The Sabotuer
The Saboteur was showing a lot of promise at E3. It was a stylized game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. This means that with their art direction they were able to achieve something that looks pretty cool, but normally isn’t too taxing on the hardware. It’s something you don’t see often outside of the Nintendo Wii because teams don’t have to get creative to make a game look better. They are working with hardware that can handle high environment physics and shading. We don’t have anything like No More Heroes on the PS3 or Xbox 360 because it’s just not necessary.
So when I saw the first videos of the Saboteur I was a bit excited to see what would be squeezed out of the system if half the world was in black and white.
Turns out, Pandemic didn’t squeeze anything extra out. The Saboteur looks great, don’t get me wrong, better than some games out there, but it could’ve been so much more.
The early impressions had everyone imagining an experience like Medal of Honor 2, where you’re a covert op for the French Resistance, mixed with a gritty James Bond. In a way, it was delivered, but if you opt to play the almost 40 hours worth of secondary missions and complete everything, you soon find out you’re just going to be setting a lot of dynamite.
The game suffers from all open world sandbox games of this type. You can do everything, but since you can do everything, everything is done mediocre.
The fighting works, but doesn’t innovate like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War. The environment physics look fine, but don’t do anything near what Valve did with fire in Half Life 2. The story is compelling and the characters are rich parodies of stereotypical war heroes and sitcom stars, but it sure as hell isn’t Mass Effect. The climbing opened options for strategy, but after playing Assassin’s Creed 2 felt clunky and slow.
In a world as large as these, there’s no way a development group can have everything 100% working. You expect at least a 95% success rate, but The Saboteur had pretty amateur mistakes.
Often times I found Nazi soldiers standing six feet above the platform I knew they were supposed to be on. I would drive into the country side looking for a target I missed to find that the sniper tower that should be there is missing and only until I beat another mission, power cycle the system, and come back will it return. There were even a few missions where I would get stuck in the middle of tables or walls and just have to blow myself up with dynamite to reload the checkpoint.
The general system was in place. I could easily take cover and kill the Nazi hordes, but some things prevented the clean getaway. If I were on top of a building when soldiers found me, I would try to quickly jump down, but grabbed every single ledge and crook all the way to the street. By then the street was usually filled with halftracks and flamethrowers waiting to fire bullets up my ass. There were times where I was just about to get clear of an alert area when a Nazi vehicle would spawn in front of me, creating an even larger area of alert. These are frustrating game mechanics to deal with for as long as the game goes on.
So the game wasn’t perfect, but like all Pandemic games before it was fun as hell.
One thing that Pandemic managed to get right is the racing. Rockstar has this annoying reputation for invisible corners, environment popups, and frame rate drops anytime you have to race. For the most part, the racing in the Saboteur was smooth and pretty fun. Pandemic did a great job of designing a race you can pull two laps ahead on. Usually they were coming down to the finish line.
The characters were witty, lovable, and heroic. Sean, the protagonist, had some extremely witty one-liners and made me fall in love with the Irish all over again. The story itself was of one man’s struggle inside of a larger war. It was done well. I have to give it to Pandemic, the Saboteur is probably one of their finest games. I guess if they had to go, they went on top.
