A solid game that goes into its closet at night and assembles discarded bubblegum of GTA to form a shrine.
With Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas a faint but unforgetable memory, the XBOX 360 tries to tide gamers over before GTA's fourth installment of the epic saga. Watching commercials on TV for SAINTS ROW, it looked like more of a clone than Boba Fett and, condidering myself a GTA fanboy, tried to stay away. But, I eventually gave in, and am pretty glad I did. This particular title was awesome to begin with, and the story was engrossing to say the least. When I first played the game, I had immediately noticed that when you get into a taxi, you can't be a taxi driver. Nothing else worked that way either. You couldn't be a vigilante cop, you couldn't be a pimp, and you couldn't fly RC cars, drive boats, fly planes, or ride bikes. But then I saw that for things that this game didn't have, it made up for (if not entirely) with its own little side missions. It has things such as helping down-and-out pimps get their hos back, protecting drug dealers while they're dealing, and jumping into crowded streets for insurance fraud. It also has a lot of other things that GTA didn't have and should've. For one thing, the targeting on your map not only puts a little point there on the side of it, but gives you a path where to go with a bunch of dots on your map. It has more vehicles, made possible by the 360 engine, which are not only different, but some cars of the same make and model can have different types of wear on them. Sure in GTA you would sometimes find cars that were smashed up, but here some just have dirt on them, which is not just unchangeable graphical draw-in like in GTA, but can be removed at the nearest Pay-n-Spray - I mean Rim Job's car mechanic. But there are problems with the vehicles too. In this game, it seems like the cars don't get as damaged as they should. In GTA, every little fender bender would show some kind of dent in the car, but here, you could sometimes crash full speed into things and not find a noticeable scratch. What is good though is that much less things can be glitched through. Signs can not only be knocked over, but hit around as your car drives, not just immediately disappearing like in GTA. You can't just walk through the doors of your cars, and things like fire hydrants can be knocked over and carried with you too, which was possible in GTA, but here when the water shoots up, it (mostly) doesn't just glitch through the top of your car if you drive over it, but hits the bottom of it. The targeting system here with weapons is better, using a reticule in the middle of the screen instead of a color-changing auto-target. It's fun to rob stores and things like that, and also fun to heist them when the lights are off. In this game if you find a rival gang's tag on a wall, you can spray paint over it any time because you always have a can, though much of the spray painted walls are just regular old grapphiti, which gets annoying. In the start of the game it seems like the side missions would never get old, because there are so many on the map, but there are only about 5 actual types, and the abundance of them is just because there's different people to do the same exact missions for. It is also very annoying that you have to do these same missions over and over again to earn enough "respect" to do the next story mission or even take out srtongholds of gangs strewn about the city. If anything, taking over another gang's territory should earn you respect, not drain it. The character customization is much more expansive than in GTA, here besides the amount of clothes to choose from, you are able to choose what your character's face looks like. I also like the rag doll physics for characters that are dead. It makes them look much more realistic than in Grand Theft Auto.
In this game, the sound track, though much larger than GTA's is not as good. GTA gave you a little of everything, from rock to rap to talk. This game does the same thing, but leaves out the real kind of rock, the only strong points being the rap soundtrack. I, not being a fan of rap, was left listening to the talk radio where there was only about 30 minutes of real talk which just keeps getting repeated. I sure miss Lazlo and all of the other radio personalities in one station in GTA, here just being only one radio show, consisting of two guys talking about what's best for the country and stuff like that. And then there are the glitches. Sometimes when you are listening to the radio in the middle of a mission, the characters will miss some of their lines, which are usually throwaway filler to keep the driving from point A to point B interesting, but it is still annoying. Also, sometimes you will be driving along on the highway going super-fast when you notice to yourself that there is no road under your wheels. Yes, that's right kids, the road can glitch out from under you and leave you thinking that you just jumped off the bridge without knowing it or something. And, then there is the super game-changing jump on top of your car and press the Y button (button to get in the car) and just appear in your car glitch. In the game, there are things like hostage missions, where if you steal a car with somebody in it, you can hold them hostage for a certain amount of time and they will pay you money. What was part of the fun of this was trying to get into the car before the hostages could climb out. But with this glitch, they have no chance because you just appear there. And once when I did that glitch, the driver of the car actually raised his arms as if to say, "What the Hell just happened?" This glitch even makes getaways about 20X easier because you can just appear in your car and drive away. It really takes away from the immersion and, ultimately, the fun. SAINTS ROW is also a suppporter of the "saved by the bell" technique. This is a name I call games where if you have a wanted level of 5 stars during a mission and you beat the mission, your entire wanted level goes back down to zero. Now this is very convenient and makes the game a lot easier, but who says the game should be easier? It takes away from the realism of the game.
But in the end, the great graphics for a sandbox game, the awesome audio with booming bass (mostly in the rap music) and the tight controls make this game an excellent fare, especially if you haven't played GTA before. The fairly long main story (if not anywhere near as long as in GTA: San Andreas) is engaging and well-told, if a little childish at times (and not GTA childish either, I'm talking about the bad kind). If you have played GTA though, expect to be like me, calling the local gun store AmmuNation every time you see it, even after beating the game. Though this game is essentially as shameless a clone of GTA as can be, it has its moments, and those moments are frequent. In the eyes of most gamers it is destined to be forgotten, but it deserves much better than that. Even though it is not GTA, and is not close to it even slightly, it is still a great game and should be played by more than just people who are looking for a next-gen GTA fix before the fourth chapter of Grand Theft Auto.