The Saboteur (Or: How I Learned To Stop Sneaking And Just Shoot Everyone Directly)

What can I say about The Saboteur that hasn't already been said about Barack Obama - all potential, trying unsuccessfully to simultaneously appease two very different sets of ideals and sensibilities, and in the end, I'd much prefer to spend time with Inglourious Basterds instead. Set in Nazi-occupied Paris, it's yet another GTA clone that lacks the polish to compete. Let's start with all of the features that seem cool but fall flat. The world is an open sandbox - but it's relatively small, and lacks basic amenities, like waypoint navigation. This means when you want to get to the next mission in the story, you have to wander in its general direction. The art style is an interesting concept: the inspired (not liberated) portions of Paris are in color, while the Nazi-oppressed regions are in black, white and red. Cool in theory, but then you're driving down the streets at high speed, slamming into pedestrians, walls, and trees. And thanks for copying GTA in making trees strangely indestructible, it makes for a really awesome escape to be completely dead-stopped, regularly. Really exciting. The game is filled with old classic cars, but they all handle like shit, or highly unrealistically. The majority of the cars can't drive up stairs given a decent head start, or even up gentle hills. Really, this is the vehicle that the Nazis stormed Europe with? The guns are from the era, which means they are for the most part inaccurate, or underpowered, or have too slow a fire rate. The scoped sniper rifle in particular is unnecessarily difficult to aim with and is basically useless in a pressure situation. The MP44 is decent but anemic against later foes (ugh, I'm not ready to clarify this point yet). The game posits the protagonist as an expert climber, yet the climbing controls don't feel at all fluid, the jump timing is imprecise and too many times I found myself being injured by jumps that shouldn't hurt me and killed by jumps that should only graze me.


Not pictured: the actual turn itself, which almost every car is incapable of. Also, the game never at any point looks this good, ever.

The AI is stupid when it comes to helping you and unfair when it comes to fighting you. Your teammates for the most part are blithering idiots and the Nazis can either pinpoint exactly where you are shooting from or see you from hundreds of yards away, whichever one is more inconvenient at the time. The stealth elements are entirely botched; as a Nazi, if you do anything other than walk slowly, you are "being suspicious" and your disguise is good for about another six to eight seconds of whatever your unacceptable behavior of choice is, sometimes less depending on the "severity" of it. And all the fun or useful weapons like the rocket launcher or the silenced pistol have remarkably low ammo counts. The missions are ambitious but for the most part are poorly-executed for the reasons stated above. More on how missions are almost a total disappointment later.


This looks really cool until you realize it's impossible to see what you're doing.

The characters somehow manage to be colorful and uninteresting at the same time. The protagonist, Sean Devlin, is an Irish race car driver turned-vigilante and for all intents and purposes is a complete stereotype. He's brutish, crudely sexual, has a poorly-managed temper and is of course alcoholic. I guess he's also fearless because of the driver angle but more often it just comes off as thick-headed and stupid. The whole beginning of the story hinges on a Frenchman talking him into blowing up a petrol station while he's in the middle of drinking. He's supposed to be charming but the fact that he plays every stereotype to the hilt makes it very hard to take him seriously. His whole character can be summed up in a reply he gives during a conversation in which he is offered anything the British government can procure. The reward he finally agrees to is, you guessed it, a case of scotch. We get it already, he's a hard fighting, hard drinking (not exactly yet)IRA type. They even made his eyes shamrock green. You'd have an easier time selling me on the virtues of this character if his introduction was spent climbing out of a pot of gold at the end of a French rainbow.


Stand back, this cliché isn't going to deliver itself!

