While Saints Row 2 is revered for its ludicrously fun activities, some of them aren't always so great. Here are those examples.
- The Tow Truck Diversion. The Shaft tow truck handles poorly and can't be fixed, and the time-limit is short, which makes the lack of saving rather unforgiving. Though it is doable, just time-consuming and very tedious. By far the most consistent way to do it without failing is to recruit homies.
- Heli Assault Level 6 has you flying a helicopter to defend a van through tightly packed skyscrapers and mazes of highways. The most annoying part is that bumping into something usually sends your helicopter bouncing off in the opposite direction at top speed, which usually means you're going to hit something else. Also, your rocket launchers can get knocked off, and the machine gun is nowhere near as effective. Last but not least, somehow, the rival gangs you are up against also have attack choppers, and you have no idea where they will come from until a missile just struck your tail. What's worse, you can only survive three hits max. There are at least three of them in level 6 (though granted, one of them concentrates only on the car). On the last stop, the game spawns a car right next to Shaundi with a rocket launcher, meaning that if you're not careful, you can get blown up seconds before the mission ends.
- The Trailer Park Heli Assault on Level 6 has a helicopter spawn after each stop (there are 6 stops, meaning there are 5 helicopters). More often than not, they are too high to shoot back at without abandoning Shaundi to die from the enemy cars.
- More annoyingly, while your chopper can technically survive three missile hits, more often than not one missile can send your chopper flipping (especially if you tried to dodge one by flying sideways). If your chopper is flipped upside down, it's over. There is no way to recover from that position but to see yourself crash and burn (or cancel the activity early).
- Pierce and Shaundi will always whine about you not protecting them as soon as they get the slightest amount of damage, even if they took the damage by hitting the wall themselves. Pierce, in particular, has an annoying tendency to drive through tunnels and underneath highways and railroads, blocking you from shooting any of the cars following him.
- Trail Blazing Levels 5 onward. Heli Assault may be annoying, but it is something that can be mastered by getting used to the chopper control and memorizing the enemy Tornados' spawning locations. Trail Blazing, on the other hand, puts you at complete mercy at the game's random number generator. You may train yourself to turn smoothly at every corner, memorizing every obstacle and rocket/barrel location, but you will not win until the game decides to give you enough pedestrians and cars to hit along the way. Downtown level 5 and 6 in particular features long stretches of tunnels, parking lots, and shopping malls where there is often literally nothing to hit.
- Nuclear Plant Mayhem levels 4-6, especially if playing under 'Hardcore' difficulty. Whether you succeed in them often depends on if the neighborhood they send you to has lots of small objects to blow up (e.g., fences), some neighborhoods have enough small objects to blow up to finish high levels very quickly (e.g., Frat Row), others simply don't have enough objects for you to be able to reach the required amount of damage (not without constantly blowing up passing cars anyways). The heavily-armed police or FBI units that spawn only adds to the difficulty.
- The Drug Dealing levels from 5 (if done at the Airport) onwards are practically luck-based. Dealing against the Brotherhood is notably harder because they come armed in Compensators, which take amazing punishment.
- Escort, in which you drive two people (who are having sex in the back seat) around the city while avoiding news vans, their significant others, and private investigators, is one of the most loathed activities in the series. The Anchors are inexplicably fast, come at you in numbers, and just torment you to no end. Your clients will give you requests that range from killing targets, causing damage to other cars with your vehicle, and even driving halfway across the city to a porn theatre, all the while avoiding getting filmed. You can, in theory, temporarily drive off the vans with your gun but each shot annoys the client, costing you part of their enjoyment bar.
- Crowd Control from Level 4 and onward can be pretty frustrating too.
- For starters, the player has to deal with aggressive fans that are armed with weapons, most of them wielding baseball bats, and since they errantly swing at the celebrity you're defending (which is who you're most likely going to be close to trying to defend), more likely than not you will take a hit and be sent to the ground and have to helplessly watch as the annoyance meter starts shooting up before they can recover. It gets worse when the fans start toting guns or projectiles, which will cause the meter to instantly rise up and cause a fail.
