Saints Row is the first time Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto has officially been challenged for its sandbox free roaming title. The game offers some things that GTA has yet to offer in their series of games. For instance the online play which is something that Xbox fans have wanted from the GTA series since they first started porting over the series to the original Xbox. Then it offers complete creation of your main character allowing you to either make yourself, some random person, another video game character such as Agent 47 from the Hitman series, or even George W. who can be put into a pimp suit.

The story comes off as a typical GTA storyline except for the true ending which is very shitty in my honest opinion. Single Player offers the free roam do what you want to do in a sense except you have to earn respect to unlock missions which can be earned through activities or other acts. Some of the activities it offers are Snatch, which is an activity where you steal ho's from pimps in rival gang territories. Chop Shop, where you find and steal cars on a certain list and return them to the Shop that gave you that list. Escort missions which is perhaps the funniest of all activities as you have to drive a hooker around while shes with a customer keeping away from news vans and significant others. And then theres the other activities like Hitman, Demolition Derby, Drug Trafficking, Racing, Insurance Fraud, & Loan Sharking. Also mix that in with the ability to mug random people or take hostages in vehicles that you hijack that have more than 1 person in the vehicle and the activities can be pretty fun until you reach a certain level of difficulty for them. Then theres the stores that you can buy from like Freckle Bitches, a fast food joint, Impressions Clothing, Branded Clothing, On The Rag Clothing, Sloppy Seconds Clothing, Rim Jobs Mechanics, Friendly Fire weapons, and of course your local liquor slash drug store which allows the purchases of bongs, forties, cognac, pipes, blunts and spliffs. Oh the joy this game offers.

In my playtime one thing i have noticed is that the game was supposed to offer Welfare and Food Stamps but i have yet to find them. Overall the free roam and doing all the missions the total game play time is still not very long. I've played for 31 hours as i type this review and have yet to finish all activities but i have taken over the town Stilwater where the gang war is and am 75% finished with the game. From the people that i know that have finished all activities they have spent roughly 40-45 hours playing the game. A little more info on the single player is that your character whether he's Hispanic, White, Black, or Asian will be forced to join the 3rd Street Saints and take on three rival gangs called The Rollers, The Vice Kings, and Los Carnales which has a very funny cut scene due to that gangs particular name. Included in this is also the police who, for the most part, ignore you unless you specifically do something in front of them.

The online portion of the game is particularly interesting because it allows you to create a complete different character and you get rewarded money so you can buy different clothes to wear online. The game modes for online are a standard death match, team death match, and then some unique modes like Big Ass Chains which is similar to capture the flag, Team Big Ass Chains, Pimp Your Ride which is a team based game, and Protect The Pimp which is another team based game that the name gives away the point too. So really the question comes down to is Saints Row going to knock GTA out of its beloved held title King of the Sandbox type games. The answer honestly is a no. The game offers some great things that GTA didn't and does have its good points. The customization completely is wonderful although it lacks all the hairstyles and mustache styles to be able to create every single human on this earth to an exact point but it is quite well done none the less. Then you have its overall addictiveness mixed in with extreme pleasure in blowing the hell out of shit around you and killing random people. Those are very strong points the game offers but the best thing i have found in the game is one specific weapon that you can only unlock by completing the Snatch activities, The Pimp Cane Shotgun. This weapon makes the game just that much more fun as it is by far the strongest weapon in the game next to everyone's beloved rocket launcher.

There's one huge area that the game really out performs any GTA game you can name in my personal opinion and that's the Voice Overs. Volition or THQ had to pay some major money to get some of these voice actors for the game because some of them are major film actors. I mean theres nothing like hearing Keith David, who you may know from Barbershop or ATL, call you a player every time or hearing Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile, Daredevil and Sin City) say something in a cut scene as the leader of the Vice Kings. Throw in other celebrities like David Carradine, Tia Carrere, Michael Rappaport, and Clancy Brown to make a wonderful voice over cast for the game all around which only enhances the games enjoyment. Also the soundtrack is every hip hop fans dream for a soundtrack as it features both underground artist and mainstream artists. I mean you got members of The Wu, Strong Arm Steady, David Banner, De La Soul, Copywrite, Camp Lo, Madvillian, and many many others to select from. However if your a fan of other genres the game does kind of fall short. Most of the other genres are chock full of older songs the Metal genre has mostly 80's metal songs on there, the rock genre has Fall Out Boy and Local H and not much else. So basically you can tell they were playing to the hip hop audience more than anything when it comes to the soundtrack. That becomes painfully obvious as every unique song for the game that you unlock is mostly Hip Hop artists such as David Banner's song Saints Row or the Ghostface tracks. What i did find interesting is that the character Aisha who is a singer in the game actually has tracks on the game that are said to be performed by that character until you see the end credits and then you see they are actually done by Sy Smith specifically for the game.

