Go on. You might as well say it. We’re all friends here at X360. Just one glance at any of the screenshots adorning this page has no doubt set off questioning thoughts in your mind as to the striking similarity between Saints Row and a certain bestselling series of games from a certain British publisher. You see, this title makes no attempt to conceal its influences – from the in-car radio through the wanted levels to the Forgive And Forget drive-through police pay-off, this is very much an attempt to take the GTA mould and go on a screaming rampage with it. That’s fine by us, after all, you would have to be a very naive person indeed to anticipate the decline of thirdperson free-roaming action games on current technology, following a handful of abortive attempts on Xbox and PS2. With this in mind, it becomes rather lazy criticism to dismiss an offering like this out of hand – the focus instead should be on seeing where it fits into an emerging genre, and letting the whole world know whether we have another Getaway or, God help us, another True Crime on our hands.

The good news is we most certainly haven’t, as there are plenty of positives – some of them quite innovative – to go around. Strangely enough, the frontrunner among these is the game’s map. Brought up via the Pause menu, it allows you to theoretically pinpoint any area of the city of Stilwater setting before embarking towards it using a suggested main-road-based route highlighted in your HUD. A modest sounding element perhaps, but one that completely wipes out the sense of disorientation that would usually go hand-in-hand with an environment of this size. Better yet, it does so without giving away the positions of the wealth of jumps and hidden short cuts, leaving you room to explore the terrain in search of ever more efficient ways to escape. The background story, too, leaks quite nicely into aspects of the game aside from the basic cutscenes. Without giving too much away: one second you’ll have assisted another gang member to fake their own death using the combination of a stretched limo and a rather large bomb, the next you’ll be hopping into another stolen car, flicking the radio on and listening to the news being transmitted to all and sundry. Other times, you’ll hear tongue-in-cheek adverts for in-game stores and mission providers, reminding you of the services they can render. Also tying in with the whole gangland story, the chance to call in back-up ‘homies’ is pretty quickly dealt out – a function you’ll only start to use more than ten hours into play, but anything that helps to create the illusion of a permanent world shouldn’t be sniffed at.

Before we drown in criticism, it might be useful to relate a little of the game’s structure. Once you power up your 360, you’ll be requested to create an avatar for your underworld self. The whole process bears a reasonable degree of similarity to EA’s GameFace system in terms of potential variety of outcome and ease of use. Suffice to say you could create many hundreds of thousands of credible appearances before you’d have to delve into the whole ‘David Dickinson with an Afro’ thang. Now, the amount of character model detail available takes a hit due to the existence of this system, but the flip side of that particular coin is the fact that no two people you will then go on to meet will look the same.

Pretty much the second your feet finally touch Stilwater turf, you gain access to a set of ‘activities’, numbering around a dozen, spread liberally across the city landscape (which, incidentally, is fully unlocked from the game’s outset). These show the same extreme lack of imagination that they do in variety, covering such diverse subjects as stealing cars to order, doing as much damage as possible to the environment and protecting a drug dealer as both a pillion passenger in his car and as a lone gunman on foot. All prove immensely enjoyable, even strangely relaxing, due to an automotive control system that shows the true difference between each of the available vehicles and the lack of an automatic targeting mechanic, replaced instead by an icon just large enough to make you believe each fallen opponent is all your own work.

Every time an activity is completed, you’ll receive the standard cash bonus, plus a number of respect points, based on difficulty. Said respect points build up, RPG-style, until eventually you’ll have earned enough to take part in one of the game’s full-on missions. Once you’ve got that out of the way your respect points will drop once more, leaving you to try out increasingly difficult activities to gain another story segment (happily, if you failed you can opt to simply restart the mission). Victory, however, gains you a neighbourhood from the triumvirate of other gangs fighting to control the turf, earning you the proceeds of any criminal goings-on from the district, easily collectable from your safe house at any point. Once you’ve gained control of all 36, of course, the city is yours.

Now, if you’re sitting there thinking: ‘Haven’t I heard all of this somewhere before…?’ allow us to take you back again to Rockstar’s classic series, specifically San Andreas. As obscenely unnecessary as the blocking off of story elements may look, it’s a very different animal to CJ’s personal quest to keep himself fit, loved and full of badly cooked chicken. While it may artificially elongate the game somewhat, the variety of the activities on offer, combined with more incidental stuff such as holding up stores, robbing people in the street and hostage missions (timed exercises in losing a tail, activated by a quick tap of the Y button as you make off with a car occupied by more than one person) give the game a ‘more than the sum of its parts’ feel. Often, you’ll become sidetracked as becoming the world’s greatest cat burglar becomes momentarily more interesting than the story itself. Modifying cars at in-game garages, remoulding your face at the plastic surgeon’s and kitting yourself out in a feathered pimp hat also prove worthy of a mention when it comes to expressing the variety on offer, even though these can be of concrete use when you need to lose the cops or increase your respect levels, respectively.

And so we come to the point in every review wherein resides the ‘but’ – and Saints Row is no exception to the rule. Top of the great list of irritations this time around is the relative futility of trying to keep yourself alive. The many fast-food outlets provide health packages in the shape of various cheeseburgers and soft drinks which, in theory, are accessible during the heat of battle by holding down a button and using the D-pad. In reality though, the second your health bar begins to drop in a gunfight you’re in serious trouble, so much so that running away often does little good – such a fiddly control mechanism just frustrates. Eventually, you’ll take to running down opponents, simply switching from car to car. While playing golf with pedestrians does have a certain tactile charm, desires to go in Matrix style remain well and truly unsatisfied. Some sort of automatic, Metal Gear Solid-inspired system would have gone down a treat, and actually allowed you to enjoy prolonged armed combat rather than spend the entire time anxiously tiptoeing around.

At number two on the hate list is the fact that gangs will attempt to reclaim territory you’ve already earned, through an all-out battle in which you must destroy a handful of enemy lieutenants. Engaging in large-scale combat like this is quite atmospheric, particularly as you skirt between isolated smaller stand-offs, but the delicious fancy of having access to RPG launchers becomes about half as amusing as each of the scores of times you’re hit by one while in a car, dying instantly. In addition, these feel so much more like an artificial attempt to water down the game than the activities ever could. A lesser complaint might revolve around the fact that Saints Row feels a little like it’s cheating you out of a proper, next-gen title. Sure, it looks nice, but if you’re after the next revolution in this newly established genre, you won’t find it here. Your surroundings are still loaded on the fly, the majority of buildings are still off limits and there’s no dialogue from your lead character (though the script rather pointedly and humourously highlights that fact on several occasions).

Nevertheless, the mostly successful recreation of perhaps the greatest videogame of all time will suffice to make you return to spend many a happy hour cruising the streets, looking for trouble. Sure, Rockstar’s next effort will probably be the next big shift in urban action, but until that happens, what’s wrong with having another virtual playground inside your TV? Nothing, that’s what.

Dave Shaw