I’ve seen many shameless rip-offs, but this game is not just a rip-off. Not only has Volition stolen the concept from Rockstar, everything else looks almost exactly the same. But who cares? Are there developers that make original and ground braking games? There are, a few. As for the rest of them, they all steal elements from one and other. There isn’t anything I can blame Voltion of. The game is faithful to the GTA games, but does it also match its gameplay?

Saints Row is not a rip-off of Grand Theft Auto by any means. The sandbox concept has already been used by a number of developers, and I’m not even sure whether Rockstar “invented” this genre. After all, Driver was the first free-roaming 3d racing game. With GTA III, Rockstar combined free-roaming driving with everything else a decent action game contains. Rockstar gave people a giant city to play with. The game didn’t force players to do anything at all. Rockstar did a great job by putting all these elements in one game. But was the game entirely ground braking on every level? Obviously not.

Fudge tha police coming straight from the underground…

But back to Saints Row. In Saints Row, you play a gangster, who joins the 3rd Saints. This gang competes with three other gangs over the control of the city of Stillwater. There is a Latino gang, a gang that is obessed with cars, an African-American gang that specializes in music and prostitution and of course your gang, a racially diverse one. Your gang must gain control over every inch of territory by competing with the other gangs. Once Stillwater is won, your mission is completed. Obviously, the other gangs prevent you from doing this.

Although the gangs are different from each other, the city isn’t very diverse. There are minor differences, but it’s not that the Latino’s territory is significantly different from yours. That’s a thing I liked about Vice City, the different areas. The Hispanic area is different from the beach area. Different cars, different architecture etc,.

In the begining of the game, you have to create a character. There are dozens options to choose from. You can be either an African-American, a Caucasian or an Asian. Furthermore, you can modify almost every part of the body. This also goes for the multiplayer. I’ve seen a bunch of different characters, which is really cool. You’re also free in how you dress up your character. Again, there are a bunch of different garments, chains, tatoos, everything. This works, especially in the multiplayer. Online gangs can identify themselves by wearing the same clothes. A nicely done feature.

She’s on fire, and she burns through the night
At the speed of light, She’s on fire,… lol.. I’m on fire.

The missions are great fun, but not any different from other action games. Steal a load of drugs, capture enemy territory, compete other gangs in a race or in a fight. The tasks feel mostly right, not too hard not too easy. However, there are fewer missions than in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas or Grand Theft Auto Vice City, which is why you’re done with the single player in an hour of 10. There are also activities, which give you all kinds of unlocks. Too bad you won’t get any unlocks that add up to the gameplay. A new chain, a garment, a new paint job for your car. Nice, but it’s not that the game gets more fun or you can beat something without clearing the activity. It would be more interesting if an unlock gave you access to a new mission. I wasn’t all that interested in finishing all the remaining activities after completing the main story line.
You do unlock Xbox 360 achievements, and that’s the only reason why I wanted to beat every activity in town. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it. There are various activities: racing missions, insurance fraud, mayhem, escort service. There are three of each of them and they’re all the same, which is why it became boring on some point.

Volition put a lot of different vehicles in the game, though there are only cars. There are many different cars, but a plane, or a motorcycle would have been nice as well. The devoloper admitted that due to a lack of time, they excluded other vehicles.

There are several radio stations that air nice songs which you’ve never heard of. Unlike Rockstar, Volition included mostly unkown bands and artists. The music is fine, I liked most of it, though the tracks aren’t as flashy as in the GTA games.

Hand to hand combat my ass, drive-by pwnage, mulaghaka!

What does Saints Row have, what everyone wanted from the GTA games? That’s right a multiplayer. There is a multiplayer in Saints Row, which disappoints on some level, but is entertaining though.
There is a death match mode, a capture flag variant which is called “Big ass chain”, “protect the pimp” in which one team must guide the pimp to the exit point, while the assassins must prevent him from doing so, there are team based modes, and the most intersting one: “Blinged Out Ride”. This game type involving cars, lets you compete other players by pimping you car. You earn money by killing other players, you use the money to pimp your car. The first team that reaches level 4, can win by showing it off. The other team can prevent them fron winning the game by destroying the car.
This mode proved to be very entertaining. Players must work together in order to win.
But now my biggest problem with the game, which limits the amount of time you are going to spend with the game.
There are too few maps. Each mode has only three maps. I was really hoping that the players would get the chance to create maps. And why not? The maps from the multiplayer were taken from the single player map. Now we have to wait and let Volition do the job. It’s a shame that they charge you for every new map they release. The game would have been much more interesting if players could make their own maps and use them in the online multiplayer. Now players are limited to just a few maps.

Closing comments

Saints Row is not orginal but is a blast to play. The singe player lasts 20-30 hours, and when you’ve beaten the game, there is a fun multiplayer which will keep you busy for many months. However, if the players were able to create their own maps for the multiplayer, the game would have been much better.

