Visuals/Audio
Visually, Saints Row is outstanding. There are no ‘next gen’ graphics here but they’re impressive enough and much better then San Andreas’s visuals. A top end PC could manage these visuals easily. The most obvious feature is the texturing of the buildings, they’re superbly done. Once you’ve stopped staring at that, you’ll notice the stunning lighting. In places if you stand and stare at the shadow of a building you’ll notice the shadow slowly changing in correlation to the position of the sun – That’s detail for you.
The city of Stillwater is very well designed, and does look impressive as you drive around but something just didn’t feel right, and I could never put my finger on it. Why did I feel that San Andreas’s city was more immersive? I would guess it’s because we had such a large range of transport that was active in the game that it felt more realistic. Whereas in saints row, all you see are cars, lorries and that’s about it. Granted saints row has a huge range of vehicles, but you don’t see two types of them in our real world. Even the pedestrian AI in saints row is more impressive then either of the two GTA’s mentioned in this review.
Explosions in this game are awesome and very realistic. I loved throwing Molotov cocktails off bridges and watching the carnage below, until I stepped back and got creamed by a 10 ton truck. During an explosion you can see the heat shimmer off burning objects too, it looks lovely but depending on how large your explosion is it can slow down the engine noticeably in some cases. The frame rate drop doesn’t detract from the game play though, its not as bad as other 360 games anyway. In addition to this, vehicles explode with car parts flying all over the place, this alone looks so good.
The character models in the game are nothing special, basic and functional, while the cut scene fmv is superbly done and comical in places, and are enough to almost rival the cut scenes in Dead Rising. Your character never speaks in the game by the way – a good move given that you can create your character do be say afro carribean, Hispanic etc. It would mean a huge amount of voice data for each ethnic class you choose. That isn’t to say that your character doesn’t speak though…
A common quirk that Saints Row shares with GTA is the ‘vanishing cars’ issue. If you see a nice car drive past you, and you quickly turn around to see it, it will have vanished! This isn’t as bad as seeing an entire lorry just vanish before your eyes – I seemed to notice this on the freeway on the odd occasion. I would make an assumption that this is down to the streaming technology that both these games use to load the surrounding area in which you are, instead of being loaded up in one go and causing performance issues. So in regards to that, saints row does share these issues that the GTA series suffers from.
The audio portion of Saints Row really does shine through in places. The voice acting is brilliant, and just like the GTA series, a whole host of famous actors do the voiceovers for some of the ingame characters. Some of them are:
Also in common with GTA, the game has its own radio stations, which sadly are no where near as good as the one featured in San Andreas, let alone the awesome stations in Vice City. There are 12 radio stations in total, and over 150 songs. There are a lot of well known acts too, but I just found the stations annoying and switch them off, the moment I enter a vehicle. There’s very little humour in some of the chat stations, although I did find one very good feature. There was one station that mentioned sales going on in various shops – and true they were! There was an advertised -20% off sale at the Friendly Fire shop, so I decided to check it out and it was really true – how good is that? Radio advertising really does work.
My favourite audio effect is when you leave a car behind. As you do these you can still hear the radio in the background, but it’s slightly muffled due to its distance. The same effect is used as members of opposing gangs approach you, e.g. Westside rollerz vehicles blasting out hardcore tunes. This is the first game that I’ve ever seen this effect used in, and when I noticed it, I appreciated the game a lot more for its unique traits.