The Saboteur

Listen carefully, Duncan will say this only once...

It is an immutable rule of every movie ever made that if you have a scene in Paris then there must be an establishing shot of the Eiffel tower through a window in the background. Movies would, of course, never lie to us and so we have to assume that the area immediately around the tower is densely populated by Jason Bourne, Inspector Clouseau, and Tom Hanks. Pandemic Studios' new sandbox game is set during WWII, putting you in the shoes of one-man resistance movement Sean Devlin, therefore naturally has the tower front and centre right there on the menu. It is immediately preceded by the silhouette of a naked lady, so the tone and level of subtlety for The Saboteur is all set before weve even killed our first Nazi.

The set-up of the game holds very few surprises in its open-world mechanics. In fact, nearly all of the technology and presentation could probably have been implemented as another expansion pack for the latest GTA title. Run around, encounter targets of opportunity, follow the map to the initials of the story missions, steal cars, and partake of mini-game asides, et al. Its a whole generation too late to break any ground, but the genre remains popular and the presentation is shiny enough to keep the world feeling distinct and coherent.

As well as the rain swept film noir streets of Paris which the game's publicity concentrated on, there are far bigger swathes of countryside than there are of urban environments. Open-world games that mix their environments are always welcome - a trick that the otherwise excellent Borderlands and GTA IV both missed out on. Fleeing a full worldwide alert through the Champagne-Ardenne countryside, dodging the Luftwaffe in barns and beneath trees, avoiding roads, hiding on moving trains, and boosting the farmers old junker in a final dash for a safety point are probably the highlights of the game. Once things are set in the urban environment both the game's execution and Sean himself get significantly clumsier.

The core of the game is to slaughter Nazis in volumes to make Lt. Aldo Raine proud, and blow up anything that bullets wont do for. This is achieved through what could be loosely called a guerrilla campaign of disguise swapping, avoiding circles of suspicion, assassination and subterfuge and a Gorilla campaign when that gets frustrating and you just go in guns roaring. Aside from the necessity to shake your Alert level after doing something noisy, the game will not penalise you for either tactical approach.

The foul influence of the jack-booted fiends manifests itself in each fully occupied Parisian district by the colour draining out of the world, with only artistic highlights of a swastika banner or a passing girl's scarf standing out. Whilst this usually adds very little to the gameplay, its a nice touch and looks a bit like the unexpected spawn of Crackdown and Schindler's List. Splitting enough Nazi heads will restore the colour, which blasts out of the point of your last success in a great wave that injects a sense of achievement to your victory.

The urban and the country environments are absolutely riddled with targets of opportunity, but unfortunately their variety and the approach required to destroy them are quite limited. Where as Assassin's Creed or Crackdown enthused the player to sweep areas clear of every last side-mission or pickup, here the player will likely soon ignore them completely in favour of the more varied and better implemented story missions. Aside from the traditional violence, there is a generous smattering of hidden mini-games involving gambling, racing, thievery, and even duck hunting.

The Saboteur would have held up better if not for the pesky double act of Altair and Ezio from Assassin's Creed. Compared to the implementation of free-running and climbing done even in the first AC, Sean is a clumsy monster to try and control. You can soak up an awful lot of enemy fire without even being knocked off a ledge, healing up at a speed to impress Wolverine, but the controls are by far your most dangerous foe. The climbing is mandatory in the urban areas - with objectives, necessary sniping points, and the vast majority of the hiding places to escape Alert levels all up on roofs or inside courtyards. The Irishman is clumsy and slow to climb, the mechanic involving simply hammering the A button over and over again and hoping there's some sort of ledge above you, not invisible and inexplicable obstacles, and not a small overhang which will stop you dead. Getting back down is every bit as tedious, and dismounting a building will nearly always involve simply flinging Sean off the roof and hoping he doesn't quite die on impact. Long and involved missions lasting the better part of an hour of infiltration, stealthy assassination and planning will be ruined when the ham-fisted controls steadfastedly refuse to grab an obvious ledge, randomly launch you over a balcony, or completely fail to notice a guywire that Sean sails past en route to death and/or failure. The entire Nazi war machine pales into insignificance to the dangers posed by a criminally badly implemented control system, which feels like it was someones first go at ever working with a console. The handling and the climbing aspects of the game are so bad they feel rushed and unfinished, cutting off at the knees what could otherwise be an excellent game.

There is a real satisfaction in executing the missions (and the Nazis) professionally, and a measure of pride in going through a story episode without raising the alarm once, moving like a wraith around the compound, watching the Hun freak out as things blow up and corpses are found. Unsurprisingly, these are the missions that involve minimum of climbing or trying to force the erratic cover mechanic to work.

The story missions and the plot that goes with them are pleasingly just this side of ludicrous. Sean Devlin couldn't have possibly been more of a cliche fighting Oirishman if he was painted green and trying to get his pot of gold back from Hitler. Naturally, your nemesis is a cowardly Aryan sadist, Fifi the showgirl will spout 'Oh La La!' at hardly any provocation, and the local Resistance is run by the closest thing to Pepe Le Peu that the developers could get without a visit from Disney. There is also an awful of of really very well drawn nudity going around which is a fine argument for why HD is a good thing in games.

The Saboteur could have been excellent. It has presentation, usually solid mechanics, characters that you are at least interested in if not actually engaged by, and things look pretty when they explode. However, the simply unforgivable control and climbing mechanic is just too hard to get past - constantly interfering with your game to the point of swearing and projectile gamepads. None the less, it is hard not to have some affection for The Saboteur, even if you have to try and look to what the game could have been.

60%

By Duncan Lawson