From designing your character you notice it already: an important part of Saints Row 2 is the large freedom you get. As your character by accident undergoes plastic surgery you can completely choose your new look. A lot of options are presented here from the way you walk up to the trashtalk. Let your fantasy run wild and create the most insane person you can think of. A man-bitch, a vulgar gorilla or a whimy gay guy, ... it's all possible. After this reforming it's time to escape from jail and take on your old business again. Saints Row 2 doesn't offer much innovation but we don't really care about that if the idea of "more of the good things" remains.

A large part of your time in the world of Saints Row is occupied with known missions. To play these you need to earn respect and sometimes that takes a little too long. For the rest no problems here. Next to that you can earn some additional money (or have fun) by taking on jobs like being bodyguard for the stars, hookers or dealers, commit insurance fraid or even spray houses with the content of a furtilizer tank. Indeed, the comedy isn't really grown up but I guess that's not the intent.

The real goal of the game gets clear very quickly: have a lot of fun without using your brains too much (on the contrary, thinking no doubt disturbs the experience). To limit the frustration that might spoilt the fun the game has some nice and handy features like checkpoints during missions, automatically replenishing health and so on. Also there's some multiplay options where especially the possibility to play the missions in co-op is very interesting.

While in a certain sense we can praise the game itself, we certainly can't do that with this PC port. The bad controls show from the very first moment that this is a console system that has been transferred to PC without much tuning and tweaking. Mouse and keyboard tend to work differently than a controller and as such the controls overal are quite clumsy and awkward.

The same problem goes for the camera which is very hard to control with the mouse and starts to roll around which is hardly practical. Sometimes it will also wonder off to strange places like a close-up of the wall or floor. Not handy if you want to be able to see the enemy. On top of that there's also a plentitude of bugs and other issues like lag. Although the PC version got released later and the system requirements are relatively high, it seems like this didn't matter for the developers as the graphics for instance don't look better than on console either.

You also need to activate the game through Steam (even if you don't buy it online). As such not a problem if it weren't for the fact that it took me hours to get working as one problem after the other came forward. Problems that wouldn't have happened if I could have installed it in the traditional way.