It’s not long into hosing down a cop car with human waste while playing an obese, albino Hispanic woman in clown make up with a samurai sword that you realise that Saints Row 2 is, well, a large portion of Bad Fun indeed. Anyone who cannot figure out how to enjoy this game is somehow lacking in the correct glands to have a mad laugh and should probably throw away their gaming platforms and very quickly volunteer to take part in reality television and a healthy career in watching paint dry.

You don’t have to have played the first Saints Row to get the most out of the game – but it helps. Here’s the deal: The first game saw you creating a basically mute character that rose up to become a prominent member of the Third Row Saints, one of a few gangs fighting over the unlucky city of Stilwater. At the climax of a long campaign, you were betrayed, blown up and put in jail while in a coma. Now you’ve come to and are looking to take over a city with a depleted gang, no money and an all-new rogue’s gallery of enemies.

Up against you are a motley collection of movie-style gangs. The Japanese sword-wielding bikers, fight-freak, body-mod-crazed different kinds of bikers, evil corporate scum and a Jamaican/Haitian Voodoo posse. On your side is your trusted right hand man and deep psycho, the very cool Johnny Gat, Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer with dreadlocks and a serious drug and sex addiction, and the latest in a long line of gaming’s comedy relief black men. He doesn’t do much but sort of look stupid and worry.

The storyline is actually quite interesting and makes the use of its interesting menagerie of bastards. In a non-linear story arc, you begin to move against the other gangs, looking to take a home base, properties, gang territories and more. This starts out as a pretty simple story line, but soon becomes quite engrossing. A grudge with your girl Friday’s ex-boyfriend soon sees you tracking down DJ Doogie Howser, perhaps the most irritating villain we’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting. Mind you, he’s meant to be irritating, so it works nicely. The Japanese bikers strike a particularly vicious blow against you and soon you’ll be in an aggressive war against the Haitians and a threatening, frightening war of payback and ghoulish attrition against the Brotherhood. That one comes as a bit of a surprise, actually. You’re playing a cartoonish and sort of silly game when along comes one of the more gruesome scenes I’ve seen in gaming for a while. Not to mention Gat getting hardcore in a graveyard.

That storyline is a great place to launch the new game features. The customisation is rather extraordinary. The first game saw you playing the latest in a long line of Gordon Freeman-esque tongueless men. This time, you’re front and centre, so you’ll be able to use massive amount of combinations of every conceivable kind of human body parts and personality traits to lead with. Yes, including yourself, you vain creature you. You can change your face, your voice, your walk, your talk, your height, weight, sex, fighting style, compliments. You can even change the degree of the male and femaleness of the character, creating Tom of Finland-style enormous masculine chaps or ludicrously busty, hippy, well, they used to say va-va-voom. Of special notes are the taunts. Honestly, half of them couldn’t even be described here where precious innocent children might see but, well, a game that has a very specialised emote for what the kids call ‘tea-bagging’ is going to earn that mature rating, you know? It really does, by the way. The game definitely works blue and that’s no lie.

Even those of you over the age of eight and therefore fully versant in many, many swears will occasionally find yourself thinking ‘can they really say that in games?’

Now you’ve got the most bad-ass character imaginable, you’ll have to find a way to take back the city piece at a time. This mainly involves combat missions. Grab a car, drive your way across the city of Stilwater and get to shooting. Of course, this isn’t a straight up crime game, steering wherever it can towards a distinct black-comedy action style. Blowing up drug labs from a helicopter, ramming drug dealers off road, protecting a funeral, racing across town, assaulting yachts from the back of jet skis, fighting your way through tourist caves while coppers try and cap you. Combat is simple, with a useful roaming targeting system. The missions are fun and fast but there could be more variety. The majority of them play out in similar fashions. Take out some bad guys, then stop a boss from fleeing in a high speed car pursuit.

The combat is livened up by taking human shields. Having troubles up against just a few too many guns? Grab an enemy and let them soak up the damage. When you’re finished with the poor buggers, there are context sensitive executions. A lot of them are neck breaking or guns to the temple, but there’s the occasional Easter egg of bloody horror to be found.

In between advancing your plot to control the crime in the city, there’s more customisation to be found in the cribs. Bases where you can store your favourite cars, gather money and ogle the seemingly limitless amount of police-themed pole dancers in the city who apparently have keys to your damn house. The same goes for buying up businesses. Finding what else you can buy and decorate is a strangely addictive.

To play the missions, you have to fill up the Respect gauge and that’s where the fun really begins. Respect is sort of like mission points. The more you have, the more you play. It fills up through doing Activities, mini-games available on certain portions of the city-map. Highlights include Crowd Control, where you protect a celebrity from crazed stalkers who want to kill them (extra points for throwing them to their deaths). The ever-popular Insurance Fraud, boosted up from the first game, where you’ll throw yourself under cars for money, looking to be tossed as far as humanly possible. Heli-assault has you stealing a helicopter then flying about town, picking off enemy gangsters from the air, or protecting your own guys and many, many more.

Activities, mini-games, all that business extends the life of Saints Row 2. You can take up the main plot pretty much any time you like. Sometimes you’ll just want to drive around town, looking for assassination targets, fine cars to steal, fanging down the street looking for wrong-lane records, huge jumps, or even stealing a plane to cruise about in before bailing out trying for a BASE-jumping record. They call them sandboxes, but that’s not quite the way to look at Saints Row 2. It’s more a Ritalin child’s angry, sexy, violent playpen.

Multi-player combats are nothing special. The usual kinds of maps and goals. There’s a rather daft basketball-themed deathmatch that’s oddly fun but that’s the only spark of the same intelligence and dark humour that runs through the game applied to versus play. But it’s the co-op play that sees the most fun. Join a game, get XP and cash. Better yet is the drive/shooter combo of the drive-by. Loads of fun, screaming ‘Hold the bloody car still!’ ‘No, shoot straighter you bastard!’ Oh yes.

There are some nitpicks to be had, of course. The physics engine of the game is ramped up high but not nailed down tight. A lot of the game will see you racing all over the place, either against a clock or in pursuit of your next murder victim. Often you’ll see even low-speed collisions knocking you about so violently that mission goals go out the window. There’s room for more one-off missions than there are currently available and some of the online arenas could have used a bit more work. Those are only nitpicks, though. Saints Row 2 is a crackpipe full of fun and when you’re outrunning policemen and filth, shooting off sub-machine guns while lesbians are doing rude things in the back of your BMW, you’ll agree.