Welcome to the unique open world of Nazi occupied Paris set in the 1940's, where the missions are huge, the women are sexy and the killings plentiful. You take on the role of Sean Devlin, a hard drinking womaniser with a past who has fled his native Ireland to try his luck at race car driving in Grand Paris. Sean is out for revenge on the one man an Aryan named Kurt Dierker who killed your best friend. Take this delicious scenario and throw in a third-person style, free-roaming action-adventure game-play, then season it with some exceedingly clever visuals, areas locked down by the Nazis are rendered in near-monochrome, with just the odd splash of color and you have a tasty dish indeed. The greatest challenge of playing an open world game is finding the right balance of a player's freedom of choice with a storyline that pushes them towards the main objectives. The Saboteur manages to do both very well. You can strictly follow the plot and complete the missions or go Nazi hunting across the countryside. One helpful way to ensure you remain on course to complete each mission is the character or location that must be reached to advance the story is always highlighted in yellow.
In this way the objectives are neatly displayed and players always know where the next most important task can be found in order to complete the missions. To complete these tasks players will need to find and purchase weapons, and currency is obtained through the separate neighbourhoods. Players can earn a number of perks from their violent activities around Paris, this will unlock new weapons, lower the price of grenades and dynamite and reduce knock-back effects from explosions. The prices for such tools start off as fairly arbitrary activities, such as mowing down Nazis with a stolen car. The biggest perks require the player to ramp up their destructive activities to almost maniacal levels. The game's achievements also add to this cartoon-like aspect; players can receive achievements for kissing women, collecting postcards and for leaving Devlin standing around doing absolutely nothing other than smoking his way through a never-ending pack of cigarettes. Open-world action-adventure games are all about the systems, which determine how the world operates and in that respect, The Saboteur is state-of-the-art.
The key system used is Suspicion, the Nazis occupying Paris were famously paranoid, and if any of them spot you doing anything untoward, they will blow whistles to sound the alarm; at which point you will be swamped by enemies. It’s lucky, then, that Devlin has stealth abilities provided by the hard-working developers, when he bloodlessly executes Nazis, he can don their uniforms and creep around buying themselves a little more leeway when walking through a base. Special enemy types can see through these disguises and reveal your true identity, which sets off the alarm. Another enjoyable aspect of The Saboteur is there are hundreds of specific targets to blow up; bridges, seaboard-facing super guns, V-2 rockets, tanks, fuel depots, communications towers, the list goes on and on and even after the story is finished you're still able to go back and burn everything that remains under Nazi control. If you fancy your chances as a demolitions expert (albeit a foul-mouthed, whiskey-drinking one) then look no further than The Saboteur. Just make sure the flint on your Zippo lighter isn't wet, that dynamite won't light itself. All in all The Saboteur is an awesome game with hours of fun, entertaining game-play with fantastic and authentic sound.
