But in pretty much every other respect I would say that Saint's Row 3 is the inferior complete game. SR2 was a bit weird and loose, but SR3 is pretty tight. After I was done with SR3? Stopped playing, haven't touched it since. I on the other hand was left with a game that I barely cared about completing once, whereas I've played through Saints Row 2 four different times to completion, and spent countless (well, countable actually, as I have two 80 hour, and two 50-60 hour length saves) hours just messing around in the game's world. The people who didn't really give a shit about the previous games and had and still have no intention of playing them. SR3 is really disappointing because it feels like what they did, and I'm almost certain this IS what they did, was realize how many people knew of SR2's reputation as a wacky, zany, fun game, but how few of those people who knew it's reputation actually bought it, and designed a game specifically for THEM. I was hoping he'd be in charge of STAG at the very least- but no. I bought and played through SR2's mediocre DLC just to milk out any details about what Dex was doing before SR3, a game which seemingly forgot all about him. Then there is the fact that they basically abandoned the entire continuing plot from the first two games which I actually cared about. So they have a fraction of the number of actual missions that SR2 had, while making other missions literally just levels of Activities- ultimately having less of those than 2 as well. THQ apparently saw how much people loved the Activities in 2 and thought 'WELL, WE MIGHT AS WELL MAKE MOST OF SR3 INTO ACTIVITIES!'. It had a great campaign and fun as hell activities. Saints Row 2 also had a better mission structure. Even then I thought that he was just playing dead until the game ended and I realized 'wait, Gat never came back.'. I didn't even know Gat died until a while after what was supposed to be his funeral scene. In Saints Row 3, your best friend for two games dies without any real note. You gave a shit when one of your friends died in it. SR2 had some wacky stuff in it which was great, but at it's core it had great characters and great action, both were serious but both could be funny. The one closest to the top was that it tried TOO hard to be 'lel so randumb XD'.

SR3 had better feeling combat, but it had many many issues.

Saint row 2