Finished Saints Row 2 at 93% completion. Did all the minigames and races, but didn't bother with chopshops or hitman missions or all the collectibles because those just seemed like busywork. The game is fun but kind of easy like I said before. Once you get unlimited smg ammo, combat holds no challenge and waves of enemies will instantly melt before your spray of bullets. Also you have regenerating health and can hold 4 food items that can restore 70% of your health instantly, so surviving is usually not a problem. I did have to look up how to actually eat the food, because the game never actually mentioned what buttons to press as far as I was aware. Money is also worthless. After about 2 hours of play I had more money than I could ever use. You can buy shops (which I did whenever I saw the sign, but didn't go out of my way for) which has the reward of paying out more money. You could buy cars for exorbitant prices... which you can just steal for free. You can buy clothing items and guns and ammo, none of which are very expensive. I ended up with over a million dollars and had nothing to spend it on. I could have bought the rest of the shops and all the clothes in the game, but I doubt that would have cost more than 200k. Weirdly the game is constantly reminding you to go back to your house to collect your money, as if it actually matters at all.
The minigames are mostly kind of awful, and needed a bit more thought into how to make them fun. The Septic Avenger missions that everybody likes to talk about is trivial because you can stop the truck for as long as you want and your truck is indestructible. This means that you just stop the truck in front of every building and fire at a single spot until the health bar runs down. A better implementation would probably have been a coverage based score rather than a health bar and remove the ability to stop the truck. Heli-Assault is terrible and frustrating, and both instances of it are the exact same thing. Your lackeys are constantly whining at you the second an enemy appears and they also like to drive under underpasses where you cannot cover them. Also you need to take out enemy choppers the second they appear or else they might blow you up in a single hit with their missiles. Which sucks. Every minigame where the AI is driving is frustrating, because they drive slowly and kind of badly. The only minigame that I considered actually fun the entire time was Insurance Fraud, where you hurl yourself in front of speeding vehicles to launch yourself into the air and chain collisions for extra points. The only problem with that game is that there is no arcade mode. I want to be able to see how high of a score I can get before the time runs out, but the last level of the mission ends as soon as you reach $500,000 and there is no option to continue. Oh sure, they make 10 different bonus modes for the demolition derby that I will never want to play, but not a single bonus mode for the only fun game. The races are kind of frustrating because the minimap won't tell you whether you've gotten gold on a race or not. I don't know why because the other minigames turn grey once complete, but the races make you guess. In the end I had to spend like an hour taking a cab around to every race to pick up the last 4 or 5 that I hadn't done yet.
The game is kind of buggy, I had about 6 or 7 hard crashes that required me to restart my 360. The aforementioned cab is this games version of fast travel. If you think to phone the number written on a cab, one will spawn and you can get in and then select a location on the map to instantly travel to... most of the time. Sometimes the cab will spawn and instantly pull a U-turn and start driving away from you. You can't call another until the first one despawns so I would frequently end up sprinting for minutes trying to catch up to it or even steal another vehicle just so I could catch my cab. Ridiculous! Why can't it just go to the fast travel screen immediately after I call the cab? A couple times I took a cab and immediately died upon arrival. One time the cab arrived underwater in the sewer.
The story is light and fun and really captures the joy of being a nearly invincible mass murdering psychopath. There isn't any very memorable characters or moments, but that doesn't matter because it's all about how much chaos you can cause in this world. Overall the game is fun, but could have used a bit more polish.
