Saints Row 2

I struggled to find even a second of Saints Row 2 entertaining to begin with. Tasked with designing your lead character from the ground up had me scratching my head. What did I want? I'm all for avatar customisation, but you at least want templates to work from. Where to even begin? I skipped over to the voices, of which there are three. I reasoned that once I knew the voice, I could build an image around it. A solid beginning I thought.

Three voices then. Three voices. Let's give them a listen. Confound it! Three voices, each as revolting as the last. For a male character in Saints Row 2, you have three options: black chap n' the Hood, Latino lilt, and finally a bizarre Cockney wideboy / Australian Jason Statham attempt. That's it? Can I not just have a quiet brooding Clint wheeze? Is that too much? Do you not cater for my favourite brand of cool? Whispy gentry a little too refined? Do I really have to be one of these dicks? I did. I initially sided with the faux-London accent. I convinced myself it'd be amusing to hear a Guy Richie movie alike bitching and whining at second-rate American voice over talent. It won't be that awful. It might have even been recorded by someone English. You never know!

I tried to build a Kirby comics man-mountain around the chatter. It looked alright in the in-game menu presentation bit, but running around in minimal cut in-game clothing he looked appalling. My staunch muscled minimalism had gifted me Brucey from GTA4. Thanks a fucking lot me. I hated Brucey in GTA4. His slobbering meat-headed dickery reminded me far too much of a few slathering twats that waddle around my place of work. Legs wide, shoulders back, attitude on. Each and every one of them desperate to be considered very fucking hard indeed. And now I'm playing with them, my in-game toy modelled after their deplorable persona. Good God! What if someone caught me faffing around with this lame duck attempt at masculinity? I scoured the menus to find anywhere I might partake of some drastic plastic surgery. Site secured I waddled off for another bout of self-loathing.

Eventually, after much thought I settled on the Latino voice. I married this to athletic, tanned frame, topped off with a greying corporate side-parting. From this I imagined some vague contra backstory. He's done a kill up and down South America in the eighties, then decided he liked picking on plastic gangsters for money and kicks. Innate superiority secured I began to find fun in clipped, lethal encounters with the Benetton gangs that populate Stilwater. A little later on I dressed him up in a pristine grey linen suit, with a white shirt and red / grey striped tie. My nasty little merc was gifted a whiff of class. This prism of respectability actually framed a few later callous events with a trace of humour. It's Bond appeal: thug in a suit. Avatar stepping correct, I got on with the game, which unfortunately turned out to be endless rounds of simplistic gun-battles. Nevermind!

I couldn't warm to Saints Row 2. And having spent £40 on it, I dearly wanted to. It's idea of 'cool' and 'bitching' was pitched a good ten years younger and dumber than my own particular tastes. Hating women and loving death is alright when you're fifteen and just using it to mask your own deplorable social skills, but when you're a grown-up man, it's just wearying. It might even make for a funny punchline occasionally, but that's all Saints Row 2 is: punchline. It's an endless parade of detestable shitheads, shitting on each other. I cared not one jot for any one single character or event, because they were all hateful bores. All locked out a numbskull race to out nihilise the other. Saints Row 2 doesn't want you to create a convincing ageing gangster, it would rather you dreamt up a dreadlocked, streaking, transvestite. It's only ambition to repeat what has gone before, but stupider. Saints Row 2 would love to pitch itself as the manic inbred sibling to GTA4's pretentious narrative snob. It's a pitch that doesn't hold. It's just boring. And shitty. It's a bankrupt take-off with none of the wit, wheeze or whimsy of what it's imitating. It's a game only really tolerable when the difficulty is fixed so low you can amble through its infinite shoot-outs with zero chance of stall / repeat.