The missions are cleverly woven into the free-form activities. There's a lot to do in Stilwater. There are a series of challenges, such as helping drug dealers, recruiting prostitutes, wreaking havoc, and racking up injuries to collect insurance. There are dynamic mini-activities like carjacking hostages, defending captured territory, and robbing businesses. Most activities earn you experience points, here called "respect". You spend that respect to play story missions. This creates a sort of dual progression, one largely freestyle, the other largely canned. The higher-level story missions can get difficult, but among the unlockable rewards in Saints Row are special character abilities, weapons, vehicles, and companions that make many of the difficult missions easier. Furthermore, the canned missions are divided among three separate storylines that don't come together until you've finished them. When it comes to things to do, Stilwater is vast, generous, and rarely ends in the sort of brick walls that plagued the Grand Theft Auto games.
As a city, Stilwater is relatively small. This isn't a San Andreas sized world. On the plus side, this makes it easy to get around. It's a modest city, but considerably more detailed, tightly contained, and broadly drawn than San Andreas. The world of Stillwater is relatively vague, and at times almost generic. You've got your industrial area, your suburbs, your downtown, your classy shopping distinct, and so on, all presented without committing to real world reference, but with their own sense of character nonetheless.
Volition benefits enormously from not having to develop for a stinky ol' Playstation 2. Since it went 3D, Grand Theft Auto has been lodged firmly and uncomfortably against the limits of Sony's console system. But with Saint's Row, the Grand Theft Auto model busts free. It's still pushing the hardware to some uncomfortable limits, as you might note by the way distant geometry suddenly pops into existence, cars sometimes mysterious vanish after the 360's RAM assumes you're not interested in them, or the graphics sometimes glitch up under the sheer weight of what's being drawn.
But that’s the price of the game’s visual ambition. Saints Row is a good-looking game that you can tear up, drive around in, and inhabit nine ways to Sunday. Like Oblivion and Dead Rising, it’s another free-form living world that demonstrates next-gen tech at its best. Consider this yet another feather in the Xbox 360’s increasingly crowded cap. - Tom Chick.
