The Saboteur (PC DVD)

I bought this on a whim and must admit that when I started playing was a bit disappointed the viewpoint was not first person. That pretty soon evaporated as I realised how awesome the game really is. If you have played and enjoyed "Fable", imagine a similar huge world to explore, but in Paris during WW2. Be warned though, the game is rated for 15 or older in the UK and contains some ripe language and strong violence.

The game is a mix of free-roaming and missions with some fantastic fun escaping the Nazis in car chases, while being shot at from motorcycle side cars, armoured cars and some nasty looking Gestapo cars that have machine guns built into them. The tracer effects are great and at times it looks like it is raining lead. The AI on this is really good as they really do try to box you in and run you off the road.

Some reviews here suggest the game was buggy to begin with. But there is an update, though it can be a bit hard to find on the web. I had to update the driver for my ATI Radeon HD 4800 to get the frame rate up, but that was my fault for having drivers that were out of date. I have a core duo processor rated at 3Ghz and the game runs perfectly at 1024 x 768 resolution, which is fine by me, though I havent bothered to try a higher setting.

The real star of this game is the populated city of Paris with all the landmarks and, yes, you can go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. You can drive at 90mph down the Champs Elysees and often have to if you want to survive. You also bump into crotchety civilians, who often have something to say to you and all too often walk right out in front of you when you are driving. They keep shouting, "learn how to drive!" at me.

Oh, and there are some nifty car races to get into as well.

This is a gem of a game, full of variety and unexpected charms and it would be a great shame if you missed it because of the early technical snag reviews.

If like me you have played a bunch of games of this type over the years but are now sick to death of dis functional moronic gangs and their stupid activities, then this game is a godsend ! don`t believe any `dated graphics` comments, they are very stylish for a game of this type, especially if you can max out all the settings on a high end rig ! I have this running on a core 2 duo windows 7 Ultimate 64 system with an N-Vidia 260 GTX card and with recent game patches it runs just fine.

the game play is varied and, as said by others before me,incorporates elements from other games, GTA type of world set in WW2, climbing a la Tomb Raider,racing,sniping, covert stealth operations etc etc. The missions are varied and the many cut scenes really add to the wide and varied story about the Nazi occupation of the North of France in World War 2.

Your main character a wise cracking foul mouthed Irishman is a lot of fun also.

It is best played with an Xbox 360 controller, I have a wireless one and you can buy the USB receiver for it from Amazon, but beware there are controller issues with the game, upon a quick google search I found that this is easily overcome simply by switching on your controller when the game has loaded and reached the title screen instead of before the game starts, problem solved. I`ve now played the game for around 10 hours and it hasn`t crashed once.

What are you waiting for go and buy it now, especially at the current knock down prices, great stuff !

I bought The Saboteur because I like both open world and stealth games. However I was wary whether it would actually work on my system having read some very negative comments. Apparently Pandemic the studio who produced the game closed after releasing The Saboteur so there is no proper back up for bug fixes. It appears there are serious problems running this on newer ATI Radeon graphics cards although EA the distributor has released a beta patch which may cure this. I use an Nvidia card so this issue luckily did not affect me. I run a dual boot system so for safety I ran the game initially on Windows XP 32 bit as everything normally runs on this smoothly. However I got many lock-ups including the odd blue screen along with the message that the graphics driver was not working. This has never happened on any other game so I switched to Windows 7 64 bit and the problem largely disappeared apart from the odd very rare freeze up. Stability problems in this game are particularly serious as there is not a conventional quick save so you have to replay whole missions if you get a crash. The game says you can save at any time but this is misleading. What appears to happen is it saves progress when you are doing freeplay missions but if you save during a normal mission this puts you back to the start of that mission. Therefore the best thing to do is always complete a mission before quitting the game - if you die during this session you go back to the last checkpoint within the mission not to the very beginning.

I noticed a few bugs in the game such as guards walking around suspended in mid air when they were supposed to be in an observation tower. In one scene Devlin is in the private members part of the Belle enjoying a private burlesque dance with a stripper who is cavorting over an invisible table. However these did not really bother me too much. More seriously I read on the forums there are a couple of game breaking bugs. In Act 2 you must not do Kwong's optional missions before the main mission titled "Needs of the few ... or the One" or the main mission cannot be completed. I followed this advice but then could not backtrack to complete these optional missions until after I finished the main game. Early in Act 1 the Slaughterhouse becomes a safe house (this is not a spoiler). If you notice after the "Grand Theft Limo" main mission that the back rooms in this safe house have not opened allowing access to characters who provide new missions the game is broken and you will have to replay this last mission to progress. Luckily this did not happen when I played the game. I thought I had found a new game breaker in the second to last mission Deja Boom when I hit an invisible wall when trying to enter the factory through the main door. Luckily there is a side entrance so this was not a bug. One of the problems playing a game you know is really a beta release is every time something strange occurs you assume it is a bug and get worried. I found that weapons I had looted were disappearing from my inventory. It turns out only weapons you have bought are in your inventory and can be swapped at will. If you loot a weapon which is not available to buy on the black market yet you lose it if you swap it out. Therefore the best thing to do is keep it until it runs out of ammo. I also noticed quite a few graphical glitches where characters or parts of scenery would go incandescent red briefly. I read a release from EA saying the game is experiencing graphical problems with some quad core processors (what doesn't it have a problem with?). Turning off cores using the "set affinity" trick to make it a dual core may work they say but I didn't think it bad enough to try this.

