The Saboteur

Its seems appropriate that I'm reviewing The Saboteur on the day that Rockstar released their first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 5. The Saboteur shares many traits with that most famous and oh-glorious murder-simulation series. It's open-world, features car-jacking and third-person action and has car physics that make you want to pull your hair out. I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Saboteur, the last game from developer Pandemic, is a game set at the beginning of the occupation of France during WWII. The player character is an Irish bloke named Sean Devlin, a whiskey-drinking stereotype who is some what, kind of, not really based on an actual figure in the French resistance. He is a race car driver (one of the things that is actually true about the real man, I was surprised to learn) who's friend is murdered in a case of mistaken identity at a German motor race. Then Sean swears revenge and Germans start blowing up. The story is so standard and poorly executed in terms of pacing (it's slow) and voice acting (it's bad) that I stopped playing those missions altogether and started doing one thing the game executes extremely well; sabotage.

I love blowing up Nazi things. It is strangely satisfying to plant dynamite on a truck or a sniper's nest or even just a loudspeaker and watching it blow up. All you have to do is press a button, then hold a button while not being seen and you can blow up almost anything that the Nazi war machine is using. Sure, you get money for it that you can buy new weapons and ammo with from black market dealers, but who cares? While the WWII shooter genre was ridiculously over-saturated last decade, I do miss the simple joy of eliminating Nazis. They're like zombies; you feel little to no remorse for killing them. Of course the rank and file German soldier wasn't a super villain in real life so much as a commoner that had been caught up in a conflict they didn't fully understand, but not the ones in this game. No, they're ALL evil. And if you still feel a twinge of regret, there are generals that the player can pick off. They have to be evil. They're Nazi commanders; kind of like how Cobra henchmen may not be evil as they are just following orders, but Cobra Commander sure is as he is whose orders they are following. To make a long story short, killing Nazis is fun, blowing up the things Nazis is more fun and The Saboteur handles both of these aspects very well. I also like the feel and the setting of the game. The music is good and the idea of the color is cool. In the game, everything is in Sin City-style black and white until the player frees them from Nazi control. Then the color comes back into that section. It's a very cool visualization of the idea that the player is bringing hope to the French people and gives a real sense of progress. Then again, the black and white makes seeing difficult sometimes. There was more than one time that I got lost because everything looks the same. 

Beyond the cool use of color and reckless destruction, however, the game is seriously lacking. The animations and controls are very clunky. Sean often engages in Assassin's Creed style climbing (and if anyone doesn't like that comparison, one of the cars in the game is called Altair, so Pandemic knew what they were doing,) but he doesn't enjoy that series' smooth mechanics. The player has to mash the jump button over and over again as he jumps clumsily around like a drunk monkey. He also has a habit of getting stuck on ledges where he thinks he can't climb higher, even though he clearly can , and forces the player to move him slightly to the side before he will climb up. There are the aforementioned driving mechanics that makes it feel as if the player is continually driving through deep mud. Perhaps this was on purpose, as cars in the 40's probably didn't have the best handling. This is also true of the climbing. Maybe Sean is intentionally bad at climbing, because why would a random Irish guy be a free-climbing master? If this is the case, then why is it in the game? Both of these things are maddening. 

The thing that really kills this game, though, is that it's boring. The missions are all the same repetitive missions we've seen in every Grand Theft Auto game. The story is lackluster with forgettable characters. All of the controlling mechanics are sluggish. It just isn't interesting. To give an idea of how boring this game was, there is a sequence which takes place on a zeppelin that is simultaneously in the air and on fire and I was bored. I love zeppelins, Led and otherwise, and yet I could not wait to get out of the burning blimp simply so I could go around blowing up some more fuel depots. If that or boring GTA clones is your thing, then go out and buy this game right now. I usually try to talk about some of the meaning in the game and other such academic, smart Alec-y things, but this game is just too mediocre for consideration. Sometimes, games are just games and that's all.