The Saboteur

The concept of The Saboteur is a unique one. Set in Paris during the Nazi occupation, you play as Sean Devlin, an Irish Mechanic with a passion for women and dynamite. I never really did understand why an Irish guy was in Nazi occupied Paris but I didn’t get too caught up on it. I also tried not to focus too much on the fact that his career is about fixing stuff while you spent the whole game going around Paris blowing stuff up.

The premise is that Sean, with his sort of adoptive French family, enters a race. During said race, this stereotypical Nazi dude shoots out Sean tyres so that he loses the race. The Nazi guy then kills Sean’s French sort of brother which causes Sean to join the French resistance.

As far as plots go, it’s pretty out there. Sean as a character though, is absolutely hilarious for the majority of the game, especially when he goes on mini swearing fits and calling every German in sight a ’knob-jockey.’ He is, however, really unbalanced. His rage issues and womanising traits make him a great character, but hard to relate to and this is quite important considering we are spending in excess of 60 hours inside the guy’s head.

During the many loading screens throughout the game, we are reminded of Sean’s abilities. As a mechanic, Sean has gained the ability to ‘climb almost every building in Paris.’ While his climbing ability is to be admired, this statement is nowhere near true and led to countless frustrations when trying to climb buildings only to be stopped by either barbed wire or Sean not being able to reach the next ledge. Also, in order to climb to have to repeatedly tap the A button which makes climbing a very bad copy of Assassin’s Creed style gameplay.

Also, I kept getting caught up on the surrounding scenery which became very annoying after the fifth-hundredth time it happened.

While I’m on gameplay mechanics, the disguise function is a pile of garbage. Sean can wear a Nazi uniform to blend in with the Nazis and not be spotted by them. However this only works when you are a certain distance away from them which, in certain circumstances, makes the disguise more of a hindrance than help. For example, In Nazi occupied France, Nazis don’t run. Ever. This means that when you run as Sean i a Nazi outfit, this is suspicious. However, when I blow the fuck out of something, it’s not suspicious at all for the other Nazis to run towards the explosion. Fuckers.

The music is a fifty-fifty for me. At first I enjoyed the added atmosphere it provided, however when you are playing for the points, it’s an awfully long time to be listening to either to plinky-plunky music that adorns the streets of Paris and the five songs that come on the radio. I did download a few versions of ‘Feeling Good’ afterwards though, but they didn’t play the song enough in game to not hate the music.

Achievements – 45 Achievements – 1,000 Points

I didn’t use guides for any of the achievements in the game which probably means there are easier ways or cheaper ways of doing things that playing properly so there are maybe certain ways to earn these easier, so I’ll only focus on the ones that pissed me off.

There are four missable achievements, two for completing the story missions in a certain way and two which relate to a side quest for killing Nazi Generals in a specific way (of which there are a limited amount in the game).

Certain things in this game really shouldn’t be an achievement. There is an achievement for kissing fifty women. While not immediately obvious, if Nazis are chasing you, you can ‘hide’ from them by kissing a woman. This is absolutely crazy especially when there are ten armed Nazis chasing after you and you are dressed exactly the same! However, this is a side point – my point is I had nowhere near enough opportunities to escape from the Nazis near kissable women so I had to spend ten minutes kissing the same woman to get the achievement.

There is also another achievement for ‘Chain Smoker’ where the description is to stand around doing nothing. What this means is that you have to smoke enough cigarettes to get this and to smoke cigarettes, you have to not move. I do not understand the point of a game that awards you for not playing it, especially to the point of smoking 100 cigarettes.

And then there is the completing the ambient freeplay events of which there are... hang on... 1,338 in total which makes the Assassin’s Creed flags look like nothing. This is made even worse by the fact that you have to blow most of this shit up with dynamite or a rocket launcher. This means that the total shit you can blow up in one go is 39 things before you have to go and buy some more explosives assuming you don’t die. Arduous much?

And the last one is the same as the 100,000 credits from Quantum of Solace. You have to spend 75,000 contraband and there is nowhere near enough opportunity to get this during normal play unless you die a lot. Just to clarify, I did die a lot and still didn’t get close to this amount. It was another one I had to grind out at the end which was just another additional frustration.

Downloadable Content – N/A

To sum up, although it may not seem it, it was fun in places and Sean’s conversational skills are something I want to see more of in games. It’s not a groundbreaking sandbox game and if I had to chose between this and Grand Theft Auto, it’s not a contest. Far from perfection, but not the worst thing I’ve played and I did get a sense of achievement from completing all the ambient freeplay stuff. Just don’t ask me to do it again... ever.