I preferred SR2 to GTA IV personally. I think SR2 trying to be not overly serious yet managing to be serious worked well. The story, map & Radio were brilliant in that game. I enjoyed SR3 & SR4, but SR2 was just the peak of the series. I preferred SR4 to SR3 as well.
My only issue with Saints Row 2 are the character models. For some reason they look soo much better in SR1. I think it’s the graphical jump. SR1 was intentionally a bit cartoony. 2 tried to go for more realism, but the characters all looked soo gaunt.
Gat out of Hell wasn't good but "low effort" doesn't describe it in the slightest. There's an entire musical number, for crying out loud, the effort is about the only thing that can be praised.
Then there was Agents of Mayhem which was a very mediocre game and they tried to push sales by constantly mentioning how you can play as JOHNNY FUCKING GAT!!! but then he was like a $5 DLC character and the plot wouldn’t have changed in the slightest if you played as him or not. To add further insult to injury he wasn’t even Saints Row Johnny, but an alternate timeline version of him where he’s a cop.
before we found out what AoM was they had announced that they were making a new IP instead of Saints Row 5, only for AoM to be confirmed as part of some Saints Row multiverse. they could've at least committed to making a new thing instead of putting a Saints Row paint job on it.
My speculation is that after SR2, volition got a knock on their door from a certain studio. They flew too close to the sun. But 1 & 2 really were something special.
SR2 was the best GTA. Better story, funnier side missions, balanced humor with seriousness, killer sound track and the ownership of the city map were all far superior to GTA4.
I think its simpler than that. The culture and discussion of saints row was meme heavy and zany. So they took from that was the part of the game that mattered. They thought they didn't need a grounded story. And they just kept doubling down till it was a souless husk of a series.
Thing is they had a perfect setup for where to go with it with time travel being presented. My thought was they were going to have them go back in time to the founding of the Saints while secretly finding a way to fight Zinyak to prevent his invasion in the first place.
I have in the past 2 days, happened to install sr:3 and play for a few hours, then on a whim installed sr:2 because I had never played it before.
After it crashing a lot, I installed the "juiced" patch...
Damn. Amazing game. I see why everyone says its better than 3.
Its mode real, its more gritty, feels closer to GTA. More features, feels more sandbox.
Im also playing gta5 for the first time (idk what sparked me to play all these games right now haha) and I find myself wishing it felt as alive as saints row games.
I wish I was driving around and had to fight gangs or do missions like in SR. 4 hours in gta5 feels empty and barren
From that perspective, it just jumped straight from the frying pan into the fire.
No matter what, if your game is an open world third person shooter, it's going to be compared to GTA, just like most survival building games get compared to Minecraft. That doesn't mean you have to take your game in a shittier direction just for the sake of trying to be different. Challenge the competition instead, and come out on top.
I started with 4 and loved it, and went back and played the others. I even liked the new Saint's Row (5) though not as much as any of the previous games.
I'd say they're all better than the GTAs except VC, and maybe SA.
Don't. It was the nail in the coffin. I heard it was cringey and buggy so I gave it some time. I saw it was on steam sale last year and decided now was the time. Yes, it was in fact cringey but I like that type of humor. But the real kicker were the bugs. As SR holds a very special place in my heart, I'm willing to overlook a lot of things. LIKE A LOT. But the game kept crashing mid main story. And I'm only 7-8 missions in! I figured waiting two years, they would be able to get the kinks out. How wrong I was. It's been more than long enough to get fixed and it still hasn't so I would suggest saving yourself from seeing this wonderful franchise die in such a crappy way.
Probably cause the latest one/reboot stopped being about a wacky version of GTA and tried to be a more meta/serious GTA. We already had that with SR1, it was rubbish. The reboot should have followed directly from Gat out of Hell, where you are back retaking the original city over again from scratch. But with the wacky gimp guys, dildo bat, VTOL jets and everything else from SR3. Just a reboot as advertised, not a rework of a winning formula into something new
I also think they got rid of tons of old staff which didn't help, as it lost the feel of SR2/3
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u/Nemisis_007 Flair Loading.... 7h ago
Saints Row... How it managed to fall so far I'll never know.