Score: 8

After the success of GTA and GTA 2, the makers probably thought “let’s make it 3D”, a good decision, if you ask me, because this decision made a masterpiece that has made the GTA series a large success.
The nice thing about GTA is that you can walk around freely, causing destruction in a city in a legal way, using your mouse and keyboard. I’ll try to explain why the game is still worth playing and why it’s better than its sequels in some ways.

Always interesting, the box

Mafia game
Something that I especially like about the game, is that it’s a real mafia game that really has the ambience of a crime game (dark, unhappy and serious). This realism is the best in the beginning of the game, you work for the semi-Italian bunch of guys, and the missions are very mob like, blowing people in cars, hiding the evidence of a murder, kill people who didn’t pay their protection money etc. But the more missions you have played, the more Hollywood like they become (if they weren’t already).
When you play the missions, and you watch the cutscenes, you’ll notice that there is a story in the game, that pushes you to complete the game. A weak point of the game is that you sometimes get bosses who don’t fit in the main story line and that sometimes the missions don’t have a place in the story.
A strong point of the game is that most missions are very realistic, especially at the beginning of the game, and that the missions become very hard to pass near the end of the game. I think that the last mission of the game can’t be cleared without using cheats, it’s really hard. The sequels lack of this difficulty. Vice City and San Andreas actually have last missions that you can easily beat.

Another thing that is nice to notice about this game, is that this GTA 3 is the last GTA game where you can find elements of GTA and GTA 2. You get messages on a “Samurai”, money for the chaos that you’ve created and you can even watch your character in a third person perspective. Also, the character doesn’t talk, only shoots, and it’s a very serious game.

I’ve never seen an ambulance doing this…

Hollywood
The game is, next to mafia like, also very Hollywood like: giant explosions, Hollywood car chases and of course jumps and stunts with your car (there is even a jump in it that looks like the car-stunt in the James Bond film “The man with the Golden Gun”).
This Hollywood elements make the game impressive, and it even fits the game situation.

b00m

Violent interaction
Of course, one of the things that made GTA such a success is the possibility to kill people a digital way using a lot of different weapons. The blood and the popping citizens aren’t very realistic, but it gives the game a bloody effect.
It’s a pity that there are missing a couple of things in this game, but they are added to the sequels, like jumping out of the car while driving, swimming (not too hard, isn’t it?), shooting people out of cars, a realistic fighting system (with different accuracy for different guns), and maybe they must have added a crouching possibility, very helpfull if your being attacked. Maybe this could’ve helped you through the last mission. These are a few of the things I missed in GTA 3.

The chaos in GTA 3 can be very serious and can cause nice chases, like a guy in a sports car chased by the army in tanks, or something like it. The problem of the police is the AI, the chance that they get you is very little, and they don’t catch you, they kill you, not a very police-like way to work… Also the “dangerous” helicopters are easy to fool, this can make the chases very irritating and boring.

The weapons in the game are realistic most of the time, but there aren’t much though. Also the weapons aren’t overpowered like you see in some games, but it’s a pity that you can’t hide behind walls or something like it, it would have made the shooting a lot nicer.

Drive along? No I’ll drive myself

Auto?
Yes, GTA stands for Grand Theft Auto, it is “Grand”, much of “Theft”, but not so much “Auto”. There are of course a nice number of cars that you can “borrow” but I expected some more racing in the game. There is one phone with racing elements in it and some other race missions. But not many… and your fellow racers always drive exactly the same way, that’s why they smash up to other cars and do other weird tricks, making them lose in the end.
There are many different things that you can “borrow” from limo’s to ugly cars to racing cars to ice cream cars.
The collisions look realistic, well, the cars are maybe a little bit too strong, but all right.
It’s a pity they stick to “Auto” because there are only 3 other ways of transport in the form of a boat, no motors, bikes, helicopters or flying airplanes.
Luckily you can do a lot with the cars, like unique jumps, which are most of the time spectacular, but you must find a map on the net to find them all, they are well hidden.
If you’ve done all unique jumps, you can do base jumping with your car, or fly with a tank, of course with a code.

woehoe, shooting of a roof

Conclusion
A very good game that looks fine, even these days, with the right configuration. Also the music is good, nice tracks from the radio stations, you can even add your own music if you don’t like them. The free-roaming isn’t boring quick, but they could gave added some more areas, missions and sub-missions.

Sound: excellent, if the music bores you, you can switch it off. The sound effects are good, only the shots sound a bit weird…
Graphics: Still look good, nice 3D, sometimes a frame drop or large pixels, but mostly it is smooth. Only the explosions look very fake, but I don’t know of games in which they look like real…
Gameplay: It plays very well, smooth controlling, only the drowning is irritating, but the game reacts good on your commandos, and you want to play it till the end.
Lifetime: Long, very long. You can be happy with the missions for a long time, and you’ll be playing the game much longer if you want to get the 100%.; After that, you’ve got nothing more to do…. You’ll throw the game in the trash bin, because you can’t do anything else than causing mayhem and driving around because of the lack of submissions.

Score: 9