Clash of Saints Row and GTA

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It’s a rare year when a Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto game launch within a month of each other, and if you look around the community, there’s a buzz everywhere comparing the two.

There are people who are of the opinion that Saints Row was created simply as a GTA clone, and must therefore be inferior to it in every way. There are other people who say that Saints Row is more “fun” and “mindless banter”, while GTA is more “mature”.
I think all these guys aren’t looking at the issue the right way.
Barring the fact that they’re both open-world in structure and feature, in some way, criminals or gangsters as protagonists, they’re totally different games. Even if they might have stemmed out of the same roots, the beasts that they’ve become have entirely unique identities in the world of video games.
On one hand, you have Grand Theft Auto. It’s a modern day opera of sorts. You have this guy who’s trying to climb up the social ladder. He’s got problems in his life to deal with. There are dark, gritty encounters with people around the city on the wrong side of the law. You eventually have to do some bad, nasty things to get your guy to where he wants to be. Sure, you have the freedom to roam around anywhere and do a large variety of things, most of which just involve causing untold amounts of mayhem and punching wayward women with baseball bats, but if you’re playing the game and appreciating the story, setting an environment, you know what you are knee deep in.
Now look at Saints Row. People are crazily hilarious. People know they’re crazily hilarious. And the game knows the people know they’re crazily hilarious. Particularly in the new Saints Row IV, where the game wants to serve all your power fantasies at once. There’s no notion of a dark tale spun around crime syndicates with debts and money-laundering and prostitution and being sad and mature and gruffly serious all the time. It’s just pushing the fun knob all the way to the top, fuelling all your basic needs in terms of satisfying gameplay. On its own, it holds complete meaning, and on its own, it’s a great game. Does it do something better or worse than GTA? No. Simply because it doesn’t do anything that GTA does. It’s not built on the same principles, at least now. Having vehicles and in-game radios and third person shooting and open-world mayhem and Wanted levels doesn’t make the games the same.
GTA and Saints Row aren’t comparable, simply because they’re different kinds of games. And it’s possible for you to love both, I think.
If you’re an open-world gamer, it’s time for you to get excited. Lots of game time is heading straight at you.