Hands-on | The Saboteur

Format: Xbox360/PS3/PC | Genre: Action | Publisher: EA | Developer: Pandemic | ETA: 08/12/09

By Lewis Denby

In the endless sea of World War 2 shooters, The Saboteur stands out in glorious greyscale, blood and explosions peeking over the horizon.

Its world is one in which colour is key.  It’s at the heart of the art design: a striking, monochrome palate with vibrant crimson dotted around the environment.  And it’s tied to the gameplay itself, as well.  As unwitting resistance member Sean Devlin battles through each mission, he boosts morale in the respective section of Nazi-infested France.  As morale rises, the colour returns.

It’s a neat concept, and one that appears to work well.  The Saboteur’s use of colour isn’t just pretty, it also serves a pleasant functional capacity.  It’s all linked with the greater context of the game’s story, and contributes to some of the less overriding details as well.  Unsure if you can scale that wall?  Have a closer look; if you can, its footholds will glisten subtly, gently guiding you onwards towards your goal.

But The Saboteur – in its current build, at least – seems a little confused in this respect.  Its use of shimmering colour as a helpful lead is a welcome change from the in-your-face hand-holding that, for many, has plagued a great deal of current-generation releases.  But despite its occasional subtlety, The Saboteur is all too willing to fall into the same trap as its peers.  A big, yellow waypoint marker sits atop the screen, intrusive but managable.  But as you edge closer to your destination, another big blob of yellow hovers over it, layered on top of the game world.  It’s distracting, and unnecessarily patronising.

It’s the sort of thing that could well be optional in the final product.  But it’s still one of the many things that don’t feel quite right about The Saboteur, as it enters its final stages of development.

//I’ve been driving in my car
We had the chance to go hands-on with three separate missions in The Saboteur this week, each demonstrating a different aspect of the gameplay.

One saw us scaling a building, sneaking up on a few guards and planting a bomb in a fuel depot, before hopping into a car and hot-footing it to the country’s border.  Sean Devlin’s background is in motor racing, so the inclusion of driving sequences works well, and the handling seems perfectly reasonable, if nothing to get particularly giddy about.  Indeed, the whole sequence is a promising one, the open-plan driving impressively showcasing the scale of the game world.  And of course, there’s just something intrinsically, inexorably cool about ploughing through crowds of Nazis.  J.D. would approve.

The other two missions focused on sneaky stealth play and gun-toting action, and it’s here where The Saboteur starts to feel slightly clunky.  An automatic cover system, whereby the game will snap you into cover if you wander up close to it, is a very clever idea.  But in practice, it doesn’t work a hundred per cent of the time, occasionally dropping you behind a wall when you wanted to run past it, or seemingly flat-out refusing to crouch behind an object when you’re clearly being shot at from eight different directions.  You can override it with a manual button press, so it’s never hugely frustrating, but it’s something Pandemic could do to tighten up in the run-up to release.

There also seems to be an irritating conflict between the all-out action sequences and the encouragement of stealthy play.  Pandemic promise a “quiet in, loud out” approach to missions, but it seems more jumbled than that.  From the very start, Devlin soaks up a frankly ludicrous amount of bullets, while most enemies go down with a single shot.  It only serves to discourage careful, strategic sneakery, since ploughing through each level with a machinegun and an angry snarl seems to work just as well.  Or, at least, it would do if enemies didn’t occasionally start shooting at you from the most arbitrary of locations, with no visual indication in which direction they’re hiding.  It means that the cover system sometimes isn’t even all that useful – if a bad guy’s spotted you from behind, going prone behind a wall doesn’t do a right lot of good.

Elsewhere, a left-trigger-activated lock-on system works well, but manual aiming seems a little oversensitive.  And the weapons, though almost too powerful, feel flimsy and plasticky to fire.

//‘Allo ‘Allo
There’s a dialogue sequence that really sums up the shaky quality of The Saboteur.  Devlin, voiced semi-competently by Robin Atkin Downes of Uncharted/No More Heroes/Gears of War fame, is speaking with a German insider about his forthcoming mission.  Even in the game’s loud booth, with players chatting away and explosions ringing out from the speakers, it’s clear that your contact’s voice work is implausably bad.  All suspicions are confirmed when the words “Ja” and “Nein” creep into an otherwise English conversation.  It’s exemplary of The Saboteur’s currently inconsistent feel as a whole.

Most of these problems are ones that could, in theory, be tweaked before final release in December.  The cover mechanic is almost there, and a slight rebalancing of the stealth and action sections would go a long way to creating a more fluid experience.  At present, it’s a game that never quite seems to establish its own structural identity, even though its visual one shines through.