The storyline is excellent - you are freeing occupied France in World War II from the Nazis and there are plenty of subplots. Everything starts off in black and white then when you liberate areas they become full colour - very dramatic. You get the impression throughout the game of size - Paris really does feel like a vibrant city. Some missions take place outside Paris at locations such as Le Havre. There is no quick travel available and again you get the impression of scale after driving across half of France. Whilst the game is not as open world as Oblivion or Fallout 3, at any time you can break off from the main plot and do freeplay missions of your choice to earn contraband to buy new weapons etc. The number of freeplay missions is staggering - it would probably take years to complete them all. These are normally fairly simple destroy missions - blow up a tank, destroy a searchlight etc. In addition there are optional missions which are more meaty and fun but which are not required to complete the game. Most missions can be tackled in several ways. I normally favour a stealth approach so creep about disguised in a stolen uniform shooting all the guards with a silenced pistol before I set the explosives. However in one mission I hijacked a tank instead and simply blasted the entire Nazi base to bits with the tank's gun. There is even an RPG element - completing certain tasks unlocks "perks" such as improved sniping skill most of which are well worthwhile. Being essentially an open world game you can go at your own pace. However towards the end the pace became much more frantic and the gameplay and storyline more linear in style.

I noticed elements of several other gamers in The Saboteur. There is plenty of climbing buildings as in Assassin's Creed and driving to avoid pursuers as in Grand Theft Auto IV. I particularly enjoyed carjacking vehicles from indignant Parisians when I was on the run. There are some excellent stealth sections reminiscent of Thief 3 and Velvet Assassin. The game this reminded me most of though was one of my favourites, Red Faction Guerrilla. Instead of freeing Mars from the EDF you are freeing France from Nazis but the principle is the same. The explosions are not as good as Red Faction Guerrilla but the character development is much more advanced. Whereas you did not get to know Mason in Red Faction very well, Sean Devlin the mad Irish racing driver cum saboteur here is a very colourful, interesting character with a murky past who you get to like. The supporting characters are fairly interesting also and the voice acting generally excellent with some funny stereotyping of the Germans, Irish, French and British aristocracy. I remember one cutscene where Devlin takes a dislike to Wilcox, a British agent, and the two trade insults using increasingly bad language which is hilarious.

I ran the game on full settings (which you access through the launcher not in-game) and it ran smoothly at an average framerate close to the vsync cap of 60 throughout. My system is fairly high end (Core i7 920DO, GeForce GTX 285) but the game did not seem particularly demanding - I noticed using FRAPS the VRAM usage never went much over 450MB so a 512MB card will be fine. The graphics are not as good as they could be - some textures and models are very poor, particularly the vehicles which look like toys - but this did not annoy me as much as it would normally as I was enjoying the story so much. I wish in fact the graphics had remained black and white till the end when everything is liberated as this covers up a multitude of graphical sins and looked simply stunning. One of the best parts of the game is driving around Paris in a fast car in the black and white districts listening to the very cool jazz soundtrack. The vehicle AI was quite poor - half the skill whilst driving was avoiding badly driven vehicles often on the wrong side of the road (you are supposed to drive on the right in France) - however anyone who knows Paris would say this is realistic as driving in Paris is like being in a demolition derby to this day. Even worse was the AI of the pedestrians who seemed to delight in jumping in front of your car when you were trying to avoid them - especially nuns. There are not many serious penalties for killing pedestrians so I ended up just mowing them all down.

Overall this is an excellent game and you get an awful lot for your money. It took me approx. 35 hours to complete the main story including all the optional quests. However this does not include the time spent replaying sections when I was killed (which was fairly frequent). Also I only completed approx. 25% of the freeplay missions. You can finish the game, let the credits roll, then complete any optional or freeplay missions if you want to. The only criticism is I wish Pandemic were still in existence so the game could be a little more polished and feel more finished. Also they seem to know how to produce good games so we are missing out on future titles. The reason I gave this four not five stars is because ultimately this is a beta version with many small bugs which should have been eliminated at the testing stage. Ironically one of my favourite games Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines suffered from exactly the same development problems as The Saboteur - it was rushed out as the developer went bust. That game was so badly broken as to be almost unplayable on release but after a number of unofficial community patches is now bug free - I hope someone with more ability than me tidies up The Saboteur in a similar manner to make it the game it very nearly became.

If you can get the game to work well on your system as I could you will be well rewarded. I thought the opening scenes summed the tone of the game up well - Devlin is knocking back the whiskey in the raunchy strip club in Paris where he lives - this is a fun game.

Hope this helps