Review: The Saboteur (360)

The Saboteur

Developer: Pandemic Studios

Publisher: Electronic Arts

MSRP: $59.99

Release Date: 12/08/2009

Platform(s): Xbox 360, PS3, Windows

 

I had intended to start this review out with an Irish accent. It sounded great in my head. But once I sat down to actually write it, I realized I have no idea how to infer an Irish accent through the written word. It all looked the same except I was using words like ‘bullocks’, ‘arse’, & ’shite’. Yeah, it didn’t work. I may not be able to pay homage to one of my favorite protagonists of recent times in this review, but I can tell you: He is one tough SOB. Loosely inspired by real life saboteur William Grover Williams, this Irish mechanic-turned-race car driver is a rough & tumble, foul mouthed kind of guy who prefers his whiskey straight & his women loose. He doesn’t take flack from anyone & definitely isn’t someone you want to piss off. Unfortunately for the Nazis, they did just that. Now they not only have to fight a World War, but they have to contend with Sean Devlin roaming the streets of Paris.

The Saboteur starts off in the French countryside in 1940. Sean is a race car mechanic who has just been promoted to a driver & is about to run his first race. This will be a defining moment for him as he loses the race to Dierker, a German driver who cheats to win. Of course our Irish hot-head isn’t too happy about it so he, along with his best friend Jules, head up to Dierkers garage complex to anoint a little revenge. Things don’t go quite as they planned as they are captured before making their escape. Soon they discover that Dierker is a pretty sadistic, albeit a bit misinformed Nazi. He thinks they are British spies & ends up killing Jules during the interrogation. Right afterward, Germany invades France. The death of Jules at the hands of Dierker ends up providing the French Resistance with their best weapon: a revenge-bent Paddy who will sabotage anything the Nazis have their hand in.

What initially drew me to The Saboteur was the art direction. The game world covers a lot of the French countryside including the city of Paris. At the beginning, 99% of it is occupied by Nazi Germany. So the entire world is colored in a gritty black & white. It’s dark, depressing & really conveys the emotional state of it’s citizens. As you complete various tasks, you lessen the Nazi stranglehold over the area & build up support for the Resistance, gradually raising the hopes of the French countrymen & bringing color back to the landscape. As you roam from place to place, the color will transition in & out depending on how strong the German oppression is. It’s a really interesting story mechanic that helped immerse me into this war-torn world & made my progress through the campaign a bit more satisfying.

Essentially, The Saboteur is Grand Theft Auto set in early 1940’s France. It’s basically divided up into 2 parts. The first being the story based missions & the second is the ambient freeplay. In both, you’ll run around the country, blowing up anything & everything with a swastika stamped on it with a few assassinations & driving missions sprinkled in here & there for flavor. It may sound like it’ll wear thin pretty quickly, but trust me, it’s a lot more addicting than it sounds. How you approach each mission or target is pretty much up to you. If you want to go in guns blazing, you can (although I don’t recommend it). If your more interested in the sneaky approach, that’s an option as well. A lot of times, I would create a diversion that would grab the guards attention & then come up behind them & either take them out, or blow up what they are guarding (and let the resulting explosion take them out). If you combine the missions & the freeplay, there is a TON of stuff to do (there’s hundreds of the freeplay targets alone). Everything from large guns and sniper nests to propaganda speakers and even tanks & zeppelins mean you’ll have plenty of different things to stick your dynamite or RDX to. A word of caution though: Most of the variety comes in through the story missions. So you would be best served by hitting the freeplay objectives in moderation between missions. That will keep it from becoming too stale.

Sean may be a bad-ass, but he can’t take down the Third Reich on his own. He’s going to need some help & the Resistance movement is more than happy to help…for a price. The in-game currency is contraband (i.e. booze, medicine, cigarettes, etc…). Earning contraband is a piece of cake though as you’ll get it for completing missions & freeplay objectives, saving civilians from Nazi brutality, winning races, & you’ll even find it in crates scattered around the city. There’s a black market that provides a place to spend said currency with a nice selection of pistols, SMGs, rifles, ammo, & other upgrades. At the beginning the shops are only near Sean’s safehouses. But, as he lifts the Nazi influence around the city, more will of the shady shops pop up. If he finds himself in a tough stand off with the Germans, he can call in some Resistance fighters to lend him a hand (these guys can get more powerful through a couple of upgrades that can be purchased at the black market). Sean also has a bunch of perks you can unlock by completing certain tasks such as getting 10 different double kills with a single bullet or steal 12 different Nazi vehicles & return them to the garage (there’s a total of 30 perks, each divided into 10 different categories). Garage? Yep, you can’t call a game “like GTA” unless you can steal cars. Any vehicle you see can be stolen from the Renoir Clunker to the Kaiser Convertible. If you make it back to your garage, it’s stored there for future use. It comes in handy as the game world is really big, so it takes forever to traverse it on foot. Plus, if there is a certain objective you need to destroy, but the guard presence is pretty heavy, you can leave a little surprise in the car & then jump out of it, sending the bomb on wheels straight to your target without having to actually approach it.

While I had a great time with it, it was far from flawless. Controlling Sean wasn’t always as fluid as I would have liked. The way the philosophy was presented to me during my demo at E3 was ‘quiet in, loud out’. The ‘loud out’ part is great. Big explosions, 5 different alarm stages based on how much of a problem I am for the Nazi forces & several different ways to get out of it. My problem was with the ‘quiet in’ part of the equation. First, the AI is predictably ignorant. So some of your stealthiness is reduced to proper surveillance & pattern tracking. Second, the game relies heavily on running around on the rooftops to mask your approach. But, the climbing mechanic was slow & clunky. Many times I found myself just taking my chances on the ground or, when trying to escape, taking my chances with a leap of faith off the building instead of climbing down. It got to the point where once I was on the building, I would try to do everything I could to stay up there, & vice verse. It doesn’t help that when your in the city, most of your hiding places are on the roof tops, meaning you’ll spend some time exposed, being shot at as you scale the side of the building. This hurt the game the most in my opinion as the whole thing is reliant on Sean becoming a WWII Spider-Man.

In the end, The Saboteur has the Luck of the Irish. Regardless of the cumbersome climbing mechanic & the occasional graphical issues, it was still a lot of fun to play. The joy of blasting a zeppelin out of the air with a Panzershreck, hoping in your race car & hauling ass through back country roads while trying to shake half a dozen Nazi troop carriers made it easy to overlook it’s flaws. The best part? Pandemic has done something that is becoming harder & harder to do: Make me interested in a WWII game. It’s become a stale & tiresome place to adventure in. These guys made it new & interesting. The story is enjoyable & emotionally engaging enough that I felt a visceral satisfaction with every explosion I created. The voice cast is great & the music is just phenomenal (really, the 1940’s burlesque soundtrack is a perfect fit for The Saboteur & I wish the soundtrack came in the package). There’s a wide variety of targets to destroy along with the various weapons to unlock & cars to collect. The landscape is vast, covering everything from the French countryside to the Eiffel Tower (yes, you can climb to to tippy top!). Even though I adore the art direction, the visuals won’t wow you, but they are solid for a current gen game. Had it not been for the technical faults, I could have easily given this a 9. But there’s enough explosive fun to be had that makes this a must-buy for any action/adventure gamer.

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