Saints Row

That’s right the first one. After my completion of Saint’s Row The Third, I felt compelled to go back in time and round up the remaining achievements in the original. I only had the multiplayer left as with a lot of games, so it was a major drag but I got there in end and with it, one of my statistically toughest completions to date.

Saint’s Row follows the story of some dude who joins the Third Street Saints and works his way up the ladder to become one of the more important members of the gang. Gang activities include wearing purple, listening to horrible music and generally being obnoxious to members of the public.

The one bright side of playing as your created character is that he doesn’t actually say anything when you are free roaming which beats the hell of the shit that comes out of the Saints Row the Third’s character’s mouths.

The single player game play elements essentially have you complete Grand Theft Auto style missions and bizarre activities like escorting prostitutes while they entertain clientele and everyone’s personal favourite, committing insurance fraud. More on that later.

As I only really played the multiplayer recently, I can’t remember much else about how good the graphics were but they look very dated now. The worst thing by far though is the music, especially in the menus and waiting for games to load. It’s like they got the collection of the most unsuccessful or failed rap artists that can only ‘sing’ about getting ‘hos’, taking drugs and committing murders in the most basic ways. It’s honestly horrible. I remember thinking it was shit at the time but as the series got bigger, it’s really noticeable that they invested more in the music in the sequels.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 43 Achievements

Having looked back over the single player achievements, there isn’t much that was easy other than completing the main storyline and taking over the enemy gang territory.  There are only 6 that relate to the main story.

Completing all the activities for the Racket Lord achievement is one of the toughest achievements simply because you have to complete all levels of insurance fraud. This is one of the most unforgiving activities ever. You have to throw yourself in front of cars and get hit but to achieve the scores necessary to complete it, you have to be really good or get insanely lucky. From memory, I was the latter.

After completing all the activities, I still had three single player achievements left to get. Taking 50 hostages was one of them and it is as frustrating in this as it was in Saints Row the Third. You have to steal a car with someone in it and then extort the hostage in a police chase fifty times. Fifty times is excessive to say the least, especially when it’s down to chance that passengers will even appear in the car.

You also have steal 30 boxes from shops. This can only be done at night so you are limited with time before you have to wait again to do it some more. The worst part about this is that I didn’t even know it was a thing until I had completed the game, meaning I had to sit around waiting for night time, several times to get this done.

The last one I got was for earning $1,000,000 which probably shows that I wasn’t the best at the game as I expect quite a few others would have got this with minimum after-game effort. I didn’t even have it after doing all that fucking around with the boxes.

Multiplayer

If ever a game type didn’t need multiplayer, open world sandbox Grand Theft Auto style games don’t. I’ve never understood why they feel the need to ham multiplayer into everything and Saints Row was one of first games to do it.

There are twelve achievements associated to the multiplayer element. Of these twelve, there are two individual co-op missions that each carry an achievement. I was lucky enough to find someone who was really good to carry me over the line with these.

The basic premise of the versus multiplayer is that you need to gain skill in one of the various game modes to achieve the rank of Kingpin. There are 6 different game modes to choose from and you have to play three of them for specific achievements.

They are all very onerous. I cannot fathom how much of the multiplayer you would have to play legitimately in order to get all the achievements but it took four of us a good 25 hours trading off wins and kills to get them all. You have to kill the pimp 50 times in Protect tha Pimp. You get two or three kill chances per game and when you factor in random people who actually still play the game joining and the fact the game won’t load with an odd number of people, setting up the matches itself is a painstaking process.

Once you’ve done that, you can move on to collecting and dropping off 500 chains. Again, this is excessive. You can score up to 30 chain drops per match with each match taking 10 minutes and with the same game-launch issues as with Protect tha Pimp, this becomes really fucking irritating after a short while.

Of the specific game mode achievements, that only leaves Xzibitionist for getting the car to level 4  50 times in Blinged Out Ride. This one takes the longest and I cannot see how one match legit could get a level four car with the shit you have to go through to boost it. It’s mental.

There is another for buying 100 items of clothing from the store but that’s easy coupled with how much money you get from the above matches and the fact there is a free DLC with loads of cheap items (still true at time of writing anyway). There’s also one for getting 100 headshots with the sniper rifle but that’s easy again with how many games you have to play and once you know the sniper locations.

There is also the Dominator achievement for winning 10 ranked matches in a row but that’s blah after all of the above.

The biggest pain in the ass though is the Kingpin achievement. You will get Thug, Killa and Gangsta along the way but these achievements are based on your position on the ranking boards which means you have to keep playing and winning your chosen game mode to progress and it takes forever. If you lose even one match, you lose more progress than reasonable.  You have to get to somewhere around the 1,100^th position on the leaderboard to trigger it and once you do, you will thank the stars that you don’t have to play Saints Row multiplayer again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Saints Row was actually a good single player experience and it’s a real shame that it took the developers 2 titles to realise that multiplayer is not the reason people buy their games. I wouldn’t expect to see a review for Saints Row II appearing here any time soon as the multiplayer for that appears all the more excessive.