- You have literally nothing but your bare fists to defend the celeb you're assigned to. At least, that's what the game makes you think at first. You'll be desperately trying to swing your fists fan-ward and not realize that you may have picked up a baseball bat one of the patrons had dropped and not have even noticed. Once you whip out the bat, it's easier, sure, but you'll still be hard-pressed to keep the celeb's tolerance down when the fans keep on coming in full force.
- The celebrities themselves. Very much like the Escort example above, the celeb will complain the moment all of the loony fans begin to converge and attack. This can get especially bad with the Hotel and Marina District's Level 5 celeb, since all she seems to do when the fans get close is scream and get angry at you for trying to ward them off.
- Finally, remember that you have to gain enough cash before time runs out. All of the big money makers (such as the garbage truck compactor, the airplane turbines, the train track, or the vehicles) require you to toss the fans into them. For the first three levels it is manageable and you could easily make the required amount of cash on almost solely the throw points. By Level 4, this becomes increasingly more difficult, fans will be coming in groups of three or four, and when you grab the last fan to toss them, about four more replace the fallen ones.
- Later levels of Snatch, especially the Downtown instance. The gangsters tend to have a habit of rushing your car as you wait for the prostitutes to get in and yanking you out onto the street where their multiple companions open fire on you as you lie, helpless, on the ground. Then, assuming you actually manage to get all the prostitutes in the car and manage to get driving, you have all of these fantastic things to deal with.
- AI-controlled traffic that will occasionally ram into you for no reason but shits and giggles and to help the gangsters catch you.
- Enemy motorcycles that can somehow run the equivalent of a Rolls-Royce off the road with a gentle nudge to the rear bumper.
- Driving through an area absolutely filled to the brim with walls and indestructible scenery, including a few unbreakable signs directly beside the spot you drop the prostitutes off at, and lastly
- Said prostitutes constantly bitching about your driving skills.
- Getting a Bear (APC) makes Snatch a fair bit easier, since it's big, durable, and has an infinite-ammo turret. However, the Downtown Snatch mission is still a huge pain in the ass. The Ronin comes at you in tiny little Hayates, which can easily get underneath the Bear and toss it around, unlike the Chinatown mission where the Brotherhood's assortment of big trucks can't do anything but bump into you for minor damage. You can finish Chinatown Snatch Level 6 before the Bear even starts to smoke. On Downtown Snatch Level 6, you better pray that the first two spots that they send you to have three hos each because the Bear is not going to survive the third trip. You can also abuse the Forgive and Forgets to reduce some notoriety and thus get some of the gangs off your backs easily. It makes the Brotherhood missions a breeze.
- Fight Club. Gang Up on the Human is in full effect (while a pair of enemies may fight each other, their health won't decrease), Regenerating Health is disabled meaning that you can't run around to heal up(but you can bring food items with you), you need to finish off opponents by doing Press X to Not Die, and if you get knocked down it's highly likely that you'll end up in a Cycle of Hurting where the mooks just keep knocking you down again and again.
- The later levels of Insurance Fraud are pure pain incarnate, as it is by far the single most luck-based activity in the whole game. Succeeding depends entirely on having enough vehicles come at just the right pace in the bonus areas so that you can keep bouncing off them once you fill up your adrenaline meter and getting a huge bonus. The problem is more often than not you'll get to a bonus area and no cars will spawn for ages, wasting time and forcing you to either wait and gamble on cars showing up later or wasting more time driving to another bonus area and hoping you have better luck there. Also, the mechanics for diving can be really wonky at times and take some serious getting used to, getting large combos is often tricky due to the difficulty of judging what the right angle to bounce off vehicles in mid-air to land on the next car is. Also when the cars do spawn they have a tendency to knock out into the air before you even get the chance to do the dive move, so you end up having to wait for your character to fall down and get back up which wastes even more time. Also, also: you can get screwed over if the game decides to send you to a neighborhood that only has smaller cars(in some cases only motorcycles, which are pretty much useless for generating bonuses as they will rarely knock you into the air).
- To make Insurance Fraud easier, it's best to ignore the bonus areas entirely and just go to the nearest highway. Highways always spawn plenty of cars to bounce off of, and once you've filled the adrenaline meter, with some practice you'll be able to pull off some lucrative combos. Of course, most players won't think to do this. This, of course, presumes you're not doing the Downtown insurance fraud which likes to send you to the suburbs away from any highways insight.
- Return to the main YMMV page here.
