Better than GTA, but can it hold its own in the future?
First, you can customise your character: This gave the game a stronger tie in to the player, you are in the game, rather than playing a story driven character. The only two things I would add in Saints Row 2 would be a female version, and a grouping of voice actors so that players could add a voice to their character. Its neat that they mixed in your toons silence with jokes, but at the same time it reminded me of old school RPGs where your character never said anything. I think its time to move forward.
Second, your bad but not that bad: Now this is somthing people have brought up over and over in the media, GTA teaching horrid things to our kids blah, blah, blah and so on. In Saints Row, your character and the 9th Street Saints are trying to clean up the city. Now that sounds great and all, but once you look deeper your doing it so that you can replase the MEGA crime and the open streets shootings with a more "quiet" crime, off the main streets and into the ally ways. So rather than fighting crime in Saints Row, I would say that you and your characters are curbing it into a more "respectable" buissness (if you could say that lol).
Other than those main differnces, and the very nice X360 graphics Saints Row sticks to the GTA formula, hopefuly when the next Saints Row comes out, they add some more features and help bring the gameplay forward. Lastly this game unlike GTA, didn't push what is acceptable in games, sure your bad, sure you should take this game with a grain of salt and realise its just a game, but unlike GTA (from what I experianced) it never takes the violance, sex and drugs to far (Ahem we all remeber the big GTA:San Andres stuff). For that THQ and Volition gain a bit of respsect from me.
Great game, fun to play, and a solid GTA clone, with a few changes to make it worth playing if not buying.