TIME TO SABOTAGE
The saboteur is a World War II game. But before you dismiss this as another generic Nazi-killing person shooter, let me tell you this isn’t it. Yes you do kill Nazis in the Saboteur, but this isn’t a war game. It’s a story of personal vengeance that just happened to take place during World War II in Nazis controlled. Paris. The saboteur is a free roaming action adventure game with a mission structure similar to that of Grand Theft Auto. In fact, it borrows ideas from many popular ideas. But does it manage to create an identity of its own?
You play as foul-mouthed Irish race car driver Sean Devlin, who is forced to flee to Paris after the war, breaks out. There he finds himself on a personal quest to avenge the death of his best friend at the hands of a top Gestapo agent. Somewhere along the way, he gets caught up in the Parisian resistance movement and simultaneously chain smoke his way towards riding of Paris the Nazis.
The Saboteur is an open world game and the missions are mostly of the inheritance, kill and destroy variety. There is also a fair amount of Assassins’s Creed style platforming and Sean is able to climb pretty much any building in the city. Missions can be dealt with in multiple ways. You can either go all guns blazing or throw on a Nazi uniform and see how far the stealthy approach takes you. Gun play is satisfactorily exciting being perfect, while the Hitman- inspired stealth works well enough without being as clinical as specialist stealth titles.
The most unique aspect of the Saboteur is its art style. Nazi-controlled areas are ominously dark, gloomy and devoid of all colour, with only the yellow tinge of window pane at night and red representing Nazis flags, arm bands and control points breaking the monotony of black and white. When it’s pouring down, it is reminiscent of Frank Miller’s Sin City, and along with a fantastic 60’s soundtrack, it creates a brilliant atmosphere. But liberate these areas by completing missions and the look is drastically different. It’s vivid and colourful like Disney animated film and it’s almost jarring to a point where you will start to miss the noir film charm of the Nazi areas.
Besides the story missions which various from chase sequences in giant zeppelins and car races to assassinations and destroying smaller Nazi installments such as sniper towers, radars, AA guns and propaganda speakers. Completing missions earns you contraband which you can use at various dealers to buy weapons and amino. There is also an interesting perk system that rewards you for excelling in various areas such as gunplay, snipping, stealth kills and driving.
As we said, missions are presented in the standard GTA-esque ‘go there and talk to him’ structure, platforming is strikingly similar to Assassin’s Creed stealth is inspired by Hitman, and the area liberation system is liberation system is similar to, most recently, infamous so clearly, The Sanoteur is a game built on borrowed ideas, and while that may sound on paper, the implementation of these implementation of these elements, while not perfect, is pretty good and they come together cohesively to provide a fair amount of gameplay variety.
The Saboteur isn’t historically accurate; the voice acting is so bad that it almost feels intentional. What it lacks in polish and production values, it makes up by delivering heaps of simple, unadulterated fun. And that’s worth something.
The SABOTEUR
Developer: Pandemic studios
Publisher: EA
Genre: Action adventure
Platform: PS3 (Rs 2,499), Xbox 360 (Rs 1,899), PC (Rs 999)
PC MINIMUM REQUIRMENTS
Operating system: Win XP SP3, Vista SP1, Win 7
CPU: Intel core2Duo 2.4 GHz or AMD equivalent
RAM: 2 GB
HDD: 7 GB
VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX w/ 256 MB video ram or ATI Radeon HD2600 Pro
SOUND: Directx 9c complaint sound.