When discussing Saint's Row in the weeks before its release, it's a little hard not to be reminded of this Penny Arcade comic. Certainly, after playing it for a bit, Saint's Row does seem to be straining a bit harder at the whole "urban lifestyle" thing than GTA ever did. Still, upon spending some time with this game, it's hard to say that Volition didn't make a worthy entry into the increasingly crowded sandbox genre. Saint's Row has a lot of substance to boast aside from the its blinged-out exterior, including nicely polished controls, a wide variety of missions and activities to play, and impressive production values. While we've covered its multiplayer content in some detail before, this preview takes a closer look at the single-player game that most players are going to want to progress through as completely before going online and forming their own gang.

To recap, Saint's Row is a game that progresses pretty much in the GTA vein. You're dumped in the town of Stilwater, a loose GTA-style analogue of Detroit, with the initial mission of taking the lackluster 3rd Street Saints gang and increasing their stature through sheer force of your own manliness. As the Saints grow in power and influence, so does your character, so you can begin spending money on stylish customization gear like car-bling, more outfits, and custom music to listen to as you play. You can also spend money on more immediately useful things like better guns, more ammo, and special melee weapons to carry with you, along with health-restoring items like sports drinks and burgers. You rarely need health boosts outside of especially heated battles since your health bar is constantly regenerating, and as street thugs go, you are inordinately badass in Saint's Row. You will notice that you can take three pistol bullets straight in the chest, wearing no body armor, and still only lose about 10% of your total health bar. That's just how you roll.

This sort of balance means that Saint's Row in single-player mode is shorter on challenge and longer on power-fantasy than your average GTA clone. It is possible to fail missions and activities, but even police can be easily handled in a straight-up firefight if you have enough ammo on hand. If you die at all (which the game refers to as "smoked"), chances are it's the result of driving a car around at highly unsafe speeds until it up and explodes in a giant fireball. This penalizes you about 10% of your money and dumps you in front of a hospital, which is at most an inconvenience. Police can "bust" you to force you to start over in similar fashion, usually if they manage to surprise you or pull you aside as you're trying to steal a car. Otherwise getting busted is a relatively rare event, outside of risky activities like Carjacking and Hostage. Even if you call down more cops than you can kill, evading them is usually a simple matter of hopping in a car and driving in the opposite direction until you lose them.

Stealing cars is very simple, to the point where it's easy to end up filling long stretches of time just grabbing interesting cars and taking them back to your house (or "Crib") garage to store them in order to add them to your collection semi-permanently. Theft is accomplished by running up a car and pressing the Y button, which causes you to ram the driver's head against the dash, drag him out of the car, and then hop in to take his place. You can steal and keep pretty much anything you can fit in your garage, from muscle cars to delivery trucks, and every car has an appropriate sense of handling and top speed. The manufacturer and types of cars are fictional, but it's not hard to figure what they're supposed to be.

There are some interesting requirements to keep in mind when stealing or selecting a car for a job, such as how many followers you have with you at the moment. You can have other members of your gang with you for certain missions, call homies into your entourage using your cellphone, or if you're playing an activity like Snatch that requires you to recruit followers. If you are using a four-door car, then up to three followers can drive along with you. If you grab a two-door car then you can only take along one. Two door cars tend to be faster, however, and are better for missions that involve car chases. It pays, as a result, to have a wide number of cars that suit your mission at hand, or to at least be able to recognize different types of cars on the road quickly.

Getting cars to stop so you can hijack them is easy; other cars won't run over you while you're in the road. Simply step in front of a car on the road and it will stop and wait until you get out of the way. Run over to the driver side door quickly enough and you can easily hijack it... provided the car turns out to be full of civilians. If rival gang members are in the car, then they'll start chasing you down and you'll have to kill them to take the car, which in turn can call down more gang members or cops down on you. In Saint's Row, Stilwater is divided into about 38 different territories, each controlled by a particular gang. If you hijack cars in your own territory then you'll always get civilians out of them, but when hijacking in rival gang territory there's a chance you'll end up in a fight with the local gang for your troubles.

As you play through the game's various story-driven missions, more areas come under the control of the Saints, and in turn you'll find yourself able to do as you please safely in more areas. Although you can theoretically max out your character without ever playing a mission, the game is much harder on you if you don't, simply because there will be more rival gangs that are willing to attack you for simple things like traveling through their territory.

A key mechanic that plays in to expanding your gang's territory is the idea of the respect and notoriety meters. Respect is simply a stat you bulk you by finishing missions and doing suitably hard and thuggish things like robbing businesses, killing rivals, and stealing cars. You get more appreciable Respect bonuses, though, for completing Activities. You can find most Activities by bringing up the Map option from the main menu and looking for pale blue diamonds. Each Activity has so many levels at a given location. You can play any Activity as much as you want, but only gain Respect when you complete a new level of it at a given location. Aside from unlocking more Missions that let you progress the plot, gaining Respect has a visible effect on the way people treat you. At the game's beginning you hear constant insults from people on the street and in cars, but as your respect levels increase then you get less invective. Gang members may actually pause to praise you as you walk by, and at very high respect levels you get both random praise and come-ons from women.

Notoriety is simply accumulated as you commit crimes the police notice, and can be eliminated by driving through a particular business called the Forgive and Forget chapel. Businesses are yellow diamonds on the map, and these areas are where you go to purchase clothing, firearms, or simply to knock over a business if you feel like doing that. Robbing businesses is more trouble than it's worth early on because of the safe-cracking mini-game you have to play, but it's fun to pull off once or twice if you need a lot of fast cash. The only business you really need to visit regularly is the gun store, Friendly Fire, but if you're into customization then you'll be spending a lot of time at the various shops to purchase little details for your cars and character.

You also have to purchase songs for your MP3 player if you ever want to hear much in the way of music aside from listening to the radio while you drive around with a car. This means most of the game's audio experience is dialogue up until you're in a car or until you're late enough in the game to purchase licensed tracks for your in-game player. Fortunately the dialogue features some superb acting from the likes of Michael Clark Duncan and David Carradine, and there's lots of variety in the dialogue you hear from passers-by.

Visuals and graphics deserve a special mention with Saint's Row, since they're really a major part of the game's appeal. While perhaps plain compared to other 360 titles, Saint's Row has some amazingly detailed and slick visuals compared to most all other sandbox games. It comes through particularly well in the car-chase sequences, and when making a character at the game's beginning. Especially nice is the amount of variety in the appearances of the city dwellers. There are generic types, but it's not nearly as repetitive as the character models you might encounter in an actual GTA game. Regardless of how you might feel about the "urban" theme to the look in Saint's Row, the presentation of that theme is remarkably detailed.

Dressing your character up in new fashions is enjoyable for far more than the psychological value, the fashions are actually realized with remarkable skill. This is no great surprise coming from Volition, who proved with The Punisher that they were expert at putting just the right details into a scene or character model to make it feel really authentic even at much lower polygon counts than they have to work with in Saint's Row. With this game there's a refreshing feeling of moving through a city that feels like more than just a playground for your character to rampage in.

The single-player mode of Saint's Row is probably a game you've played before. It may be many games you've played before. You probably haven't played them when they looked this good, offered quite so many options, or optimized the power fantasy aspects of the sandbox genre quite so openly. Someone who is a true enthusiast for the genre by itself is probably going to find a lot to like in this game, as may fans of the TV hip-hop lifestyle that Saint's Row vaguely seems to be endorsing. It's probably not a game for everyone, but sandbox games are still hot and severely lacking for the 360 at the moment, and there's plenty of room in the genre for an offering as solid as Volition's.