Thus, at least right now, every game that competes in this genre competes directly with any one of the GTA games, all of which have raised the bar in videogame production, theme maturity and language, open-world design, and lastly, production cost (they"re expensive games to make). That is, until another developer does it better than Rockstar. Volition"s Saints Row is the newest contender on GTA grounds, following all three GTAs, Activision"s True Crime, Sony"s The Getaway, EA"s The Godfather, etc., and it"s both a ballsy, brave, fun game while simultaneously being guilty of the heaviest degree of copy cat-ism, me-too derivation, and just-plain over-doing it. 

Saints Row, however, portrays Volition (The Punisher, Red Faction 1 & 2, Descent: Free Space) as an erudite student of the genre. This next-gen, open-world action-shooting-racing game solves numerous problems born in GTA, and the Champaign, Ill.-based studio has whittled away at the concept, forming a highly polished design that plays well, feels good, and that functions smoothly and with great ease of use. Saints Row is not only a 30-40 hour single-player game with a smart progression system, a breadth of engaging missions, and tons of car and character customization, it"s the first game in this genre to successfully negotiate online and multiplayer waters, including online and SystemLink co-op functionality. 

 

Unoriginal But Fun 
I"ll be totally honest up front. For the longest time, I"ve had serious doubts about Volition"s game. It was originally slated as a launch title and was pushed back due to many obvious reasons (looked bad, played bad, wasn"t done, etc.). On the surface, it smacks of being the biggest rip-off of all time. The game mimics nearly every possible thing that"s done well in GTA and re-creates it with a bravado and guiltlessness that sticks in my ribs like a dull rusty knife. How can Volition do this and feel good about itself? How can they so indiscreetly copy GTA? At least True Crime and The Godfather tried different font styles, pedestrian humor, and radio station ideas. They copied ideas, not the whole damn thing. But like so many great writers (Shakespeare"s Romeo and Juliet wasn"t his original story, he just did it better than the original playwright), artists, musicians and game developers, copying an idea is one thing; copying an idea and making it better is another. Z-targeting from Zelda, soul sucking from Legacy of Kain, you name it, ideas flow freely from development studio to studio. You feel slighted when an original game like GTA is copied and pasted, but you feel better about it, and you give credit to the artist that copied it, improved upon it, and went a little further. While Volition is guilty as sin for copying Rockstar wholesale, it"s also improved upon GTA in many ways, making the experience of playing a game in this genre bigger and brasher. 

Despite it unoriginal premise and derivative nature, Saints Row holds up throughout because it"s smartly designed, technically solid, and straight out fun, whether we"re talking single-player, co-op, or multiplayer. In the single-player game, you follow the story of four gangs fighting for power in the imaginary modern day town of Stilwater, and you start as a no-name, low-level innocent whose life is saved by Julius of the 3rd Street Saints and eventually play a major role in the gang"s rise to power. The Saints (a mish-mash of ethnicities) compete with Los Carnales (the Mexican gang with Columbian ties), the Vice Kings (the African-American gang with ties to the music industry and cops), and the Westside Rollerz (the suburban dudes with a thing for import cars), all visible through their consistent use of colors and a handy map that provides exquisite detail for each territory. 

Just like GTA 
The gameplay is just like GTA in most respects. It"s open, enabling players to walk, run, swim, fight, shoot, drive, and pick missions at their will and in any order. The third-person view enable players to freely swing the camera around using the right analog stick, while moving the characters around with the left analog stick. Players can punch, kick, and block using the left triggers and bumpers, and with a gun in hand, the right trigger provides the shooting. While driving you can shoot, select weapons (as long as they don"t require two hands), and recruit other Saints. You start the game by joining the Saints, and through in-game tutorials, learn how everything works each time you encounter a new interaction. The story is solid on most fronts. Even though you"ll cringe here and there from the overt amount of foul language, forced humor, and shamelessness of the game"s hip-hop "vibe," the narrative is slightly better than ordinary, but the characters flesh it out skillfully thanks to adept voice actors and generally smart dialog. You"ll hear the F-bomb every fourth word from the main characters, the pedestrians, even on the radio -- and that gets really tiring. Thrifty use of the f-bomb is far more effective that swearing in every sentence. Still, enough twists and turns come your way to keep the narrative interesting and worthwhile. 

