Saints Row 2 Hands On

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Within minutes, you're back in Stilwater, starting bar brawls, stealing cars and gate-crashing the court-room, where one of your faithful lieutenants is standing trial. Right from the outset, there's no question of being anyone's minion. You're a gang boss - and okay, your gang might need to be whipped back into shape, but you used to rule this city, and that's your objective once again.

As before, the game focuses on the idea of taking over territory from rival gangs - depicted on the map as a grid of neighbourhoods, each of which is coloured in the style of the dominant gang. Much extended in this game is the concept of cribs, properties which you can buy and redecorate right from the start (money permitting), with plenty of other properties up for grabs to add to your regular income. Your gang hangs out in cribs, and as you progress you gain the ability to order them to come along with you as AI backup on your missions (or hell-raising sessions).

Almost from the outset, the whole city is your oyster. Saints Row 2 isn't mean in how it doles out fun; an entire toybox is emptied at your feet. Dozens of "activities", which earn you Respect and cash, are available early on in the game. You start with the s***-spraying one we mentioned earlier, but move on to flying assault helicopters to take out enemy vehicles, an assortment of races, drive-by shootings and stunt jumps, and, perhaps my favourite so far, Insurance Fraud. This simply involves going to a target location and performing the most impressive pratfall you can (throwing yourself off a building repeatedly is good) to rack up the insurance cash.

You certainly won't be running out of new vehicles to try out in a hurry.

The game is fast, frantic and funny. Physics is tweaked to be fun, rather than realistic - cars and motorbikes (yes, it has motorbikes) travel at impressive speeds, blow up in very satisfying ways and are an arcade-style joy to handle. Your character is a criminal superman, with a recharging health bar and tons of stamina; you're far from being immortal, but there's no question that you're a videogame anti-hero, rather than a small-time thief. And if you're thinking this all sounds a bit like Crackdown, then yeah, we were too. Which is a very good thing.

Volition's goal here is to let nothing get in the way of fun, and from what we've seen the developer's succeeding. It's not just a matter of making the whole world enormously over the top - although that helps. It's also a question of tweaking every part of the experience to prevent players from being frustrated by bad design. Gone, for example, are missions where you have to drive the whole way across the city only to die at your destination and restart back on the other side of the city once more. In-mission checkpoints now allow you to restart after the last objective you completed.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Saints Row 2, however - more appealing even than the dark humour, the creative swearing, the carnage and the combat, more appealing even than the ability to play as a fat tranny - will be the co-operative play. It's fully drop-in, drop-out. What that means in real terms is that you can take your single-player character, hop into someone else's game, complete some missions with them, and then hop back out to your own single-player game. The missions you completed and items you picked up in co-op stay with you - and you're not bound to that game session. You can happily go off and join someone else's session straight away if you want.

The fact that you can put women's clothing on male characters seems less outrageous when you discover that you can also wear this.

The whole game is co-op-enabled, from story missions and activities to the city itself. You don't have to stick together during co-op, either - it's entirely possible to play on opposite ends of the city, and the game will sync up perfectly when you get back together. You don't even have to be friendly - kill your co-op partner and when he's resurrected he'll have the option of turning the tables on you by launching an impromptu deathmatch.

Having been a GTA clone last time, Saints Row 2 is now shaping up to be the anti-GTA - or at least, the anti-GTA IV. This is an openworld crime game about neon lights, huge explosions, fast cars, massive body counts and crazy rival gangs like the Ronin, a Japanese band of cyber-punk samurai, and the Sons of Samedi, a voodoo obsessed Caribbean drug cartel. Our expectations weren't particularly high when we went to see it, but having played the game for several hours, those same expectations have skyrocketed. For those left cold by GTA IV, this is shaping up to be the openworld game you've been waiting for, and even for those who were charmed by Niko's Liberty City adventure, Saints Row 2 is a welcome blast of mayhem and bright lights.