Saints Row 2

Saints Row 2 is a great experience with interesting, over-the-top characters and missions and a solid open world to explore. The PC performance is atrocious however, it barely manages 30 fps and crashed regularly for me.

The game still runs awful but i can't necessarily blame gog, because they can't recode the game and its the crap coding on the pc port that makes this game run awful.

Possibly one of the clunkiest, badly optimized open world PC games of all time. Unfortunately, that is all I have to say. It's barely playable. For it to run 'properly' you have to adjust almost all settings to a minimum, and still the movement is weird, car handling is horrible, load times are horrendous. Thankfully the game doesn't take itself seriously, which is its only saving grace.

I want to start off by saying that I own a physical copy & the Steam version. I know that the fan patches can only do so much for this old game, for both copies. Yes I experienced crashes, non-proper wide screen support, frame rate chugs and at one point the game world being completely empty. That's older game engines for ya, that hard to future proof. However the GOG copy, fixes a majority of these issues. I say majority because the only thing that I've had to do between all versions when compared to this site's copy, is cap the frame rate a 60FPS and the last of the problems disappears from what I tested. Proper widescreen support, no crashes and less far less bugs. This doesn't mean that it's perfect cause older engine = newer problems depending on hardware and software, but it runs perfectly on Windows 10 without tweaking and according to a bud, Windows 11 as well. So if you want a copy of this game, I'd recommend getting it here

You might expect this review just to be another rant adressing the game's terrible technical issues (which ofc can be eased by the official community mod GoTR), but I might be the first few to say that I enjoy the game for the story: the game blends its wacky humor and a dark undertone together perfectly, couples with the fun gameplay created an interesting and unique experience.