Fashionably Late Game Reviews: The Saboteur

Around the Game Drunk offices (my basement) we don’t often get a chance to play the newest games to completion and post timely reviews and hence game reviews tend to be left on the back-burner. Reviewing and discussing games, however, is one of the main reasons we decided to create this site and so we are left with our only viable option for the moment: reviewing games that have been out for months because we all have full time jobs and it takes us a long time to beat games because we’re old and tend to lose interest in completing games once we’ve begun drinking.

The Saboteur is one of my more recent gaming addictions. Developed by Pandemic Studios who brought us such games as Mercenaries, Mercenaries 2 and a bunch of other games that I have never played; you are Sean Devlin, a drunken, Irish (yes I realize that’s redundant), race car driver / mechanic. Your best friend gets killed by some douche-bag, Nazi, race car driving Colonel and all of the sudden you’re swept up into an underground resistance group who seemingly can’t accomplish anything without your assistance.

You will spend a lot of time in brothels. It's not so bad.

We’ve seen this kind of game countless times, and you might be asking yourself “Do I really need to play another ‘kill-all-the-Nazis’ game?” Yes. Let’s be honest, there are some things that will never not be fun to kill. Nazis, zombies, effeminate vampires that sparkle in the sunlight, cats – you just can’t kill enough of these things. It never gets old. This game is not going to change your life, it’s not going to immerse you in movie-quality voice acting or even a decent storyline. This game is all about sneaking around, killing Nazis, blowing shit up, stealing cars, shooting people, blowing shit up, visiting brothels, ogling women and blowing shit up. It’s just fun.

The Saboteur doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, it is a sandbox game in the vein of Grand Theft Auto with stealth action and parkour style running, climbing a la Assassin’s Creed with a healthy dose of boobs, Nazis and booze thrown in for good measure. The atmosphere and the art style of the game are very well executed and contribute heavily to why I enjoyed this game so much, but that is not to say that there is nothing wrong here. This game falls into some of the same pit-falls that many other sandbox style games do, namely: races. Racing cars is a main theme in the absurd storyline, and racing cars in sandbox games is never fun. Luckily the races in the game are few and far between and they are not difficult – I never had to repeat a race.

The gameplay is generally very good. You will find yourself frustrated from time-to-time trying to grab onto a ledge or climb a wall that is for some reason unclimbable. Most of your killing will be done stealthily or from a distance. I generally stuck to sneaking around and dynamiting Nazi installations or sniping or launching rockets from across the street. There are some close-quarter fighting situations where you will be face-to-face with boatloads of Nazis, however. This is when you will have to deal with a clunky cover system and a limited weapon inventory. Luckily you can withstand an super-human amount of bullet wounds and need only a few seconds of hiding to recover your health. The Terror Squads that come after you later in the game, or if you raise the alert level too high are bastards though.

This is one of those games you will pop in thinking “I’ll just play for a few minutes.” and 3 hours later you’re working on clearing out “just one more section” of the map. There is just something oddly satisfying about scoping out a Nazi installation, developing a plan of attack to destroy it without setting off any alarms, implementing your plan of attack and then just blowing the hell out of everything once your plan goes awry. You will be left hungry to develop a better plan of attack to wipe out the next Nazi presence you stumble onto in the countryside.