Saint's Row

In Saints Row, players start as a member of the 3rd Street Saints. Under constant threat from rival gangs and corrupt officials, the city of Stilwater must be conquered one district at a time. Saints Row starts with a bang and never slows down, offering an unparalleled level of character and vehicle customization and the freedom to progress through the game any way the player chooses. Every action taken in the fully dynamic world is an opportunity for players to earn respect. With enough respect, the city evolves into a giant playground for the player to traverse. Saints Row hopes to revolutionise the open world genre with an online multiplayer experience, allowing players to battle it out against rival gangs online for the first time.

You’re probably thinking that it sounds like a Grand Theft Auto rip-off! We were also expecting an almost identical free-roaming game, but although there are many similarities, Saint’s Row does have enough differences to make it stand on its own merits.

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Saint’s Row initially begins with some heavy customisation of your character, allowing you to mould your gangster’s face with extreme precision. This character will then appear in all of the cut-scenes in the game, so make sure you choose wisely! Like GTA, Saint’s Row has a main mission and tons of side objectives that take you across the huge city environment. The difference is that, at times, you’ll need to earn a certain amount of respect before you can accept some missions, so you’ll have to take part in side-quests in order to boost your score. The first set of missions and side-quests that we played were more of an introduction to the gameplay and controls and after 4 hours of gameplay we’d barely scratched the surface.

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Your unnamed character has become caught up in the middle of a gang war and recruited by the local thugs. The first test you’ll face is to prove your worthiness by fighting a member of the gang. This serves as an introduction to the fighting controls, which you’ll be using frequently, and you’ll need to punch the living daylights out of a couple of the gangsters to be accepted into the new fraternity.