May 20, 2005 - There's nothing like starting your day by taking a shotgun to a cop's head, mowing down rival gang leaders in the streets, or busting into rooms while half-naked woman perform fellatio on their soon to be mauled friends. It just wakes you up. Those are the first instant impresisons I remembered seeing the M-rated new game from Volition, Saint's Row.
When I first saw the video to Saint's Row on a certain music television station, I thought the video was rather…unimpressive. In other words, not terribly pretty, not incredibly original, and very much on the same exact track that everyone else seems to be on -- pitting African-American men in gangs against one another in a whirlwind of bloodshed and street-fought gun wars. That's what the trailer said to me, and to be honest, it just made me want to return to the original bad boy on the subject, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and forget everything else.
Saint's Row is definitely a GTA copycat. It's such a GTA copycat that in the demo the font is almost exactly the same as in GTA. I smirked a little when I saw that.
But, BUT, Volition's game grew on me. Once I got past the mimicking behavior I realized a lot of things were going on that worked. The physics system adds a tremendous amount of gameplay to the formula. The perfect example was when the lead character threw a grenade over his shoulder at a car and I watched it blow up into pieces, saw the fiery body of the driver fly out and bounce off the ground like a ragged little doll. When I saw the machine parts clank to the ground, one hitting me in the head and causing damage. When, 15 seconds later, the character turned around and a wheel from the destroyed car spun by. It's not much, I know, but the possibilities started running through my brain. The physics are deeply ingrained in the gameplay of Saint's Row and the gameplay possibilities generated from these appear endless.
Volition's game is a third-person action-shooter in which you'll fight three other gangs for territory, power, weapons, and perhaps even some hos. There are four main storylines that interweave, you can customize your character, there are no load times when you walk into buildings, and all of the cars are drivable. Volition plans to incorporate racing as part of its online component, in addition to teaming up with others in a cooperative fashion to meet objectives and collect goods together.
What Volition's game felt like was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas's open-action, run-and-gun gameplay merged with Volition's The Punisher, which did a very good job of shooting and melee. Not a bad mix, not bad at all. We're hoping that as Volition evolves its game ite takes on more of its own characteristics, style, and flavor, instead of copying GTA wholesale.
