subtle fiber
I was hoping for some sort of tank controls for the car, like original GTA, instead what we have is clunky and I find hard to control.
I'm reminded of Videogamedunky's commentary on generic open world games "Spend more than 30% of the game driving even though the developers don't know how to program vehicles." ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK158ih4smY )
There's really a dual problem here: How to make driving good, and how to make it interesting given so much time in cars.
The first one is tricky since car physics are an entire beast. Personally my favourite driving in a 2D game was in The Lost World: Jurrassic Park for the MegaDrive/Genesis. It was smooth, and handled well. You could feel the heft of the car. You'd skid and feel momentum but still feel like you were in control. If you crashed, you felt like you could get better. Not really sure how else to put this then "it just felt good and powerful when used correctly, but still had its own rules"
On another note, the game has the "Sonic the Hedgehog 2D" problem of being able to go so fast you can't see what is up ahead. You might want to take a page out of the original GTA and zoom out a lot when you enter a car, more the faster you go.
As for the second question, much like with AAA open world games, driving runs the risk of making the game lest interesting. With original SOR you took a quest and went to destination. Now you take a quest, get in your car, drive to destination, get out of car, etc. The cars can feel like they're slowing things down, and it's telling that by the 4th Saints Row video game, you barely got into cars since you had superhero traversal; and even by Saints Row 2 they gave little challenges like near misses and driving in the wrong lane to make the driving more interesting and fun. Not sure how this can apply to SoR 2, and maybe with better controls this can follow, but my point still stands.
karmic path
calm relic