Saints Row Will Do Until April 29th.

I've had intermittent internet connectivity this week, which has made me feel very useless, isolated and bored. It's also put a slight kibosh on my renewed committment to keeping this blog alive.

If there's an upswing to this sad tale, it's that I've had some extra hours to sink into my latest bargain bin obsession, Saints Row. Being quite late to the party, I won't delve into too much detail about this game as I'm sure many of you have long since played it out and shelved it alongside your copies of Oblivion, GRAW and anything 2006.

It took me a good 4 or 5 hours of play time before Saints Row got its hooks into me. As eager as I was to enjoy some open-world action before the release of Grand Theft Auto 4, SR just felt so derivative and dinky, for lack of a better word. Things lacked oomph, whether you were driving a car, shooting a gun or smacking a pedestrian upside the skull with a crowbar. I felt like I was controlling a toy man in a toy world, which really took away from the immersive open-world feeling that these games typically aim for. The lackluster graphics don't help either. There's no doubt that SR looks better than all the last-gen GTA games, but that's about it. It only looks good in comparison to these games, but as a current-gen title the quality is baseline at best, with frequent texture pop-up, vanishing objects, poor draw distance and merely average sound design.

But wait for it. Despite all of these grumblings, I've finally managed to get into the game's groove and enjoy myself to the point where I'm logging in some late hours after work playing through the various story missions. I love the map and navigation system. It's not perfect but it's a tremendous improvement over the cumbersome map provided by the likes of Vice City or San Andreas. The writing and mission design is also decent. While quite as clever as the GTA games, I am finding the dialogue to be reasonable entertaining. Missions seem to be a lot more focused and forgiving but you also lack the quirky mini-games that are a hallmark of the GTA series.

Can I stop comparing this game to GTA? Hardly. SR is such an unabashed clone it would be insane not to mention GTA with every breath that I utter Saints Row. For better or for worse, it's a shameless copy but also a very competent and entertaining one. It's got the content, style and design refinements that let it stand alone and I for one will be playing as much of it as I can before the juggernaught lands in 10 days... and counting!



And here is the rest of it.