It looks like Saints Row 2 is back in all its janky, raunchy goodness.
See, back before the 3rd Street Saints became corporate sellouts and then leaders of the country, they were steeped in the seedy underworld of gangster turfwars. The over-the-top violence and unfiltered raunch was at its peak in Saints Row 2. At the time of its release, it was the perfect anti-Grand Theft Auto, a series that prided itself in realistic portrayals of “fictional” cities and the characters in them. Saints Row was a parody, before Saints Row The Third and Saints Row IV turned it into a comic book sandbox.
The great shame here though, is that when Volition released Saints Row The Third, the Xbox 360 and PS3 era was well underway, and the understanding of the hardware led to a more stable engine and tighter gameplay. Technically, Saints Row The Third was much improved. On the other side of the coin, though, it was a much leaner offering. There was so much more to like about it, with better voice work, graphics, etc., but the amount of content, such as the selection of zany and weird outfits, along with the mini-games, never seemed to be quite on par with the second. Not to mention the likes of the multiple gangs you’re at war with.
SR2 has always shared a special place in my collection, but maybe I’m looking at it with rose-colored glasses, because as much as I loved Saints Row 2, it had more than its share of problems. Technically, the game’s a mess, and not even the power of the Xbox One X seems to be able to fix it. I never completed SR2 due to some of the later action completely breaking the game, dropping the frame rate into the single digits regularly. I was hoping playing it on the more powerful system would alleviate some of these issues just through brute force, but I may have had my hopes a little too high.
Playing it though just reminds me of how badly the Saints Row series needs a reboot. I understand Volition wanted to do something different, so they made Agents of Mayhem. The only problem with that though, is that they tried to make a Saints Row-ish game that had none of the ridiculous charm that made the SR series great. The put the saddle on the horse in SRIV and seemingly sent the Saints off into the sunset, albeit leaving the door open with them trampling through time.
It’s an odd revelation, actually, that with the popular trend of HD re-releases, the first two Saints Row games have gone ignored. A up-res’d port at 60 frames per second would sell like hotcakes, in my humble fanboy opinion.
Who knows if a game like SR can even happen now in the current, over-sensitive culture we’ve been seeing the past few years. Who’s to say Freckle Bitch’s wouldn’t offend some small pocket of society? Or that there was a clothing store called On The Rag? Subtlety was never Saints Row’s strong point, but that bluntness was a characteristic that I appreciated. So many game developers walk on eggshells trying not to offend anyone, and the Saints set out to offend as many as possible, and it was great. I just don’t know if they could pull it off again, not anymore.
And that saddens me.