But it's not just him. Every character is like this. Skylar, the overly sexual female British SOE operative. Every other line out of this chick is about sex with you, or any other person she's worked with, and you spend the entire game working with her. ENOUGH ABOUT YOUR VAGINA, I GET IT, IT'S SEEN MORE ACTION THAN THE WESTERN FRONT. THANK YOU. Then there's Luc, the French Resistance leader. I understand this guy has to be militant, and anti-Nazi. Here's the thing: I'm anti-Nazi too. I don't need to be reminded every sentence that the Nazis are bad. You might say I'm familiar with the concept. I guess you can give this character some leeway, since the writers don't want you to like him too much, as he plays the antagonist to Devlin's archetypal love interest, Veronique. You know the one, it's the goody two-shoes girl who has never approved of the rough hero's antics and is (seemingly!) immune to his roguish charms, until the height of Act IV, when all his obvious pining coalesces into a suicidal rescue effort. Add the other cardboard dimension of "war changes people, maaaaaan" so that she basically morphs into being as violent as you but for her own justified reasons. Then there's Yosef Bryman (AKA Super Jew), who might be German, might be French, might be a lispy Jew, his accent changes with the missions. He's the noble "they only hate me because I'm a Jew and clearly I have an incredible skillset" character. He's a radio communications expert who also has skills with a gun and with stealing military vehicles, even though they pitch him as just your average bookish, fresh out of college Jew, initially. And of course there's Dierker, the "evil in every way" bad guy. It's not enough that he's a Nazi, and your rival on the race track (yes, you read that correctly). He's also somehow a Colonel overseeing secret evil Nazi experiments and an expert in torture. He has literally no redeeming qualities as a man, not in any regard, and right before you finally kill him (spoiler: the bad guy dies at the end), all he does is go on about how his "struggle" will never be understood.


Tell me more about how frequently you use your vagina

All of these characters are loud, but none of them give you any substance or even anything new. You've seen all these characters before under different names, because all of them are archetypes. The Jew is noble in every way, the Nazi is kitten-stomping evil, the Irishman is Irish, the French are noble-ish but kind of patronizing and cowardly (French, after all), and the British spies are spies who are British. All completely one-dimensional, all can be summed up by any one line of their dialogue. This may come as a surprise, but Jews can be useless, Nazis can be remorseful or reserved, and the Irish sometimes do things besides drink and fight.


Can you guess who this fellow is? I'll give you a hint: Not the plucky sidekick.

Later on in the game, they introduce "Terror Squad Nazis," which is the studio's way of saying, "this is how we make the game artificially harder in the second half." They're hulking, 8 foot tall monsters who have decided to ripoff both Killzone and Half Life 2 in terms of aesthetics, noises, and behaviors. They wear scary red eye gas masks with the typical helmet, long trench coats under scary metal armor, and copy the radio chatter almost verbatim of the Combine soldiers. They are mutants in every way, taking half a magazine of machine gun fire in the face to kill. Oh, and you can't sneak by them in disguise, you can't stealth kill them, and they constitute the majority of Nazis forces in the late second half of the game. They are cartoonish, artificially difficult, and they completely wreck the intended tone and mechanics of the game.


Gee, I wonder where this idea came from.

There are some things this game does right, though. For one, you can pick up ammo for weapons whether you are carrying them or not. For example, you can pick up shotgun ammo even whilst carrying a rifle and a pistol, and save it for later use automatically. One quick sidenote on that particular point: why since Halo have we decided that all action game protagonists can only carry two weapons? I understand the former was striving for a certain level of realism, but The Saboteur is anything but. Why in THIS regard are you choosing to bend to the whims of believability?

As much as the visual style makes gameplay impossible, it also hides the less than stellar graphics with admittedly stylish imagery. The stark red on black and white is undeniably oppressive, and while it makes for terrible gameplay under certain circumstances (more on that later) whilst moving through the territory you do legitimately feel something between dread and irritation. Maybe the dread comes because you are afraid you are going to run over a Nazi in the shadows and have to run again, it's hard to say. But I can't hate on the intent of the Sin City/Schindler's List style, even if like every other idea in this game, it's borrowed. And there is an undeniable satisfaction to shooting a Nazi in the head with a carbine rifle, or dropping a zeppelin with the Panzershreck rocket launcher.


What am I going to do, say this isn't cool? That would be a lie. It is cool.