Volition did several things very right, especially with gun controls. It worked tenaciously on nailing a good control system down, and in a sense this was easy. Instead of struggling with a lock-on aiming system, they let it go free. Aiming consists of picking a weapon holding the B button, selecting a weapon on a radial dial, and pressing the right trigger to shoot. The small circular reticule turns red when rolled over a non-gang member, i.e. pedestrians and opponent gang members. Again, there is no auto-aiming. The reticule freely moves around using a steady not-too fast, not-too slow mechanic that doesn"t get in the way. It works, and it works well. 

Unlike GTA, you aren"t likely to complain about the terrible controls or blame the designers for allowing luck to have such weight in completing a mission. For the most part, Saint"s Row"s AI is basic and familiar to GTA, and it"s neither too hard nor too easy, rather fitting into that well-honed middle ground. When it increases in difficulty, you"ll basically see more aggressive behavior, more enemies with bigger guns, and increased targeting skill. The AI types rarely use cover, and only the top-end AI use multiple cover tactics. Generally, the AI stands there dumbly and shoots until their clip is out. They will use cover, but not to any serious degree. And they often come running out right at you. The game does progressively grow in difficulty, however, so that the last 20% of the game is distinctly harder than the first 20%. Same-side AI can, but doesn"t usually, get stuck on objects in their path (you just need to return to them to unstick them), while one of the bigger AI annoyances is that it often stalls when entering a car. If a car is moving at 1 MPH, the AI can"t get in. Escort AI often gets run over by the car by accident by running in front of it while the car is still moving, and pedestrian AI often proactively freaks out and jumpsinto your car before you get there. So you end up running it over anyway. Also, the last two boss levels can be super challenging in an annoying and repetitive way. 

Volition does a number of other things well. Trailing an enemy is presented with a nice set of outer and inner circles, offering slightly more accurate measures for perceiving distance. As I mentioned before, the homie system is excellent, and the map is very intelligently designed. You can pull the map up with the start button and toggle through several options to display various missions, stores, strongholds, everything or nothing, and you can quickly zoom in or out. Splitting things into subjects clears up the map substantially, making it actually useful. 

Capping Online 
The online and co-op missions range in value. Volition gets a lot of credit for going online with this type of game in the first place. Of course, the real substance is the actual gameplay. There are four modes of play, Gangsta Brawl (straight up deathmatch), Big-Ass Chains (collect chains from fallen opponents and return them to a base for points), Protect tha Pimp (team-based attack and defend missions), and Blinged Out Ride (upgrade your vehicle and get to the rally point before your opponent). You"ll get the basic Xbox Live setup of QuickMatch, Custom Match, and Create-A-Party, and options for ranked or player matches. You can play Team Big-Ass Chains, Team Gansta Brawl, and in Custom and Create A Match games, you can set up two-player co-op missions (which I"ll explain in a second). The lobbies are interactive, silly, brawling-shooting fun where, while you wait, you can endlessly cap people for pleasure but not points. And you can, thankfully, create your own gang. 

 

Blow the whole city away if you want.

Gangsta Brawl and Big-Ass Chains are decent all-out deathmatches (DM), requiring some skill, a healthy portion of luck, and some timing. As with any DM, it helps to know the maps, especially where the weapons and drop spots reside. Protect tha Pimp has depth. This is a team game requiring strategy and tactics and with a good group of players the fun is real and substantial. One team protects the pimp, who is weaponless, while the opponents try to kill him. The protecting team must lead the pimp, who wears a really big, obvious, purple fur hat, out of the building to succeed, while offensive team must kill him before he reaches the exit. Blinged Out Ride is a complex game requiring more than just a quick trigger finger. Here, you must upgrade your vehicle three times without being blown up, and then return it to a rally point. Seems easy enough, but the opposing team is doing the same thing. Also, you must find a safe spot for the car, find the garage to upgrade it, and in between, earn enough chains (enemy deaths) to upgrade the car. This is an intense, fun, and strategic game that takes time to fully understand, but becomes incredibly fun once everyone on the teams gets it -- and it"s easily the best online mode in the game. Saints Row supports up to 12 players in both System Link and Xbox Live. 

