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As sure as water is wet and it takes a nation of millions to hold us back, Saints Row was born in someone’s marketing meeting.  And that meeting, no doubt, ended with a lot of men in suits slapping each other on the back after having decided to bring a Grand Theft Auto-style open-world crime drama to next-generation video game consoles as soon as humanly possible.

Saints Row knows where its bread is buttered. The game owes its existence to Rockstar Games’ gritty Grand Theft Autos, and no one either at developer Volition or publisher THQ games would dare to claim otherwise. Yet Row does something wholly unexpected; it manages to be more than a Grand Theft Auto clone dreamed up by men with only dollar signs in their eyes.

As an anonymous thug, enmeshed in a sweeping gang war, players are free to explore, kill, wreak havoc, and perform missions at their leisure. The open world presents plenty of opportunity for mischief, and Row performs admirably in duplicating Auto’s freewheeling formula.

Here, the simple things make the game stand out. A workable map lets players view special locations, search for specific venues or activities, and allows players to mark a location. Once a location has been selected, a faux global positioning system unerringly guides players to their target. Hunting for hotspots amid a series of twisting and overlapping roadways has summarily been eliminated, which is cause for great joy. 

Grand Theft Auto, in any of its incarnations, always suffered when it came time for the game’s protagonists to pull, aim, and shoot a weapon. With Row, a simple, smoothly moving reticule is used to aid a player in aiming a weapon. When the reticule appears over a hostile target, it turns red. When it appears over an ally or noncombatant, it turns into a green X. The rest is as easy as pressing a button.

Best of all, Row feels as if it’s set in a living world. A.I. controlled civilians curse each other off, and flee when bad drivers seek to mow them down. They ask questions of themselves that have haunted mankind since the dawn of time, namely, how am I supposed to pay for a hooker when I keep getting held up? Enemy gangs are not content to sit idly by as the player completes missions and grabs chunks of their turf. At opportune moments, they stage counteroffensives to take back lost territories, forcing the player to return to the contested area to wage a brief but fierce war.

Varied mission types let players rescue whores from callous pimps, dive in front of oncoming cars in order to drum up business for shady lawyers and equally corrupt physicians, serve as an armed escort (or both escort and driver) for drug dealers, race cars, and attempt to cause the most property damage in a given amount of time. These optional missions, once completed, earn respect for the player’s character, which in turn unlocks challenges that propel the plot forward.

Customization options aplenty let characters create and mold their protagonist, right down to the double chins on an overeating fat blob. Clothing shops litter the game environments; plastic surgery centers let players tamper with the status quo and reduce the heat on their character, to boot; and tattoo parlors offer a permanent way to say “Mom” on one’s chest. Players might not be able to relate, say, to someone who routinely hijacks cars, runs over pedestrians, and shoots people with guns, but they’ll certainly feel some sort of attachment to a character they were able to fully tailor.

Row takes some liberties in terms of what its cops will react to, and this puts a damper on the realism. Cops will routinely ignore the player’s character as he runs around with a gun, or when he takes a car over a curb. Sometimes, too, they’ll appear out of the ether, running up to take down the combatants in a gun battle.

The game goes overboard, too, when it attempts to be clever or creative. When Row tries desperately to outdo Grand Theft Auto in terms of its in-game radio stations—accessed when players hijack cars—it fails miserably. A limited soundtrack is supplemented with a series of commercials that are either horribly vulgar and obnoxious (an actor talks about his films “F- The Nazis” and “F- The Nazis II” before pitching guns to the masses) or just straight out of second grade (the Freckle Bitch’s blatantly unfunny fast food cum porn spiel). 

Score one for the marketing guys. More importantly, though, score one for anyone who wants to throw down, as the kids say, on the Row.

Article by: Greg Orlando
Video produced by: Jonathan Solin