You know that Key & Peele skit called The Power of Wings? That's The Saboteur. I'll elaborate.

The story of Pandemic is a sad, well documented one. So much EA fuckery as they continued their heel turn, and yet so many good-ass 8/10 games. SW Battlefront? Destroy All Humans? Fucking Mercenaries 1+2? Hell yeah brother, those all rule. RIP to the gas mask.

So why does no one talk about the Saboteur? Hell, I consider myself a fan and I only just got around to playing through it. The discourse I've observed on this typically begins and ends at "it was last", and after finishing it myself...yeeeeeah that's kind of its most standout trait, huh.

The game starts off full of promise. Great introductions to a tight cast, action sequences almost on par with the Uncharteds of the world, a solid revenge plot, a fantastic looking 7th gen Paris to get rowdy in, and endless legions of nazis to use as speedbumps. Hopping out of your car to plant a bundle of dynamite at the base of a watch tower and scampering back to your vehicle like a kid with a bag of burning dogshit who just rang a doorbell, complete with mischievous giggles, is the stuff video games were made for.

Then the story bits stop coming. Then the nazis stop introducing new weapons or enemies (until the last act, which are just Bigger Nazis). Then the roughly 3 objectives start repeating. Then the dogshit bag stops being quite so funny because you've done it dozens of times. This is a game where fucking explosions eventually lose their luster, and buddy, you're only halfway.

It sucks because The Saboteur has so many cool bits that just don't come together. Liberating areas and restoring color to entire regions is an incredible hook until you realize that they're only saved by finishing a character's mission chain. Nothing you choose to do matters, Sean can only affect the world through the orders of others. The small handful of setpieces after the first 2 hours all suck to play, though the singular zeppelin is at least pretty. Stealth goes completely out the window and never returns. Climbing is great, but later missions don't make use. The open world is the deadest of any of Pandemic's sandboxes; even Mercs 1 had the deck of 52 to approach however you pleased, meanwhile here there are only small distractions for equally small amounts of money. Moreover, every single mission is solved the same way: guns and explosives. Half the missions even dump you in loud immediately despite the game's attempt to introduce stealth via stealing dead nazi costumes. Shooting this mediocre shouldn't be the most common activity you do.

Sean's entire deal is that he's Irish, he's angry, and he's very good at driving. I wish that last one got more play because these vehicles are actually great! Instead the game has about 4 whole races, and the first one is a scripted loss. All the rest of the driving you do is just from mission to mission, or the end of a job where you need to evade the nazis like you always do - by scooting slightly outside of their range and slamming the brakes, because they're all stupid as shit. Which yeah, they're nazis, but you know what I mean.

By the time you trudge through the game's lengthy, flabby middle and get to the end it's clear that nothing's getting resolved in a satisfactory manner. Characters are written out left and right with single sentences, there's a mole plot that's introduced as quickly as it's resolved (that character sees no comeuppance for collaborating with nazis btw), you reuse an earlier section for a boring shootout in lieu of a big base assault, and there's no final boss fight with the target of Sean's vendetta despite hyping him up for the entire game. The enjoyability curve of this thing is a straight slope downhill, only it's covered with enough grit that you can't even enjoy an increase in speed.

So why 3/5 if it falls apart so completely? Man, listen, those first few hours are peak. Like "this is the best nazi murder sim where the main character's last name isn't Blazkowicz" levels of good. In the admittedly few moments where The Saboteur is firing on all cylinders it's the best Pandemic game. I don't take issue with folks who love this, especially if they haven't played it in ages or didn't finish it back in the day, because that's the best way to experience it. Pandemic deserves to be remembered as masters of their craft even if that's a bit revisionist.

Obligatory fuck EA.

