Saints Row (Xbox 360)

Some of the special missions in Saints Row can only be triggered by experimenting with the game, such as the hold up. Point a gun at the shopkeeper and they’ll raise their hands or panic, keep the gun on them and they’ll walk you to the safe, crack it open and let you take their cash.

If they feel too threatened they’ll curl up into a ball on the floor, or try and hit the panic button – then you’ll be faced with a bungled robbery.

At night you can kick in a shop’s door and try to rob the safe yourself, it’s based on the motion of the analogue stick and button presses, time it right and you’ll be able to crack the safe and get away with several boxes. Load them into the boot of your car and race to a Pawn shop. Take too long and you’ll have the cops on your tail, from a few cars to the whole force.

There are also hostage missions; try to get in a car with enough passengers, drive off fast enough and you’ll be able to take them hostage. The police will hunt you down and the longer you drive, the more money you can extort.

So with all these side activities and the main story missions, you’ll find there’s a lot to do in Saints Row and the game is easy enough and fun to play. Each activity is broken up into 8 levels of difficulty and these are sometimes locked depending on your Respect.

You can save at any time from the menu, or in your crib or save points dotted around the map.

Talking of the map, the map is an excellent feature and is highly informative. It links well with the mini-map and there’s a guide line that shows up to give you a good idea where you’re going to the next objective or marker you’ve added. The main game screen also displays a marker to let you know you’re going in the right direction; however it will often set up some odd routes for you to follow, so at times you’ll be relying on your knowledge of the city.

There are 7 unlockable Homies in the game, some of them are obviously earned from successful side mission and activity completion, others are found by exploration and taking a note of the phone numbers scrawled in various places around Stillwater.

Saints Row has a phone book that stores your successfully dialled numbers; you can get these from a variety of sources including listening to adverts on the radio. Once you dial a number you’ll get an amusing message or unlock some kind of bonus. For example, dial 911 and you’ll get an Ambulance that will allow you to heal.

You can heal in game with food bought from Freckle Bitches or use the above mentioned Ambulance call. Health will recover over time however as long as you don’t take further damage.

Saints Row has a number of machine gun and pistol weapons, as well as the obligatory Rocket Launcher that deals a devastating amount of damage to anyone and everything. These can be purchased for hideous amounts of cash from any Friendly Fire store or stolen from dead gang members.

Graphics

With tight gameplay the game should have a top notch graphics engine and it does, well, it does up until a point. It suffers sadly from a bad case of pop up and teleporting cars. It’s quite jarring to see a whole section of the freeway just vanish into thin air under you, or drive past a car parked down the street, come back a few moments later to pick it up, only to find it’s gone completely.

There are times that the cars will port in directly in front of you, appearing from nowhere just like a cheap magic show. The pop up of buildings varies, sometimes there’s nothing and other times whole sections of the skyline can appear suddenly in your view.

On the whole however the graphics for Saints Row are good quality, they’re bright and colourful with some nice effects and dynamic lighting (day and night, weather, headlights and so on), they’re just let down by those annoying pop up and graphical glitches that should certainly have been fixed in the retail game.

Of course since there’s very little loading, Saints Row is doing an awful lot of streaming when rendering up this huge city – still it is a next gen game on a next gen console, we’d have expected a little better in that regard.