Saints Row Xbox 360

Saints Row Xbox 360

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Oct 23, 2006 | 4 out of 4 found this Saints Row review helpful

Pros: It successfully copies the oft-imitated-but-untoucha
ble Grand Theft Auto formula; fun, responsive driving controls are as good as on-foot shooting action; impressive presentation, featuring amazing explosions and great audio; mostly well-written, well-acted story will compel you to keep playing; various little why-didn't-someone-th
ink-of-that-sooner features.

Cons: In some ways, it will be familiar to a fault to anyone who's played much GTA; some noticeable bugs and glitches; not much variety to the mission design.

You begin play by determining your character's appearance, and you have what seems like a limitless number of options to choose from. There are presets for different ethnicities, but you can proceed to make your character look however you want. I...t seems gimmicky at first, but since your physical appearance--at least your clothes--do end up having some impact on gameplay, the sheer variety during character creation is impressive. The game starts with you nearly getting caught in the cross fire of a gang war. You're saved by Julius (voiced perfectly by Keith David), the charismatic leader of a racially diverse gang called the 3rd Street Saints, one of Stilwater's four biggest criminal groups. And he invites you to join up. The game's introductory cutscene has a couple of lines of painfully bad dialogue in it, suggesting that Saints Row will go on to bombard you with horrible clichés and an appalling fake attitude. But, somehow, somewhere, the story gets really good. Maybe it's the expressive characters and the excellent voice performances by the likes of Michael Clarke Duncan, David Carradine, and others; or maybe it's the choreography of the cutscenes and the quality of the dialogue. It's probably all of these combined. Saints Row isn't always clever or funny, and in the end, the story will leave you hanging. Even so, for its occasional misses, the quality of the game's writing and storytelling turns out to be one of the highlights. Read more Less