You're right about that. There wasn't even a “Oh, and if you die in there, you die here” like there was in the last game. For all we know, our character gets ripped out of the simulation by Kinzie the moment it appeared that we were about to die. So basically...
• Any emotional investment in the world is gone because it's literally been destroyed within the first ten minutes. All we have to be invested in are a ship and our group that we rescue one by one. Why do I give a crap about Virtual!Steelport? The whole game is about trying to break it, not save it.
• Any emotional investment in our virtual avatar is gone because we don't even know what happens when we die in the simulation.
The reason I hated it:
• What's the point of Asha and Matt? They don't feel like Saints members, and I refuse to accept that they are Saints members. I also fail to see why everyone's not minding the fact that Matt is now a member of the very gang he once tried very hard to destroy in the last game.
• We're not even playing our character, he/she is reclining in the pod; we spend 90% of the game playing as a virtual avatar of our character.
• If Zinyak wrote the simulation and has full control over it, why doesn't he just re-write it so we fall into a giant pit of lava? Why did he allow into the simulation things that we could use to fight against his own men? If he knew where the ship was, why didn't he just attack with everything he had rather than send in a few armed mooks? I...I mean, he literally could've ended the whole thing at any time, especially when he was beginning to see that the Saints were a threat, yet he didn't. Literally! The next time they all go in there, have the simulation re-written so it's a giant volcanic lava flow instead of a simulation of a city they would all be familiar with. It was like the game deliberately made him stupid so that we could win.