VS

Let’s get one thing straight first, Grand Theft Auto was the Socrates of the sandbox style car theft game, and certainly by the time the PS2 was about was the undisputed king (you can argue that Driver was the first but you couldn’t get out the car and the city consisted five roads). When Saints Row 1 came out it was the first attempt for this genre on the “next gen” consoles and it wasn’t a bad imitation of San Andreas, with the whole recruitment and fighting between gangs.

By the time Grand Theft Auto 4 was released, the hype and the media surrounding it was massive and as far as games went it was one of the best on the 360 thus far. The graphics were unbelievable and the nostalgia for GTA3 came back bouncing with awesome effect. More poignantly there was multiplayer for the first time either in a free roam mode or competitive/co-op missions. Saints Row 2 came out a good 6 months afterwards and nothing I thought could break GTA4’s stranglehold on the market, until I played SR2.

It became abundantly clear to me that playing through Saints Row 2, I was actually playing all the stuff that was greatly missing from GTA4…fun. GTA4 was a good game don’t get me wrong but every single mission was like “kill somebody”, or “obtain item, by killing somebody” and EVERY TWO BLOODY MINUTES I had his fucking cousin ringing me up to play pool. FUCK OFF! If I want friends I’ll make an effort (plus all this gameplaying probably lost me a few too!)

The massive difference between the two games is the multiplayer option. SR2 can be played totally in co-op which seamlessly plays excellently either alone or with a friend. GTA’s closest thing to that was 3 missions which got a bit stale by the time you completed it for the 8,000th time and one of them contained one of my all-time pet peeves, escorting a brain dead NPC…who liked running in front of gunfire like a moth to a fucking flame every ten seconds. SR2 also had the side missions or “diversions” as they called them in the game and the vast majority of these were fun and entertaining. GTA obviously missed the boat on this because instead of putting more co-op missions into their DLC packages, they instead released a woeful title of a leather clad closet homosexual who must insist on riding bikes which have the handling of a push-chair on an ice rink with Yokozuna in the front seat and you fall off the seat more times than an epileptic in a planetarium show. I haven’t played the second DLC although I have heard it’s quite good.

Saints Row 2 also had another advantage in my opinion, it had planes. Yeah the handling wasn’t quite HAWX but still it was entertaining. And since it had a fully co-op story mode, my cohorts and I delighted in approaching every mission with the same gusto as the A-Team’s smash mouth yet subtle tactics. You could also create yourself in SR2 which was great, and the permutations of the attire you could own was both entertaining and hilarious. This was much better than only playing as a stone faced Slav with the personality of a walnut whose default attire is only acceptable in either a bus stop in Slovakia or a car boot sale in Runcorn.

If anything the handling in SR2 was too good as a handbrake turn usually corrected any abysmal mistake of driving. Plus it’s also commonly accepted in games of this ilk that the police reaction is always amusingly excessive. Just imagine walking down the road to the local shop to get a paper and see someone drop a piece of litter on the floor, only for about three squad cars and two SWAT vans arrive within five seconds and gun down the perpetrator  in a hail of gunfire which would rival an apocalyptic battle between Clint Eastwood and Chow-Yun Fat!

In summary, both games are entertaining and full but where Rockstar apportioned more developers on making the game look pretty, the SR2 developers were actually thinking up good ideas to put in the game and make it fun. And it just goes to show, online multiplayer co-op is worth its weight in gold, because it’s fun. GTA4’s only real shining moment online was the free roam whereby up to 8 players could just mess about, which is where the majority of our videos on this site came from.