I picked up The Saboteur during an Origin sale. I had never heard of it, but the premise looked cool: playing as a member of the French Resistance, fighting Nazis, exploring open-world Paris. Incredible potential, and a great idea on paper.
Well, The Saboteur gameplay is a ton of fun. It plays as a hybrid of Just Cause 2 with Assassin's Creed. If you loved either of those games, you'll probably like The Saboteur. And there are not a lot of open-world WW2 games on the market, so The Saboteur occupies a unique niche. The open world of Paris, the black & white vs. color mechanic, fast cars, destroying Nazi installations, and a passable story make The Saboteur a great experience.
Gameplay
+ The map is huge, covering Paris and the outlying countryside.
+ Parts of Paris are hidden behind Nazi checkpoints. Instead of making these other parts of Paris unlock with story progression, you can actually enter them at any time. Enemies are tougher and more numerous, and instead of presenting identity papers to pass through checkpoints you just have to barrel through the gates, raising an instant Level 1 alarm.
+ Occupation colors. On-screen colors are black & white (with red being the only other color allowed) until a sector is liberated from Nazi control, when the display is changed to full color.
+ A lot to do. There are sniper nests, fuel depots, radio installations, radar systems, propaganda towers, armored vehicles, zeppelins, railroad bridges and more to find and destroy.
+ Stealth is fun. The detection meter is there of course, but the disguise mechanic adds a fun element. Knock out a Nazi guard and put on his uniform to disguise yourself. Be sure to use the non-lethal take-down, though; blood on the uniform will make it unusable. With the disguise on, you can go wherever you want - even into restricted areas. Get too close to other guards, though, and you risk detection. If detected, it is pretty easy to shoot your way out of these situations early in the game. Later on in the game, getting detected can result in near-instant death because the enemies' firepower becomes almost overwhelming.
+Stealth weapons allow for aggressive stealth without needing to be a ninja. The silenced pistol and silenced SMG allow for quiet kills. These need to happen out of sight of other guards, OR you need to quickly kill all guards who might witness an assassination.
+Rambo-ing is also possible, if stealth is not your style. It is easy to get head-shots with the right weapon. Watch out for Gestapo death squads, though. Those suckers are very hard to kill.
+ / - The platforming / parkour works well. It just feels clunky. It's awesome swinging around Paris on the roof-tops, zip-lining and climbing everywhere. And don't get spotted by German guards, or you'll trigger an alarm (this is good). But there have been a number of times I reached for a ledge to climb it, and for some reason Devlin wouldn't grab it, or leaped for a zipline but the key-combo did not make Devlin grab it (making him plunge to his death) (these are not good). In many ways the platforming / parkour functions in a similar manner to the Assassin's Creed games with Ezio (II, Brotherhood, and Revelations). Unfortunately, a lot of similar frustrations are here as well.
+ / - The contraband system. It makes sense within the context of the game, i.e., get contraband to trade with black market dealers. And finding a Resistance cache tells you what contraband you're getting, like jewelry, paintings, chocolate etc. But from destroying a sniper nest, you get - 200 contraband. Of what? Scrap metal? Contraband is necessary to upgrade weapons and gear, not criticizing having contraband at all, there is just some video game logic at work here. Not worth taking points off, but logicians will be annoyed.
- Destroying all that Nazi stuff (sniper towers, tanks, propaganda etc.) has nothing to do with the level of Nazi control over an area; "destroy" actions yield immediately-generated "contraband," and nothing else. I was hoping for something like in Red Faction: Guerrilla, where destroying enemy assets reduces enemy control and morale; when the morale reaches zero, the mission to retake the sector is triggered. There is nothing like that here. Destroying stuff just devolves into "doing random stuff" with no major implications. Yes, if you destroyed the sniper towers by the Gestapo headquarters, it will make some missions easier, but that is about it.
- Grinding. Without much additional reason to destroy stuff, accumulating statistics becomes an epic grind which has no real relation to the story.