Those are all strong points that separate it from the GTA experience aside from the online play which until the patch comes out on September the 15th is actually more of a let down. Now here comes the part where I get to list all the negative things this game has. I'm not sure if i have the time to list all of the negative points in detail as i could be writing for days. The good thing is the negative things don't make the game less enjoyable if you can stand the glitches of the game. For instance its kind of a royal fuck job Volition when the frame rate drops drastically when put in HDTV mode instead of standard TV. HDTV is supposed to enhance your graphics and make the game more pretty not perform like a slug and no i don't mean Sean Daily. Or how about the Pop In's and Pop Outs? Yes... I love to see a wall randomly disappear as im driving along or maybe not even be there until I run right into it. Same thing with cars. Volition you dropped the ball massively here and I have no problem complaining about it because it frustrates me and pisses me off greatly to play a fun game and then have such stupid issues that you could have spent just a little more time working with the Havok Physics Engine, which I might add you cant blame for the pop ins and outs for as many many games use this engine, to make them less frequent.

How about the glitch that Hip Hop DXJay Reyd forum member has run into where your car completely disappears and your allowed to look around but can't continue with the game? Thats gotta be a bitch. I personally never had that particular glitch so far and knock on wood i don't. However i have seen my car disappear as im driving it or seen myself sitting on the hood while driving. These are things that could have been polished out with a little more time. All of them are minor in reality but they just make the game perform so crappy that it is hard to believe at times. I mean one glitch I have noticed is where the road your driving on just disappears out of nowhere and when it reappears at first you'll be driving on top of either water or other cars until the game finally catches up to the fact that your driving on a road. Or how about if you decide to run from the cops by jumping in the water and swimming away, as they never have enough sense to follow you, you warp to shore and end up with water pouring off of you as if your still swimming.

Now the majority of the negative things the game offers is nothing but graphical errors that will effect the game play just by looks alone. However it does have some other areas that could be more fine tuned like the driving of cars. For certain missions you have to be able to take curves and turns faster and while the handling of each car is different the only options for braking are your regular brake which doesn't slow you down enough to make a fast turn and your hand brake which practically brings you to a complete stop. Theres no such thing as drifting in Saints Row. Then you add in the online play which I would hate to rag on as they are supposed to be releasing a patch to fix it at least to a degree but i have to. This is one of the major set backs for the game while it is something greatly appreciated that was offered.

The co-op online, for instance, is greatly appreciated from me but I have a feeling they are going to charge me for downloadable missions as they only offer 2 to begin with. And those 2 missions can not be more different than anything in the world as one requires you to do nothing but rush through and kill people and the other makes you carry a box of goods with a teammate while trying to get through the level which I still have yet to accomplish on any difficulty. That I can handle, however, as I'll eventually get it finished but what I cant stand is how every mode lags horribly and will even kick players out. It's next to impossible to play a good game on the online mode thanks to the horrible connection. I've read that Volition says it's not really their fault. Well in a lot of gamers opinions that's a complete load of crap as the lag and connection problems are due to packet loss between players and it happens no matter who your playing with. For instance, I played with some of my usual friends I play on Live with and who I've never experienced a slight lag with even when were all hosting custom games. This was just a small group of 4 friends, the lag was horrible and we just called it quits. Sometimes the packet loss on the game isn't horrid but most of the time it makes it unbearable to play unless you adjust to it and put your faith in lady luck who, to quote Louis Logic is sadistic. More often than not you end up winning only by luck and it makes it impossible for your rank to actually count. Again the patch is supposed to fix this though so hopefully it will come and the lag will be greatly cut down and the online play will not be as huge of a let down. They will also have to offer downloadable content and hopefully not charge an arm and a leg for to improve as well as they're are really only 3 maps to play on which makes the game lacking compared to many other multi-player online games.

Overall while Saints Row has a slew of graphical negatives and a horrible online experience for the time being, the single player still is a hell of a lot of fun to play. The game is not any better than a Grand Theft Auto game for the most part but it does what it was supposed to do and challenges Rockstar to do something completely outside of the box they have built to prove that they are still king. As is, I'd say on a fun level comparing Saints Row to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Saints Row is better just because of how much more it offers in different areas. Then again looking at Saints Row to review, it's hard to give it an official rating without knowing how well the patch will be at fixing the issues. If the patch fixes some of the HDTV frame rate issues and the online play the game will be a lot better but as it is. I can only give Saints Row a 3.5 out of 5 due to its horrible online and graphical glitches even though it is by far one of the most enjoying experiences I've had in gaming in awhile due to the lack of games in this particular genre that I along with many people enjoy.