Just another appreciation post for SR2
I've been showing my wife SR2, she has watched her brother play the third and never saw the early parts of the series, so I started to replay 2 while she watched. It had been a while, and I forgot all the tiny details that made Stillwater such a great sandbox to play in.
The radio DJs all fit their stations extremely well, the music was very rooted in the time, and the radio losing signal and fading in/out sometimes makes it feel more authentic.
Each district is uniquely it's own, with NPCs rarely sighted outside of areas they would belong in, making the city feel like an actual place and not generic city concepts.
Doing activities is entirely optional, but each one gives extremely generous rewards.
The story is not entirely linear, being able to go after gangs at whatever point I want instead of working through one chain is always nice. I like clearing the map of the Ronin and Sons before hitting the brotherhood.
I can and have just fucked around exploring the city since release, it's just a cozy game to me at this point. I really wish they had embraced the key parts of the heart of the game and focused it as a gang empire simulator experience then trying to distance themselves from GTA. There was so much potential and I'm still sad that the series likely is never coming back.