With the original Saint’s Row game, that changed. The problem is that while many of these games where similar, they didn’t deliver on the scale that the GTA series did, and many of them didn’t do anything different and felt like they were just trying to cash in on the success of the GTA series. After GTA burned up the sales charts years ago a bunch of similar games appeared to take advantage of the popularity of that title, with such games like Mercenaries, The Godfather, Scarface, Just Cause, True Crime, and so on.
The genre still doesn’t have a term that defines it, so the easiest way to describe a game like this is to just say, “It’s like Grand Theft Auto“. However this is more of a problem with the language of video games since terms like “Sandbox” make a game sound like something my cat takes a dump in, and “Open World” isn’t the best fit either since that brings up images of a massive open area. Comparing the two games is something that is easy to do since there are several similarities between the two games. Let’s just get it right out of the way, Saint’s Row 2 is sort of like Grand Theft Auto.