- No fast travel.
- Dying and reloading a save-game does not give your character weapons. What? Yes. You have to re-equip weapons from the nearest black market dealer after re-spawning. That is not a problem, though, because
- All save points and re-spawns return you to the nearest Resistance safe house. Of course, that could be quite far away from where you were, leading to frustration and re-traversing countryside that has already been explored.
Characters
+ Sean Devlin is fun, determined, and loyal. A great character to empathize with. An Irish Catholic (he crosses himself once or twice, otherwise religion plays no role in the game aside from a few missions for a priest), he has an instinctive dislike of the English. He has solid if conventional motivations, and is rarely conflicted. Basically a straight-up action hero. Veteran voice actor Robin Atkin Downes is extremely solid.
+ / - The rest slot into prescribed narrative arch-types. The evil Nazi engineer / scientist who killed Devlin's friend (Kurt Dierker), the beautiful British spy (Skylar Saint Claire), the beautiful British spy's asshole boss (Bishop), the dutiful best friend's sister (Veronique), the leader of the Resistance that the best-friend's sister is in love with (Luc Gaudin), and the shady black-market dealer who can get rare and high-powered weapons (Santos).
Narrative
+ / - In the prologue, a close friend of Devlin's is killed by the Nazis. This provides the jump-off point for "let's get back at the Nazis for killing my best friend" mayhem. While the setting is serious, things feel almost light-hearted for a while. Help people out on the street, annoy the Nazis to no end, defend some hotspots in a "fight back" mission (which is basically a timed horde mode). Then return to the Belle (a burlesque club) to chill with some scantily clad women. All that determined-yet-warm-and-fuzzy feeling goes out the window as events turn unexpectedly dark in the third act. Thanks to a traitor in the midst of the Resistance, people around Devlin start dying. There is no choice available, these events are hard-scripted into the story. The climatic finale is impressive, but there is not much fighting in the final story level (where it takes place is really unique, so I won't spoil it). There is good forward motion, and the drama goes from being mundane to intense in the third act. A well-done story that takes full advantage of the locale.
- The game ends with Sean Devlin saying, "I'm just getting started." Sounds like the game is tailor-made for a sequel. In six years, there has not been even a hint of one. Too bad.
Graphics etc.
+ The black & white aesthetic that changes to color is an awesome technique that really gives The Saboteur a unique look.
+ Voice acting is good, and the French accents are generally correct.
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| B & W is cool, low-res textures are not. |
+ The Saboteur runs easy on system resources. Maxed out with post-processing disabled, the game used between 400-600MB of video memory (Radeon R7 260X 2GB). My A10 6800k was at 50% CPU capacity (two cores) while playing the game.
+ / - For a 2009 game, character models are decent, but Mass Effect's were better, and Mass Effect came out two years before the Saboteur.
+ / - Leave the Post-Processing option off in the graphics menu. This game runs via DirectX 9 and looks just awful with Post-processing on.
+ / - There is a lot of nudity in The Saboteur. It is usually contextual, but sometimes it seems like the designers took the setting (one of the Resistance safe houses is in a burlesque theater) as a chance to binge on CG breasts. The female body is awesome, don't get me wrong, but in this case it seems like this part of the game was exploited to appeal more directly to twelve- and fourteen-year-old boys who might not have a standard of comparison.
- Some crashing. Not too bad - three times in 30 hours.
- graphics are generally sub-par, with low-resolution textures everywhere and some of the worst texture pop-in that I've seen so far.
- Finding a "scenic viewpoint" results in the camera pulling back and panning (like Assassin's Creed Viewpoint synchronization). It's an achievement-based action, no new information is learned from the scenic viewpoint. I guess it is supposed to show the gamer how awesome Paris looks, but there are major problems with the mid-distance rendering. Near distance and far distance render fine (if blurry and low-res), but in between the two would be flickering textures or just black blotches. Not sure if bugged, or just a faulty installation.
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