Saints Row 2

In my oppinion, this is the best game of the series. Three gangs to fight at your leisure and pace, Much side activities, Over the top story. Freedom! BUT: Technically it runs like crap, if the game is defragmented on your HD, and the car handling is beyond awfull. But, load this and install it: http://www.moddb.com/mods/gentlemen-of-the-row. This fixes the car handling, beside some other problems. And install this game on your fastest HD in your possession, because the game istself loads small chunks from the HD every time, so it does not matter how high end your PC is. Your HD and the defragmentation of the games are the only thing that matters. And under NO circumstances play the german censored version. It will make you hate all people who messed with video games in the name of child protection laws.

I bought this game during the 2018 Winter Sale, but didn't play it until the next month. First impression is that this is NOT play-ready out of the box. It was running too fast but also had choppy animations and controls were so wonky that it was difficult to move my character around, especially in a vehicle. But I didn't want to give up on it as I could see that this would be a good game to play if I can just tweak it somehow. There is a popular suite of mods called Gentlemen of the Row, but I wanted to play it as plain vanilla as possible for my first playthrough. I will add the full suite later when I finish it the first time. Anyway, I added 3 mods (google for them, they work great!): 1. Saints Row Powertools - fixes the speed bug; 2. SR2 FPS Unlocker - removes the 30 fps cap for smoother animations; and 3. Saints Row 2 Handling Mod - improves car control and the camera doesn't go all over the place. Once installed and I made tweaks to the graphics and control options (mouse/keyboard and gamepad sensitivity was too high), it ran very well, with nice graphics, and I was able to play and enjoy the game using keyboard and mouse! It isn't a lot of work to make these changes and the little effort is so worth it! I'm having a lot of fun with the game - there is so much to do and many different fun activities to choose from, including spraying people and important buildings with crap, lol! There's also lots of things you can buy with the money you make from the missions, activities, etc. which increases your style level and thus your respect. I love that many of those things are highly customizable: your character, their clothes, their crib (homes), etc. So yeah, I didn't like this game and regretted purchasing it at first, but once I added those mods, I made a complete 180 and totally love it now! I'm so glad I bought it and I highly recommend it!

I played it to completion 2 times on the Xbox 360 and then I got it for the PC on another store, planning on getting it here too DRM free. First of all, any low frame rate at some points, is the same but worse on the Xbox. and thankfully does not affect the game at all. I am not going to spend any more on that. Now, the actual game. It's a third person action game with shooting, melee fighting, driving, piloting parts. You do a lot of them and with the mouse it's a breeze. It's very similar to the 3D GTA games, though at least for me, it surpasses them in that it never stops being fun. I like the GTA games but I never finished one simply because I got bored several hours in, or in the rare case I found a mission impossible to complete. I never had this happen to me with SR2 (or the first one). The shooting feels very good with the physics looking/feeling amazing. Not perhaps full realistic, but Hollywood realistic. The game while also being extremely violent, all the time, doesn't have the somber, almost depressing parts the GTA games do. I mentioning them in case you either love or hate that in GTA so you know what you are up to here. The driving mechanics has been blasted by some for not being as good as later GTA games and to that I have nothing to say cause I just don't know how they reached that conclusion, especially with GTA IV which was the main competitor to this game. There is no competition, here it feels like you are driving arcade cars and there it feels you are driving miniature ships. SR2 is a very large game. Both in terms of map size and in terms of content. You get a butt load of side missions, optional. They can be anything from driving hookers to customers, then trying to avoid paparazzi from taking photos of your clients. To doing drug drops. To getting trucks filled with shit and spraying buildings and people and of course the police. The story missions are full of action, on foot or not. Great game.

I already had this game on Steam, but that version was close to unplayable due to lag, very jumpy framerate, and poor car handling. I installed the Gentlemen of the Row mod but it made no difference. This on a system where Bioshock 2 and Far Cry 2 play great. Rest assured that the GOG release is vastly improved. I no longer suffer from lag or jumpy framerates, and car handling is better as well. It's still not perfect by any means -- draw distance feels short, driving is not great, especially in police cars, and melee aiming is not easy. I am playing with keyboard and mouse. Overall, this is now a pretty decent open-world game, but it's still the case that Saints Row 3 looks far better, plays far better, and is funnier.