Saints Row 2
Posted 02/27/2008 at 4:16pm
| by Ryan McCaffrey
The Xbox 360’s first two Augusts were mighty good to third-party publishers. Last year, 2K made a huge splash at the gaming box office with BioShock, while Capcom and THQ each boasted a million-seller in August 2006, with Dead Rising and Saints Row, respectively. Sequels to all three are pretty much inevitable, but the first confirmed release is this fall’s Saints Row 2.

Set once again in the fictional metropolis of Stilwater, Saints Row 2 takes place several years after the first game’s seemingly permanent conclusion. Though it looked like your character was reduced to fleshy confetti in a boat explosion, think again: it seems you were merely horribly disfigured and left for dead. Yay! It’s a convenient narrative justification for Saints 2’s character-creation system, whereby you’ll rebuild your gangster from scratch as if you required major reconstructive plastic surgery. Which, after being blown up, you did. And hey, you can even choose to come back female. Wow, just how badly burned were you?

The city itself has also changed, with new gang threats to battle, new buildings piercing the skyline, and new ways to get around, such as boats and other watercraft, motorcycles, planes, and helicopters. This urban sandboxer also promises better cop A.I., dual-wielding, and new weapons (such as laser-guided rocket launchers and satchel charges, to name a couple). You’ll also find fresh activities like car surfing (which was already an unofficial mini-game in Grand Theft Auto) and “testicular manslaughter” (we don’t need to explain this, do we?). And best of all, drop-in-anytime co-op play for the entire campaign. In addition, Volition is promising a new adversarial multiplayer mode that goes beyond mere deathmatch.

If nothing else, the release of Saints Row 2 should prove once and for all whether the success of Volition’s open-ended crime-fest was due more to timing (it shipped during the dry spell between GTA releases) than it being the 360’s first next-gen sandboxer. We’ve put our money on the quality of the original game, but with Saints 2 shipping just a few months after GTA IV this year (perhaps in August, if they’re a superstitious bunch?), its appeal will truly be put to the test.