Review: The Saboteur

Posted by Harry in Frontpage, Gaming, Gaming Reviews, PC, PS3, Xbox 360 | 3 comments

The word “swansong” has been thrown around a lot when describing Pandemic’s last foray into the video game world before they succumbed to the ravishes of time and a crumbling economy. I envision the word “swansong” to attribute to something serene, tranquil and breathtakingly beautiful and a real five-gun salute to the people behind it. This isn’t the feeling I got with the Saboteur. Instead I felt the taste of disappointment, wasted effort and an overall feeling of inconsistency. It’s sad, but it’s true: The Saboteur was a disappointing end to a respectable career.

The Saboteur takes place in Nazi-occupied France and the battle between the Nazis and the French resistance. You play as a pissed-off, stereotypical Irishman who is everything the Americans want the Irish to be and is everything the Irish don’t want to be (entirely) associated to. The womanising, beer-swigging, offensive, reckless and violent race car driver takes the centre stage of the story but unfortunately, Pandemic fall at the first hurdle based on the points I’ve made: Sean Devlin is not a likeable character.

In much the same way as Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll received criticism for centralising a story on an unlikeable character; The Saboteur chooses an anti-hero to take centre stage seemingly for the fun of it. Sean Devlin is the culmination of Irish stereotypes but this doesn’t pay dividends as his character is not one you feel for which isn’t helped by the Hollywood story, the confused motive the game seems to have and the fact that the guy who voices Sean isn’t Irish: he’s the voice of Travis Touchdown in No More Heroes, Tenzin in Uncharted 2 and Captain Slag in Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty. Put it this way: he wouldn’t be my first choice for reciprocating the Irish accent.

Dialogue and voice acting is just one problem the game suffers from. The voices are nauseatingly stereotypical, the scripting is so full of clichés and puns that you feel like you’re watching an average, dark version of a Zucker-Abrahams film and the main antagonist is everything but believable. The Saboteur’s scripting and voicing feels like it’s trying to be comical in its approach but when matched with the fairly dark and serious undertones of the Nazi oppression and Sean’s seemingly never-ending quest for revenge it comes across as tactless and possibly slightly offensive. I’m going to have to throw the word “stereotypical” in again, because that’s exactly what it is. This doesn’t make the game experience feel authentic or even believable – you don’t feel for the characters and you don’t connect to any of the characters because they’re so cripplingly bourgeois and bigoted.

The story does nothing to save this as the monotonous missions and brutal execution of the narrative is too bouncy to maintain a rhythmic coherency I’d have liked to have seen: the characters flip from pissed-off to content to depressed to angry to relieved to happy to afraid to content to enraged and you never feel connected to the story arc or to the characters within. Characters come and go throughout and the deceptively short story introduces faces that it tries to make you feel for but you end up shrugging off.

The inevitable plot twists and predictability of the story aren’t exactly helpful either and you end up feeling like you’re playing a World War II version of Grand Theft Auto but with an even less believable story and no sense of achievement upon completion of objectives.

The game runs off a currency of “contraband” opposed to real money – items such as bread, wine, cheese, cigarettes, music boxes etc. act as monetary value which you can trade with black market vendors for weapons and ammo. The concept is good but the execution of the idea is average as you spend ages earning little amounts of contraband before earning the big bucks right towards the end of the game. By then, you’ve set on two or three weapons and the most valuable and rewarding purchases are pointless. Several more expensive items such as perk upgrades and special weapons are only available when you’ve completed perk objectives or acquired a lot of contraband but it’s only about ¾ of the way through of the game before you’ve reached the level to purchase the best stuff. As I said though, you’re comfortable with a select number of weapons which are effective enough and towards the end when tougher enemies are introduced you can take their weapons and suddenly you own the most powerful weapons in the game.

The aforementioned perks system again is a poorly executed idea as the perks are based on mini-objectives completion such as stealth killing five Nazi generals or blowing up ten Nazis in a small period of time. However, you don’t really have the time to focus on that while playing out the objectives because the mass majority of missions are stealth-based and only a handful of perks are stealth-based. The missions generally consist of stealth-killing a Nazi, stealing his uniform, working your way to a marker and completing the objective, whether it’s rescuing a prisoner, killing someone… well, that’s pretty much it. Seriously. For an open-world exploration game the Saboteur feels very condensed and close-quarters and you feel incredibly restricted at times. It feels like if you were playing Grand Theft Auto with a Nathan-Drake styled character who acts like the love-child of Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell and Ezio Auditore de Firenze from Assassin’s Creed 2.

