Saints Row 2 is a sandbox crime game. It is set in the fictional city of Stillwater and focuses on the crime gang known as the Third Street Saints, with the player taking the role of their leader. The game is similar to the GTA (Grand Theft Auto) series in terms of game play and setting. The major difference between these games is that Saints row 2 is in many ways vastly superior to the GTA series (insert link to hatemail address here).

One of SR2s main distinguishing features is character customisation. A lot of games feature some character customisation (MMORPGs are a good example). SR2 offers a lot more freedom to personalise your character. This includes:
Gender
o Male or Female
Ethnicity
o Skin colour
Body shape
o Fat, thin, muscular
Facial appearance
o Detailed shape of every part of the face
Hair colour and style
o A list of hair styles and colours
Movement style
o Walking style, interactions and fighting style
Voice
o There are three voices available for each gender

The story follows on from the first game with the player waking up in a prison hospital after being caught in a large explosion. The player then immediately escapes from prison and starts to rebuild their gang. The main story mission consists of rebuilding your gang and destroying the other gangs that have taken over since the first game. The characters are mostly new with a few returning characters from the first game (Johnny Gat ect.). All of the characters are well written and add to the depth of the story, although a lot of it is comedy based.

There are three rival gangs in SR2. The Brotherhood, The Sons of Samedi and the Ronin.

The brotherhood are a gang consisting of guys in red leather jackets with lots of tattoos, driving around in trucks and beating people up with sledge hammers.

The Sons of Samedi are a Caribbean style gang with a strong connection to voodoo. Their main income is from drug dealing.

The Ronin are a Japanese biker gang. They can usually be found around the city on bikes or in sports cars or disposing of their enemies with samurai swords.
The other enemy of the Saints is the Ultor Corporation. Ultor started out as a clothing business but now owns most of the city and is in the process of regenerating it, specifically by wiping out all the gangs.

The story missions are not the only activities in the game. There are also a large number of interesting side missions and activities. This is another area where SR2 is better than GTA. GTA features activities such as sitting in your house watching tv while SR2 includes car surfing, base jumping, assassinations, driving around on a quad bike in a flame suit and attacking strippers while dressed as a police officer and being filmed for tv.

The games combat system is well designed and incorporates a large number of ways to take down an opponent. In hand to hand combat getting three successful strikes allows the player to perform a special move. This is the same when using most melee weapons. When using smaller fire arms using a close range melee attack often results in a "nut shot" (basically kicking your enemy in the balls). There is a wide range of weapons available, including a rocket launcher, flame thrower, samurai sword, .44 magnum and a stun gun.

The driving controls in SR2 are well designed and can be easily customised. There is a great variety of cars and other vehicles most of which can be fully customised, including adding hydraulics, reinforcing the frame, changing the colours and look and adding knee cappers (spinning spikes that protrude from the centre of the wheels and are good for deflating other peoples tires). Aircraft such as helicopters and aeroplanes are also available.

The game is not without problems, however. The menus still feel like they are designed for a games console because of not being able to use the mouse. This can be very frustrating, especially during character customisation when trying to use the slider bars. It is also not possible to drop weapons. This does not sound like a major problem at first but if, like me, you hate carrying weapons you don't use it means that you have to spend several minutes unloading on a wall to unclog your weapon menu.

Another problem I have with the game is its system requirements. I can understand that better graphics and physics require more processing power, but I think it should be possible to lower the graphics enough to play it on a laptop and still get more than ten frames per second while driving. As I do all my gaming on a laptop at the moment I at first thought that it was just because of that, however after researching it further I found that it doesn't play well even on an expensive gaming PC. This is probably because it was converted from the console version badly.

The poor conversion also causes several other problems. The driving AI sometimes feels slow and clumsy and both enemies and allies can often be found getting stuck behind car doors.

Conclusion:

Overall the game is well designed with agreeable story telling and many amusing activities.
However due to bad PC conversion it suffers from poor AI, inadequate frame rates and dodgy graphics I would not recomend SR2 to anyone without a good deal of patience.