the 2nd game more.

Now usually going backwards is hard with games because the 2nd game takes things that were annoying or unbearable about the first game and fix them. I figured it can't be too much different. Sadly I was wrong, very very wrong.

To start the activities are insanely annoying and no where near as fun as they are in the sequel. There's one where you have to hijack cars from people that becomes a trial in patience. The person your chasing has the reaction time of Jesus and can dodge every obstacle they come across with precision timing forcing you to crash several times. If that's not annoying enough most of the time you're after a rival gang members car and you have them chasing and shooting at you. That would be tolerable if everyone else in the city didn't drive like they were blind which doesn't help your cause at all. Also the only way to damage the car to slow it down is to shoot it so if you run out of bullets your screwed. Sometimes the game thinks it's funny to not register bullets hitting the car too so you can unload an entire clip into it with no effect. If that's not enough you have to be within a certain distance of the car at all times in order to keep the activity going. This is near impossible and really frustrating especially when it has a sliver of damage left before it stops. One time I just got lucky and a cop car ended up plowing into it.

Now you could say, "Well if they're annoying then don't do them.". I wish that were true but you have to do them in order to gain enough "respect" to continue on with the story missions.

I also tried the hitman activity which was really fun in SR 2. In this game it's amazing how they screwed it up. For one you have to use a certain weapon to kill the target so they could be standing right in front of me and I can't do anything about it till I have the right gun. Having the right gun wouldn't be an issue either if the game designers didn't decide to make guns cost 1,000 dollars or more a pop and no way to buy just ammo, something they added in SR 2 that was much needed. The gun thing isn't that bad though compared to the biggest flaw with it, and I really can't believe they screwed this up, the targets aren't in the area they're supposed to be 90% of the time. You have a better chance of randomly running into them then you do searching for them. I actually had to check an FAQ to find some of them, which in some cases were on the complete opposite side of the map they were supposed to be.

Another issue is the map GPS system. It's great in the 2nd game and the implement of the shortcut system was awesome. However in this game that's non-existent and when chasing someone it makes it super annoying. You could lose sight of someone and they take a turn down some alley you have no idea is there and lose them because the GPS tells you the long route instead of the shortest.

While on the subject of cars, for a game that's centered around the jacking of cars there sure isn't enough of them. Almost every mission I've started unless I brought a car of my own there's none to be found. Where I finally decided to say F this game was on a mission where I had to follow some guy. The first time I played it I ended up dieing because the game only gives me a 3 second warning, in the form of a beep, that I'm about to die and you die way to easily. It also thought it would be fun to make you restart missions from the beginning instead of having check points. Anyways the second time I played the mission there were no cars in sight. The car I was supposed to follow drove past me and it began the follow mission. Once it reached a certain distance it gave me a mission failed again.

Before that though I also tried some other stuff, like robbing stores, which was still fun. Though one of the things I absolutely hate is all the stores close. That's nice and realistic and all but when I need bullets it's very annoying. I decided to break into a store when it was closed and try that. For starters the cracking safe feature is extremely broken and I had to try six times to get it to work. After that I then had to grab a box and hike about ten minutes down the street to a pawn shop in order to unload the merchandise. While this is happening I had half the police force trying to shoot me. If I tried to enter a car I dropped the box and the shop was pretty far away.

This game is full of good ideas that they just screwed up with poor game design. I don't usually complain about games or stuff like this in general but this one really annoyed me and I felt like typing up some thoughts on it.

I don't know how many of you have played this game or SR 2 but what are you thoughts on it? I know it's my fault for going back and trying to play the first game after enjoying the 2nd one so much but I now remember why the first one collects dust on my shelf.

[raphael_is_cool]

I played the first one for a bit but just got fed up with it.

I didn't like how the controls felt and the car handling was kinda crazy. It was fun, like having a cop car crash into the back of you and the guys flying through their windscreen, but something about it felt off.

I think I did about three missions and then it bugged out on me and wouldn't finish one. I'd driven to the finish point and the women (I think I was rescuing hookers or something) got out the car but then stood there and nothing happened. After that I moved onto other games and forgot about it.

And while SR2 sounds fun I'm not convinced it'll control any differently and I have plenty of better or more promising games to play.

[Peanut]

I loved and beat the first Saint's Row without any kind of bugs or glitches. Loved the shooting and driving way more than any GTA game. SR2 IS a ton better, but I still felt Saint's Row was good for it's time. The problem with this generation of games is that sequels always end up being a vast improvement over the original, so going back to them never does anyone any good.

[Spitfire]

Yeah I wish I beat it first. I want to like it but I just can't.

After seeing the secret ending to the 2nd game I can pretty much figure out everything that happened. Makes me wonder how 3 will turn out if they plan on one.