The game splices together different concepts from multiple franchises but the outcome is underwhelming as the Saboteur ends up feeling like an average homage from a student’s college project. The climbing is rudimentary, making you press X/A every time you want to go higher. The ledges you can grab onto shine a little so you know where you’re going but most of the time you’re going straight up so you find yourself just tapping X/A and pointing the left analogue stick up until you’ve reached the top. Almost every building is scalable and you will experience a fair amount of climbing (especially to obtain disguises from guard towers) but the experience is underwhelming and meagre in comparison to Assassin’s Creed 2. Your character jumps like an idiot and it’s reminiscent of the jumping in Elder Scrolls IV. The free-running across the French landscapes is good to look at mostly but it feels sluggish as you’re controlling a slightly unfit Irishman who’s had one too many beers

Somehow though, Sean’s damn near indestructible. You can fling yourself off buildings and he probably will be walking around a few seconds later like he’s just hopped a fence. You also soak ordinary bullets like a sponge and take explosions like you’re Iron Man. This is ridiculous and the true extent of the haphazardly designed damage counter is exemplified when you get killed within seconds by the better weapons later on. It’s literally a case of one minute you can run around with minimal worry and you’re still running around a few minutes later under heavy fire, then the next minute you’re dead within five seconds because a particularly powerful Terror Nazi has mowed you down with his Terror machine gun.

The enemy build is another problem in the game, as you have only a select number of enemies and they all look pretty much the same. The unoriginality of the character modelling is worse than Prototype at times and the believability is ruined further when you come across Nazis in their double digits that all seem to be related. I know the Aryan thing was around at the time but it wasn’t this prominent.

Thankfully, the varied French landscape isn’t repetitive, as the Saboteur experience is redeemed slightly by a very good-looking landscape, particularly the inner-city building design and the recreation of famous monuments. There’s a real sense of polish with the game’s graphical design from a landscape perspective and it’s something that the game has done right. The implementation of colour representing oppression and the film noir style becoming colourful when you’ve successfully defeated the Nazis in a particular area is one of the few real rewards from playing the game and it’s nice to see while it lasts.

Shame the same can’t be said for the facial animations that feel like the characters were picked out of PS2 games and left the way they looked. Disappointment sets in again as the beauty of the game around the characters is great to explore but the people you see could look better.

Pandemic were sloppy in several aspects of the production and this stretches to the AI system too unfortunately. The AI is incredibly dim-witted at times and yet is a whizz-kid with a gun. I found myself standing easily within the eyeline of several Nazis undisguised ready to pounce and steal their uniform but when going for a brisk jog past Nazis when disguised, suspicion creeps in and they suspect that you may not be one of them – it feels like Assassin’s Creed, where you would try and blend in but even the slightest suspicious movement is a worry. Strange, considering you can sprint as Sean but not as a Nazi.

The detection system is flawed in the way you can be found out – driving a car as Sean when he has forged papers is perfectly fine but dressed as a Nazi driving the same car is suspicious when you even pull up to a Nazi checkpoint, never mind before they take a look at you. Stupid thing is, the checkpoints accept your papers regardless of whether you are dressed as a Nazi or not but chances are you’ll have an entire brigade of Nazis firing at you if you try and drive through a checkpoint dressed as one of them.

It’s the little things like that that left me feeling frustrated. The awkward control mapping was rugged and sluggish to handle and the wayward camera seemed to have a mind of its own sometimes, swinging to different positions as it saw fit. Sean is difficult to control at times and while it’s fun to blow stuff up and create a ruckus, trying to get away afterwards can be difficult when you’re in control of a game that seems to want to follow an exact script and not deviate from the norm. A massive flaw.

The Saboteur as stated before is supposed to be an open-world experience, but everything you are tasked to do and the way you play the game feels so scripted that if you try and play the game in a way the game isn’t expecting it doesn’t like it – I found myself stuck in floors, having characters glitching in corridors and passageways, had enemies unaware of my existence when I was in stealth mode in front of them, had bullets not causing me damage, had fall damage eradicated because I landed in an unusual spot. The Saboteur is very much unpolished in its gameplay and it’s the biggest letdown of the lot because it takes what little experience and reward you take from the game when you’re constantly fighting for freedom. How ironic.

The plot structure feels very linear and with only fifty missions to take part in you’re limited in your experience. The game offers you the chance to take part in driving races at some point in the game but the average driving controls (reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto’s driving) don’t work as well as you’d like. Racing plays a part in the story (as you’d expect) but the racing is simplistic in its design due to the context of an open-world action/adventure game with driving as a side-part but rugged in its control.

One other side part to the game are the collectables but you feel little purpose to completing them other than for trophies/achievements and a little extra contraband. Throughout the very inaccurately proportioned France are many Nazi propaganda outposts and vehicles for you to destroy and steal respectively. Collecting cars improves your garage collection but much like the weaponry as soon as you get the right ones you’re set. You get the fastest car in the game about 2/3 of the way through and until then you have one of the next fastest to play with anyway. For the collectibles, you drive around the city destroying different Nazi instruments of propaganda outposts like radio towers and signal vans, and you can steal armoured trucks for your garage. It’s very pointless though because, as I say, the reward is minimal.

Conclusion:

The Saboteur is not as good as I’d hoped. It could have been a brilliant open-world experience and the groundwork was there for that. Pandemic got very little right with the Saboteur and there were too many problems with the game for me to accept. It’s sad that this is the last game from Pandemic because it’s not a game I’d have wanted them to go out on. The Saboteur could have been so much more but instead you’re left with a hollow experience that brings very little to the table and does nothing much more than take away several hours of your time.

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