Over the past few years there have been far too many console games that could only be described as GTA Clones, so it was hard to get excited about Saints Row at first - everything from the driving and mission, to the radio stations, sounds worryingly familiar.

It only took the tutorial to change my mind though. You see, Saints Row has two things that none of the other pretenders have - a sense of humour, and style.

You play an ordinary guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Caught up in a gang war you know nothing about, you are recruited into The Saints to help them in their mission to clean up The Row.

There are several other gangs fighting for control, each with their own look, style, and methods of causing mayhem.

Saints Row eases you in gently, letting you get a feel for the game and its style. The first two achievements come easily, but after that you have a lot of work to do.

Missions that advance the plot are handed out at a steady pace, interspersed with 'activities' which you must do to earn money and gain 'respect' - earning respect gives you access to more missions. You can choose the activities you do, and there is ample variety of them - from insurance fraud and drug running to pimping or safe cracking. The first few levels of the activities are pretty simple, but be ready for some frustration in the later ones.



Mission wise, the developers have done a very good job of keeping them entertaining. There are several staple 'clear out this building' missions, but also plenty of escort missions, rescues, and general 'go out and cause mayhem' ones. The missions all seem to have a purpose, explained by the cutscenes, and you always feel like you are getting somewhere.

Once you have completed a mission and claimed an area, your work is not over. The opposing gangs may decide to seige an area at any time, and if you wish to use the facilities in an area, you will have to defend it first. This involves killing a certain number of the opposing gangs lieutenants - without dying, or leaving the area that is under siege.

Graphically, Saints Row is very nice - the areas are all well done, and you can see the difference between the ghetto areas of the city and the affluent central areas. You can enter many of the buildings and explore them, and the world feels alive, with lots of nice touches, such as the dancing girls that appear in the clubs at certain times of the day, and the way if you watch carefully you can see your avatar steering accurately when you are driving.



When you're running or driving around the city, you will hear people muttering to themselves - complaining about running late, or about guy problems or whatever. If you almost (or actually do) run someone over, they will shout at you - threaten to sue, or make comments about how they're too good lucking to get hit by a car. Those comments get a little irritating if your driving is bad as mine - as you will hear them rather a lot, but some of them are amusing.

Sometimes things just happen around you - the police show up to arrest someone, who resists and gets a gun out. This causes general panic, and other people end up fighting too, so more police show up. The neighbourhood descends into chaos without you even having to wave a knife around.

Little toches like that distinguish this game from all the others - it really can be fun sometimes to just watch the world go by instead of pushing ahead with the plot.

There are several radio stations in Saints Row, covering most music tastes (Rock, Metal, RNB, Classical, Easy Listening, Electronic) - along with the obligatory chat channels, which are well worth a listen. They've also covered that age old problem of having to re-set the radio station every time you change vehicle by including a playlist editor so you can set up the songs you want - either from the game or from your 360s hard drive, and have that playlist playing at all times - even when you aren't in a vehicle.

The playlist stops when you complete a mission, and you have to re-start it by hand, but its still a big improvement on having to pick your station every 5 minutes.

Saints Row ues a shooter style targetting system instead of lock on targetting. This can get annoying since ammo is often limited, and you don't want to waste it on poorly aimed shots. They have been generous however, and on certain activities you are given infinite ammo, so you can just run the activities several times to earn enough money to kit yourself out for missions.

In the later stages of the game you take insane amounts of damage from opposing gang members. Your health regens over time, however, so if you take your time and pick your targets carefully the missions are do-able.

You can recruit homies to fight with you. They're not the most intelligent of allies, but they dish out some damage and take some aggro. If they die, you have 30 seconds to get to them and revive them. Reviving them is simply a case of pressing a button - you can do it as you run past, and it gets them up on full health.

The developers recruited ex-gang members to help them with the dialogue and behaviour parts of the game, and it shows - the dialogue sounds natural, and many of the slang terms used were ones that I have heard American friends use (I say that to emphasise I'm from Northern UK, we have our own language up here). Its a far cry many games where the characters sound like they were written by some out of touch older guy who watched a few cheesy movies from the 90s and thought he knew 'how kids talked these days'.

The dialogue reflects the situation - for example, on one mission you and a fellow Saint are dressed in the colours of the Vice Kings, with the aim of making the gang look bad to draw police attention to them. If you crash, your friend says 'You did that to make the Vice Kings look bad, right?'. Another cool sequence involves one gang member arguing with another about the correct usage of some Spanish.

To conclude, Saints Row is probably the greatest game of its type on the 360. It has style, humour, daring, and plenty of variety. It is more risque than many games of its type, but it pulls it off well - doing it not for the sake of it, but because it fits the plot and the setting well.

If gang warfare, cool cars, and rampant destruction is your thing, buy this - now.