This is a dumb game that wants to be a smart game. And it carries itself as the latter. But in reality, almost none of the missions can be done the smart way, or the sneaky way. For example: in one mission, you have to rescue the French-German Super Jew Bryman, who is being held in a Nazi detention center. I procured an SS uniform, then scaled the side of the prison, working my way around clockwise, dropping the sentries from the highest posts first, working my way down to the lowest. After I had cleared the facility, which had taken a good 15 minutes, I freed Bryman and ran towards a ladder that we could use to climb to our escape.

Except Bryman can't climb ladders.

Okay, so the only way out is now through the heavily-guarded and barred gates. So...why give me the option to sneak at all? Why encourage me to do so by putting scaffolding for me to scale on the side of the building? I put some dynamite on the gate since there is no other means of opening it, and immediately am flooded with Nazi reinforcements. We somehow get into a vehicle, which is immediately smashed into by three Nazi Sturmwagens. We are shot to death far before we can get a good start on the road by tanks. I attempt this about seven more times, trying to find some stealth option, including blowing up the doors from afar, which promptly heal themselves when I enter the complex (which is not a separate loading screen, by the way). After an hour and a half of trying this mission in every stealthy way I can imagine, I just say, "fuck it," drive a vehicle through the gates, shoot everyone, get Bryman in the vehicle, and just speed out the same hole I made. This is every mission in a nutshell. And add to ALL of this that the major missions take place in scary black and white Nazivision, where making getaway escapes in a car, shooting, or just navigating your surroundings in general is unnecessarily difficult, and every major mission becomes a frustrating clusterfuck.


Why am I doing this? The guard in the tower will see me through the wall, or any Nazi who is within ten feet of me will immediately see through my disguise.

I can understand making an action-y game. I do. But stop having pretensions of being a covert thriller, or urging me to try the smart approach. You have programmed your game in such a way that the only smart approach is to shoot everyone and run fast. Remove the "disguise yourself as a Nazi" gimmick completely. I am expected to believe that the Nazis took France in the BLITZKRIEG without any running? And that every Nazi soldier at a glance can tell apart all the other Nazis, to the level that you can't stand too close to a Nazi for more than 8 seconds without him seeing through your disguise? Maybe if the main character didn't stink of booze and Irish boxing all the time, this game mechanic would work better. When wearing a Nazi uniform, you basically can't do anything mission-related. You can't run, you can't shoot, you can't even get close to the Nazis. Someone should tell Pandemic that THAT IS WHY I PUT ON THE GODDAMN UNIFORM! And in the second half of the game, it automatically doesn't work on enemies anyway. What is the point of this gameplay mechanic? I can't use it for anything! There were two points of this game for me: the first point where I tried to play by their rules and almost stopped playing entirely, and the second point, where I just became the Constantly Fleeing Action Hero, which was completely mindless and not entertaining. I've played that game already. Give me the game you're trying to be. Or don't try! I really can't articulate enough how poorly managed this disguise and stealth system is. You can't accomplish anything with it, and for as dumb as the Nazis are behaviorally, they are savants when it comes to sensory perception.

The last mission, in which you do nothing but ride up the Eiffel Tower and then anti-climatically execute the antagonist, is only relieving because there isn't one last, retarded hoop to jump through. Since you've essentially murdered the entire Nazi party, to not have to fight your way through the Eiffel Tower was like one last concession for all of the stupidity you previously endured. When a game rewards you by not making you play it and you feel genuinely relieved, there's a problem.

