Saints Row 2 Info

While the original Saints Row may have lacked the expertly executed satire and originality of the GTA series, it certainly made up for it with its mostly excellent controls, hilarious side missions and dazzling visuals. Saints Row 2, due sometime in 2008, builds on the original Xbox 360 crime sim and packs in some exceptional new features not yet seen in the genre. It’s aiming to be a serious threat to GTA IV’s world conquering plans.

Firstly, Saints Row 2 is packing a lot of elements that should have been included in the first place, namely aircraft. Fixed wing aircraft and helicopters are in, as are motorbikes, jet-skis, speedboats and more, and most of them will have performance upgrades available. The addition of aircraft in particular is handy given that the Stilwater location in SR2 will apparently be 45% larger than that of the first game.

If what little we have seen so far can be believed, you’ll also be able to fly right through a building! How cool is that? We can’t wait to cleave right through skyscraper penthouse to take out an enemy drug lord, and mutter something deadpan like, “Sorry to crash the party”. Entire buildings won’t be destructible – this isn’t an Al-Qaeda training simulator – but flying aircraft through windows certainly opens up a lot of cool new gameplay possibilities; a dogfight in and out of buildings with an army jet or police chopper would be particularly awesome.

Character customisation, which was already quite deep in the previous game, has been enhanced to the point where you can customise your character’s sex, or in the words of the developers, “you can play as a man, a woman or anything in between”. Yes, your dreams of controlling an Uzi-toting transsexual are about to come true (you sicko).

Players will now be able to take hostages and use them as human shields, which will apparently be particularly useful during interior combat. You can also dual-wield ranged firearms, and rip things out of the environment such as road signs and mailboxes to use as melee weapons, Incredible Hulk style. In fact, nearly every object in the game’s sprawling environment can be interacted with in one way or another.

One massive inclusion in the game is the online co-op mode. We’re not talking the watered-down two-player component from the last game, this is a substantial co-op mode that allows you to play through the entire story and all the side missions with a friend over Xbox Live, ala Crackdown. Can you even imagine how cool that will be? The developers are also promising additional mission objectives specific to the co-op mode in order to put a greater focus on teamwork.

Not only is the city of Stilwater much larger in SR2 than it was in the original, it’s also set to feature over 130 building interiors to explore and/or crash through, six new above ground districts and four underground, plus every district from the first game has been retouched and redesigned to make the experience seem fresh.

While Rockstar’s GTA IV seems to be focussing on realism, Saints Row 2 is shaping up to be an enjoyable hyper-realistic alternative. We’ll have more in the coming months, but for now we’ll leave you to ponder how much funnier throwing yourself in front of traffic during the Insurance Fraud missions will be with a friend.