Saints Row 2

In short, if you do not have at least the listed rec. specs i.e. 3 GHz Dual Core, the game will be borderline unplayable. If you have anything less than a 2014 budget laptop with an okay graphics chip, you are screwed. With 2.5 Ghz Intel dual core ( i5-4200U ) and a HD Graphics 4400 GPU chip, the game was 95% playable. I was still slightly underspecced. The practically mandatory Gentlemen of the Row seemed to greatly improve the handling to 90% of GTA 4 level and added tire-breaking and side sparks for collisions, though it does not fix a notorious control lock-up glitch (2 seconds every time) and random input dropping. The lock glitch makes any car chase and a racing mission a nightmare as the car simply won't turn and costs you your mission. There is no point in digging into the content if any of the previous points unless you can deal with those big unfixable glitches and extreme system reqs. Otherwise you are better off watching the story cutscene clips off of some video hosting site than trying to suffer through the game. The story in general is a GTA3+ rip-off: do missions and destroy other gangs until you are the top dog. The missions range from alright to brutally difficult. Most of the last level activities are intentionally impossible unless you break the game in some way, e.g. finding that unreachable spot in Zombie Uprising. At parts the game revels in making things pointlessly difficult. That "save Shaundi from Masako" mission was simply awful. Especially when the game has the extra glitch of randomly crashing when you drive too fast across the map sections, especially when driving in the lower parts. The sparsely-populated starting neigbourhoods never crashed that way. So you need to master pedantic saving to not lose progress. The respect system requires you to practically grind in order to unlock the next story mission. Okay, a summary of good and bad parts: great main character and the rest, the music and superior to GTA4. Bads: graphics on ATI.

The worst pc port ever. It is so bad that the car handling is awkward and clunky. Tow truck diversion is impossible to beat because of shitt* car handling, and because of over aggressive npc ai. Npcs ai tends to be so annoying at the times, and makes certain diversions (side missions) harder than they actually are. It is unbearable. Aircraft controls are terrible. Aircraft handling is terrible. The game itself is locked in 30 fps, no matter which rig you have. You need to unlock it via Nvidia control pannel, by disabling frame rate limiter and all V-synch options as well. Graphics are terrible because of the poor port. Colours look washed out, and I guess the engine itself doesn't have enough colour variations. It is a great game. It could have been great game at least. It has very good and interesting story, memorable characters, lots of side activities, detailed character customization, detalied clothing customization, detailed vehicle customization, good character models and some innovative features which got stolen by Rockstar themselves, and implemented in their game Grand Theft Auto 5. That's ironic, considering this game was highly influenced by Grand Theft Auto series. That's about it.

I can get the game working with or without mods but no matter what I do it has horrible performance

Hours into this game, and while the graphical bugs have finally been fixed for this game, there are still HUGE problems. Your allied AI can't walk in a straight line, much less fallow you into a group fight. And what finally killed my play through, is that boss fights can end on a boss character getting into an animation where they can't move, but also leaves them inmune to your gun fire. This finally broke my play through at about a quarter of the way into the game. And I'm not coming back, in fact I want my money back, and I'm not sure if I'll ever play 3 now.

Lots of story content, and the respect mechanic is an interesting way to encourage exploration of the world. Unfortunately, the game is crahs-prone. After losing my progress three times, I have given up on playing this game