Compare this to Saints Row 2, another GTA-clone. Do you know why people enjoyed that game? Because it knew, from the first second, that it was a stupid game, and never at any point tried to pull the conceit of being otherwise. Hell, that game opened up with an explosion so big that it actually gave you the option to change the gender of your character. That's a game that knows what it's selling. It was mind-numbingly retarded throughout, yet the end still managed to feel like it came too soon, and it also ended with you scaling a massive tower to kill the final antagonist! The only difference is, you did it by flying through the windows in a fucking helicopter, and instead of shooting a Nazi colonel, you shoot Jay Mohr. If you're going to be dumb and loud, commit to it. That way when I'm shooting Nazis up like an Inglourious Basterd, I actually enjoy the counter-sadism of it. Stop trying to be serious and make the Nazis pincushions for my cruelty and devious creativity already. You want me to be a hardass (pre)IRA type? Okay, then make my character a total motherfucker, not this 'struggling with his morality' type; the latter comes across as completely disingenuous. Stop pretending to be smart, because it throws a light on ALL of the utter stupidity in your game. Maybe the aforementioned Tarantino film gave me unfair expectations, or maybe it's that Pandemic teased at this very thing that they did not follow up and deliver on. Believe it or not, this was a time of some resentment. And you're putting me in the shoes of a wronged character. Give me the satisfaction of having the Nazis shit themselves when they see me coming, not blowing a whistle and forcing me to run. I don't want to spend an entire game running from Nazis; I want them to be running from me!

If you're going to make a serious game, then consider this: World War II was an interesting time. Nazi-occupied France was an interesting setting. The people that fought against the Nazis secretly were interesting people. There are amazing stories of heroism, of valor, of sacrifice. The man Sean Devlin is based off of was born to an English father and French mother, won a fortune as a race car driver and when the war broke out, fled to Britain to join up. Because of his fluency in both languages, the SOE nabbed him and inserted him into the French resistance. He was a successful part of the Chestnut network and eventually was sent to the concentration camps and executed for his efforts. This is an interesting guy, and your homage to him is a drunk Irishman who fucks a lot. Really?

The reason the stories of World War II are so fascinating is because at a glance it seems to be the perfect struggle of good and evil, but the closer you look, the more complicated the picture becomes. Most Nazis were not evil men, just men who were overly proud of their country and for the most part, deceived and worked into a frenzy by the efficient propaganda of a small organization. And even evil men are complicated, and can provide an interesting character study. The highest generals still had their own sets of ideals and morals, dreams and delusions, and what they thought, and sometimes only hoped, was a necessary sacrifice of those for their idea of a greater good. The Nazis aren't scary because they burned children, or gassed women, or shot men. Though all those things are horrible, they aren't unique, and Nazis didn't introduce us to the concept of brutally wiping out innocent civilians; far from it, they're just one of many groups throughout history to do so. The real reason the Nazis were scary was because at the lowest level of involvement, they could have been anyone you know today, yourself included, and at the highest point, conceivably could be what any person could become with the right influences. The Nazis are terrifying because they are people, and not monsters. And when you make them either freakish, genetic beast people who take three grenades to put down or overly sadistic lunatics who shoot their own men for misplacing paperwork, you're missing the point. Which in the end, is this game's biggest sin. Indeed, the only true feat accomplished by Pandemic was taking all of the depth and personality out of the war and the people who fought it and somehow making it clichéd and forgettable.

I understand that the goal was not to go for a totally serious game, but this is a setting that requires commitment. Either you're shooting Hitler's face off and gunning down a crowd of German movie goers, or you're COD: World at War, pretending to be dead while the Germans are mercilessly pumping rounds into the fallen comrades around you, all the while just hoping to survive until nightfall. The game ultimately comes across as schizophrenic - it wants to be a high-thrills joyride but it also attempts to be somber and serious with mature themes. You can't have both here, especially not in the way that Pandemic has done it. It comes across as shoddy, and it feels like it cheapens the real ordeal of the men and women who were there. I don't need every game with Nazis to be a war-era biopic, I really don't. But you can't handle serious, real-life occurrences and people in this way, it just seems...disrespectful.


Gaze upon these breasts, lest ye reflect upon all of our failings.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the game is full of topless girls. I didn't mention it because it's insignificant to the gameplay experience and panders to the lowest common denominator of gamers, but it bears notice simply so you have a heads up of what politicians are going to call the next rape simulator in 8-13 months.