Decided to abandon SR2. The constant crashes and then the absolute absurdity of how instant-kill some things are in the missions just pissed me off too much. I had to restart the game over five times for one mission due to crashes and being squishy and carrying a squishy teammate in a game that throws a constant stream of cars and fire at you just isn't something I enjoy. An example of this is the Reunion Tour mission in the Brotherhood line, if anybody is curious. That's the one where you make Donnie plant bombs on 4 Brotherhood trucks. You have to dodge ~20 cars filled with guys, not get hit by molotov cocktails, flame-throwers, and too many bullets while protecting a guy who either just stands there or gets blown up from trucks catching fire and exploding from bullet fire. Then when you're done you have to hope your car isn't damaged too badly and your guys not incapacitated too extensively so that you can get into your car and race away before you get killed by the ridiculously large bomb you just set. It's a stupid mission anyway--why can't you just blow them up with a rocket launcher or something else that's not pointlessly elaborate?
The game just doesn't feel like it does a good job with the concept of being the head of a gang. If I'm going to be fighting a constant stream of guys from another gang, being limited to 3 gang members when the map is completely covered in SR guys is just silly. It undermines the idea that the Saints are taking over the city if you can't actually use them for anything. Curious how 3 and 4 handle this aspect, but it'll be at least a few months until I get around to starting 3.
Other than the poorly-balanced mission difficulties throughout the game, the only real mechanical problems I've run into are that weapons randomly change in story missions (meaning you have dual-wield infinite ammo Kobra equipped, you have a brief cut-scene mid-mission, and suddenly you're rocking bare-fisted suicide mode) and that you have to go find Saints to get your followers to re-join after any mission that doesn't use them or when quitting/restarting the game. You should have been able to call them on the phone like your homies, or any followers should have simply rejoined you automatically on entering the game/completing a mission they couldn't attend.
I wouldn't refer to it as a mechanical issue, but the mission variance is really bizarre. The goals and scenario of missions is randomized so for example if you're playing Mayhem level 3 it'll send you to one location, and if you restart the mission it will send you elsewhere with a very different layout and ease of destruction. The locations and situations behind missions changes to an extent that the difficulty of one iteration can be very different from another. It's an odd approach.
I like the game narrative and style quite a bit. I'm expecting that 3 being more polished will have me enjoying that a lot more. Seems like a lot of people like 3 less, though, so we'll see.
k
a two hour fetch quest? What happened here?
