I walked into the expo hall this morning and found myself face to face with an unoccupied demo station for Volition’s Saints Row 2. Seizing the opportunity to avoid waiting in a line, I snagged up the controller and dove into the game’s opening scene.
Saints Row 2 takes place five years after the original game. At the end of the first adventure, the player-character that we established was injured in an explosion aboard a yacht he was on. And now he’s stuck in a coma in Stillwater Prison’s dingy medical ward. I skipped through the robust character creator (for time purposes) and jumped into the opening sequence of the game.
Click through for the goods.
We wake up to find a young Hispanic by the name of Carlos alongside us in the medical ward. He’s purposefully “shanked” himself to gain access to our player-character, and after a brief spat where we learn that Saints split apart, he convinces us to escape with him. We instantly break out of the poorly-secured wing of the prison and run into some guards with batons. Thankfully those five years of inactivity haven’t had an effect on our motor skills and we dive into the familiar combat system from the previous game.
The left and right triggers control each of our hero’s fists. After a few swings it was clear that Saints Row 2 has undergone a few cinematic advances. I easily triggered some combos that resulted in brutal flurries of punches and a heavy-hitting knee to the head. The game does a bit more to emphasize the action this time around and the change is very welcome.
In fact, it’s clear that Volition have been working hard on their second foray into Stillwater’s urban landscape. The character models and textures are vastly improved, not necessarily GTA IV-quality, but its obviously a giant step forward. Once Carlos and I made it to the prison’s rooftops, I took a moment to check out the filthy world surrounding me. I guess Stillwater hasn’t exactly changed for the better during my five-year absence.
On the rooftops Carlos and I snuck slowly from cover to cover to avoid the trolling searchlights in the prison yard. A prompt showed up on screen that told me to knock out the passing guard for his firearm. So I approached the officer from behind with the expectation that I would perform a takedown on the guy. Unfortunately, my attack merely engaged the guard in the same hand to hand combat from before. But at least I was now packing heat.
The rest of the stage had Carlos and I blasting our way across the rooftops and out onto the nearby streets. Police officers swarmed around us, arriving in cruisers and by boat (the prison is along a coastline). After only a half-dozen rounds I managed to set their vehicles ablaze, the classic warning of impending explosion. And the following blast set off a chain of exploding cars that cleared our way to the coastline.
Carlos took off running and I followed suit. He jumped in an unoccupied boat, started the engine, and by the time I stepped on deck we were off into the harbor. The demo ended there, but it gave me a clear impression of how the final game would feel.
Much like Nico Bellic in GTA IV, our character in Saints Row 2 has a much heavier feel to him than we normally get to experience in video games. Moving him about during the demo gave me a real sense of the players relationship to the world around him. He’s part of the world. He touches it--interacts with it--and the effect does wonders for the Saints Row universe.
We can only hope that Saints Row 2 manages to carry its weight in the narrative this time around. The first game, while a pleasant distraction during our long wait for GTA IV, had such a laughably terrible story that it made finishing the campaign more of a chore than a pleasure. But the minigames--especially the excellent insurance fraud missions--were part of the reason that we lingered in Stillwater. Hopefully we’ll find out more about the new campaign soon.
Saints Row 2 releases October 14th, on the 360, PS3, and PC.
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Aug. 31st 2008, 12:00 AM
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