While I wish I could say jump for joy about this, don"t get too excited about the Co-op mode. It"s not a full-feature, full-game cooperative mode like that in Doom 3. Instead, co-op can be found in Custom or Create-A-Player modes, and it consists of two types of mission-based games, Mob Rule and Turbulence. In one, you race from one end of the level to another, and in the other you attempt to carry valuable boxes to the designated point. The co-op missions areOK, but the AI is tougher than the base middle-ground AI, there are no health pick-ups, and there are only two game types. Plus, collision detection on solid objects often fails to provide ample cover. These will be fun to play for a short period of time, but they"re not nearly as substantial or fun as the online Versus modes. Co-op mode is supported in System Link and Xbox Live, but is not available otherwise. You have to own two Xbox 360s, two copies of the game and subscribe to Xbox Live Gold to play it. 

Sights, Sounds, and Issues 
Aside from Saints Row"s wholesale copying of GTA"s looks (which it does well), style (average), presentation (well), humor (poorly), cars types (well) -- the list is extensive -- it also duplicates several of the same problems. On the positive side, the environments are fully fleshed out with dozens upon dozens of neighborhoods, each one offering distinct texture maps, ornamented by graffiti and bump and normal maps. The cars are totally destructible and blow up in beautiful, fiery blazes of particles, flames, and heat blurs. When you get a rocket launcher and blast a car to smithereens, man, it"s like finding an oasis of ice cold beer in 100-degree weather in the desert -- totally satisfying. The game packs an enormous amount of geometry; Volition"s engine uses high dynamic range lighting and makes full use of Xbox 360"s shader technology, which gives everything a high-definition edge. The character design shows up best in the well-orchestrated cutscenes, where the characters show off good facial animation, motion-capture, and natural movement. The in-game characters display a good range of looks and animation too, manifesting in examples such as homies jumping into convertible cars by hopping over the door, fluid transitions from standing and running to crouching or stealthily creeping, and overall quick believable motion. 

There is more than a scant amount of issues, however. Saints Row uses streaming technology, which appears to have inherent issues no matter who uses it. The box copy occasionally will crash on you. The game crashed twice on me and I could not reproduce the bug -- my car magically stopped when entering a bridge, the car disappeared, and I was left stuck in the invisible car, seated, with my hands on the invisible steering wheel and my feet on the invisible pedals. I couldn"t get out, drive or even kill myself. Luckily, you can save at any point in the menu, or use the save houses to do so. The game also produces substantial fade-in, though not nearly as badly as GTA, and it regularly shows off screen and texture tearing. 

Sonically, Saints Row offers a good mix of music you assuredly haven"t heard before, giving the game the feel of GTA (with its top-notch soundtracks) without being like GTA. You might know Husker Du, Iggy Pop or a few others, but this collection of songs, while in a sense hustling you with a strong presentation on the surface, feels like a B list of hits rather than the blockbuster A list you"ve come to expect from Rockstar. I found some cool songs I"d never heard, created my own playlist, and while I didn"t import my own ripped music, you can. The separation of channels is well done, offering players a sense of neighborhood ambience, traffic in surround sound, great chase scenes in full 3D sound. You will hear some funny commercials, which are set up EXACTLY like in GTA, but for every funny thing you hear from Foreign Power or from the Eurotrash fool Stefan, the clothes designer, you"ll hear two others that badly miss the mark. I have to say this, though, at least Saints Row is more humorous than every other GTA rip-off, and at least they tried. Too bad most of the humor is forced, overdone, and sometimes just plain bad.

Exploding cars is one of the best things in Saints Row.