To looking like this:

And as if to pour salt in the wound, the game still runs questionably slow at certain points. The above two images show dynamic lighting on, and off, repectively. With the exception to the character models, the game looks similar to a slightly graphically better GTA San Andreas. Now, Saint’s Row 2 has been praised to have more things to do than the GTA series. It was also being noted that the game is obviously focusing on gameplay, and not nesscarily on graphics, as it shows. Assuming that this praise was “positive” was my mistake, because when the game was finally released for PC, all people were doing was complaining about how horrible it runs instead of shutting up, putting down the graphic sliders, and coming online.

Ok, so everyone was playing in co-op mode, which don’t get me wrong, is a lot of fun when I tried. But you can only play with one other person, which means half the time the server was full. (In this case, taken, cause there’s only two frikin slots, and the host takes one already.) And while co-op makes activities and missions change sometimes, for the most part, it’s still single player! It’s called. “multi-player,” not “dual-player.” I’ve yet to play a single game of Strongarm and I beat single already. I don’t know about everyone else, but taking over territorites via a combination of doing the various game activites as well as making frags to win the game round sounds a hella lot more fun than CTF. And by combination, one player on the blue team can be drug tafficking with little to no AI cars chasing them while two or more players from the red team can be going after him. And two more players from blue can be going after another player on red who is racing, etc. Everyone is not just playing activities “or” killing, it can all happen simultaneously. Let’s see you pull that off in co-op. I see very little SR2 reviews mentiong this fact.

If you’re complaining that a game runs slow, you obviously have a decent computer to run such a game well, and are complaining to the fact that you spent $3,000 for nothing. In liu of that, the game is indeed choppy, but it is NOT “unplayable” as many claim it is, even with Dynamic Lighting set to medium. These people either don’t have an up to par computer, or are too damn stubborn to lower down the settings. You bought it. It runs poor. You can’t return it. Deal with it. Aren’t you at least glad you paid 40 bucks for this instead of 60 for the console versions?

Well, you should be. Steam has FINALLY released a patch for the game. And unlike many “performance” patches, this one actually makes a difference. (And I’m notorious for having the nastiest and most unheard of bugs in games that nobody can solve.) So if you’re one who has ababonded this game’s multiplayer because you like playing games and not slideshows, please come back, and tell your friends of the new patch.