I got my money's worth and then some.

On the suggestion from a good friend of mine, I picked up the Saints Row double pack from the might Best buy a while back. I have never really been a huge fan of the big box style games where you can free roam. Yes, you can do what you want.Yes, at your own pace and when you feel like it. I will have to say to anyone that challenges me on this that it is a linear game. There are things you have to do to get from point A to Z, and you do have to do them in order. You can't just walk in to the last mission of the game and finish it the second you start.

That being said....
I was a huge fan of this game. You play a guy who only says a couple of lines in the whole game (the AI makes fun of you constantly for it too). You are pulled in to gang life by accident and start taking over the town.

I actually played this game the wrong way. Wrong, that is, according to what most walkthru's would tell you. I actually played the Vice Kings missions first, Los Carnales second, and the Westside Rollerz missions last. Everything I read after said that the VK missions were supposed to be hard. I think they got it all wrong. I had more trouble with the ending missions on the other two.

This game to me was fun. There were elements of it I loved. I got a kick out of Insurance Fraud activites and the Mayhem activities. So much silly happened in those two that I kept going back to them over and over.

My only gripe was that you had to gain this whole thing called "Respect" in order to continue with the game. Basically, they force you to do all the little tedious crap that you don't really want to do in order to move on. That was the only thing I didn't like about the whole game. I'd be on a roll and I wanted to go to the next mission just to find out I didn't have enough "respect" to actually do it. I gotta say, I paid my $20 for the game... let me play it.

This is only the second sandbox game I have played all the way through and the first from THQ. Red Dead Redemption was the first one. Both of these games are highly different from one another and both enjoyable.

The ending to this game is great. One I never expected.

I popped in Saint's Row 2 almost immediately after I got done with the first one and was quite pleased right away. I'm only about an hour in to it. But for $20, I got my money's worth out of just one of the games already.