Alan’s Blog

I felt like writing up my thoughts regarding Saints Row, now that I’d finished it. Note that this is not intended to be a review. I am not trying to persuade/dissuade you from playing the game. If you want a review - “It is an excellent game with a high production value. If you like the Action/Driving genre, check it out” - or go somewhere else :).

I am writing this in postmortem format. For the record: I was not involved in the development of this game at all, nor do I work for any of the companies involved in it’s release. I just wanted to run through what I liked/disliked in Saints Row from a gamers perspective. From a Professional/Game Development perspective, what works/doesn’t work interests me. I’m not trying to be scientific. I’m not trying to start a discussion. I just thought it could be interesting to write down some of the shit I end up rambling incoherently about for hours and hours. Ultimately my intended audience is me :).

I will use a lot of comparisons to others in the genre. For the purposes of comparison it would help if you had played at least GTA3, Vice City, San Andreas, and Crackdown.

What Worked

Garages
I loved the fact that cars in your garage were persistent and can be recalled at will. It removed any apprehension in using a customised or unique car in a mission (where, in all likelihood, it would be abandoned – by choice or otherwise). I’m not entirely sure I liked the “select car from list” selection system (also used in Crackdown) as opposed to an actual Garage where you park cars (even though the latter limits the number of cars that could be stored in a Garage).

A good example from my play history is in GTA3, when you are given the Spoiler ▶Bullet-Proof Patriot during the Ray missions. The first thing I did was drive it back to my Garage and saved the game. The first time through the game, I then drove my new acquisition around for a while, and ultimately lost it doing something stupid. So I reloaded my game and then didn’t want to use it on a mission for fear of flipping the vehicle, or doing anything else that would give it an untimely demise.

Similarly, in San Andreas where you can customise your vehicles, I found I would find something I like, customise it, park it in a garage and save. The only time I would take my ‘custom’ ride out would be if I had no intention of saving. In Saints Row, even one-of-a-kind cars got used, knowing that ultimately money could be used to recover it if necessary.

As a side note, I liked that you could buy cars ‘legitimately’ in the game too, rather than being forced to acquire vehicles by nefarious means. While, in the game world, it doesn’t really make much difference how you got the car; it added to the sense of ‘ownership’ making the car appear to have more value. In the GTA games most cars had little value, which I found led to more reckless driving than was otherwise called for :). Obviously the perceived value being proportionate to the difficulty to acquire said vehicle, whether the metric is cost, distance or difficulty, it will ultimately be measured in time to acquire - it was just nice having an alternative means of acquisition.

Mission Failure/Death/Busted
Allowing you to restart a failed mission was a nice touch. I don’t necessarily think the GTA way of doing things is bad either. It was just something I appreciated while playing. I found that losing the mission was usually annoying enough, having to make my way back to the mission start point would have much worse.

Vice City tried to do something similar (the Taxi that would take you back to the mission start), but as you would usually need to pick up more weapons/armour anyway, it didn’t really make much difference.

Saints Row’s weapon persistence was also nice, there were enough things to keep track of without having to get more weapons when you died or were arrested. I imagine this was done because the primary way to get most weapons is by either buying them or picking them up from the recently deceased. The cost of weapons was also quite high, so losing them regularly could make the game impossible to finish. San Andreas did something similar if you’d finished 100% with a couple of the girlfriends (the nurse and the cop).

Miscellaneous
Here are some smaller aspects of the game I felt deserved mention, but where I didn’t have enough to say to warrant their own section.

Audio
The games audio was quite nice. In the GTA games there are basically two ‘audio worlds’; 1) when you are in a car, and 2) when you are on foot. The world is deathly silent when you’re on foot, so you naturally prefer to be in a car where you can listen to music whilst playing. In Saints Row, they added ‘ambient radio’, so you can hear certain car radio’s whilst they drive around. I felt this ‘joined’ the two worlds finally, radio stations finally having persistence outside the car. Very nicely done.

Activities
The variety of sub missions (Activities) in Saints Row is really excellent. It adds a lot to the world when there are many things to do and I like that it is not all ‘Crazy Taxi’ game-play. I quite liked Insurance Fraud and Mayhem.

What Wasn’t So Good

Respect
Having Respect as a game-play metric on the main story line became frustrating. If you wanted to concentrate on finishing the main story, you couldn’t - you are forced to do side missions on a regular basis. At times it felt like it’s sole purpose was to artificially increase the length of the story.

I can understand the reason for it being there. It makes the end user experience more aspects of the game, rather than running through the story. It also fit with the story quite well in the ‘new guy working up trust and respect within the gang’ kind of aspect. The main problem was doing side missions started to feel like a chore. “No! No more story for you until you’ve done your errands”.

If you’re trying to promote open ended ‘you choose’ game-play style, then a valid style should be “fuck the side missions, I want to finish the story”. Respect could have been used instead to unlock new weapons/features of the game if it were to be included at all. San Andreas used Respect to gauge how many cronies you could command.

In the same concept, Stronghold missions should have just been integrated into the main story arc; as they were a requirement to get the last mission for each gang anyway. As I’d been playing for the story anyway, I’d ignored them and had just decided that the story for each gang ended pretty weak. That is, until I checked the strategy guide and found out that I was missing 3 missions because I hadn’t finished the Stronghold missions.

Mission Cohesion
This is a fairly mild complaint, but it ties in with the last point on Respect. The missions regularly felt like I was ‘walking in on a conversation’. I think it was just in the way the cutscenes were done and I can’t really add anything useful comments to how they could have prevented it. In fact, I’m just going to stop this one here. I think it was probably required to allow you to do any mission in any order. Maybe more of a ’start’/intro to each gang arc would have worked? I don’t know. The problem wasn’t as apparent the further you got into each gangs story.

Radio Stations
It really depends on how you rate a ‘good radio station’ overall. The radio stations were unobtrusive, they blended into the background well which could be a positive I guess. I felt they lacked personality. The song choices were … different … not bad per-se – just different. Like going through someone else’s CD collection, rather than themed radio stations. Part of it could be different tastes in music. I mean, I did like some of the songs, so it wasn’t that I just hated all the music. I don’t like every song on the San Andreas or Vice City stations, but I could listen to practically any one of them.

Some of the material was really funny, others it felt like it was trying too hard to be funny. The talk radio station was quite good, but far too short (got repetitive quite quickly). Overall I guess the best way to sum up is it felt like listening to AM radio stations as a kid. Kind of foreign.

Actually, I just looked through the track listing. Apart from the classical station, I’d heard of maybe 6 or 7 artists in the Rock station, and a couple out of the Rap station. So lets call that the main part of the problem and leave it at that :).

Ending
I’m going to complain about the ending now, I’ll spoiler tag the whole thing.

Spoiler ▶While it was nice to not end up killing everyone and taking over the gang, it felt like there should have been a final mission. This is a fairly minor complaint, really. There were a couple of points in the story where I had thought things were a little ‘odd’ with the 3^rd Street Saints and had expected some kind of ‘betrayal’ within the gang. That could be why I was expecting more. Regardless, it did feel like they left us hanging a bit. Perhaps the feeling of the ending is different depending on which gang you finished with. I did Los Carnales last and perhaps I wasn’t cognisant that this was ‘the end’ but the final cutscene made the game feel more like a TV show rather than a movie. I almost expected a group laugh and a wink towards camera.