С одной стороны у нас стильная игра в открытом в мире, а с другой - сыроватое мясо.
Понятно дело, что игра вышла в 2009, но уже тогда были хорошие примеры с нормальной проработкой мира, сюжета и геймплея.
Отдельно отмечу постановку некоторых миссий в качестве примера моего негодования.
В игре будет миссия, где надо встретиться с главарями сопротивления, чтобы договориться и объединить свои усилия против нациков. К сожалению, немцы устроили засаду и собрали пол армии на месте встречи. Мы отбиваемся и нам сразу же надо ехать в безопасное место, чтобы высадить главарей. По неизвестной причине, охране на блокпостах вообще похер, что в машине сидят три главаря сопротивления и один нашумевший подрывник-ирландец. Они просто пропускают нас, как только проверив документы.
В другой ситуации вообще был прикол: Чел, который говорил нам прямым текстом, что не может показываться на людях, опасаясь встречи с нациками, просто приходит на площадь, где вокруг стоят одни нацисты и даёт нам задание. Сука, при этом идёт внутриигровая катсцена и НПС могут к нам подходить. Смешно было то, как нацик встал ВПРИТЫК к этому челу и слушал его слова по поводу очередного подрыва.
Смешанные чувства от игры, вообщем. Хотя бы музыка крутая.
Игра на вечер, не более.

I am rating this game 15 years after release and so my rating is probably a bit too low, however, Grand Theft Auto IV had come out the year prior and it is a much better game mechanically, so its possible to have done better.

The game is entertaining, it is like popcorn action flick and not like GTA IV which is more akin to a thoughtful movie experience. The mechanics in the game such as disguising yourself as Germans and climbing around the rooftops is a lot of fun and adds a stealth component which is needed in the Hard and above difficulties.

The driving is not the best, however there are a wide variety of vehicles which you can steal and store in your garage and spawn as needed for free. There only feels like a few handling types, heavy, race car, medium, and tanks. The cars do slide a bit in certain situations though.

The gunplay is a lot of fun, although there doesnt seem to be auto-aim for controller which is fine, but the control stick doesnt allow for the finest precision shooting so it can be hard to kill enemies efficiently.

The place this game basically loses most of its ratings is in the jank. There is a lot of game ruining jank, crashes and glitches. I have found myself stuck in a small creek because they did not program a way to climb out of bodies of water unless its with a ladder, get stuck behind scenery, and crashes at checkpoints.

The controls are terrible and you will find yourself manning a turret instead of yanking the German off and then able to fight. You will take him off the turret, then man the turret, and in harder difficulties you can get killed fast if you dont anticipate this happening.

The game also frequently has you holstering your weapon after a cutscene and right before a major action scene, meaning you have to be aware to draw your gun out so you dont get killed immediately.

Lastly, the jumping off of ledges and between buildings can be a give or take on if youll just fall off the building or grab the ledge. Same with the telephone wires that connect rooftops. You cant just stand underneath and grab on, rather you have to jump forward and hope you grab it.

Overall, a fun game with a lot of fun mechanics that were ruined by shoddy programming. Oh yeah, you can cheese the disguise mechanic by blowing everything up, running out of the suspicion zone, wait a bit, then itll be business as usual and you can take down a whole building with explosions and no one really cares. Once you get the line of sights down pat and how to use the disguise mechanic stealth is a much better way to complete a lot of the missions.

The Saboteur is one of those games that blew me away when I played it back when it first released. It would take almost a decade for a game to come around that I think understood the open world genre better than this game (and more broadly, the way that Pandemic Studios understood it). Thankfully due to the recent re-release on Steam, I was able to revisit this gem.

I think firstly, I need to talk about if it has held up, as often is the question when revisiting nostalgia. Yes, with an asterisk the size of a boulder. The story is bare bones and frankly not great. The character motivation of revenge is a tried and true plot device and it is mostly the only thing that works here. I think Sean being a mechanic and racecar driver is great stuff, but there's no in game explanation why he is so good with explosives. Other than he is Irish I guess and oh god, did they only make him Irish because of the IRA? The other characters are all forgettable. The game is clunky at times from a gameplay perspective. Sean will often be confused about climbing over a wall and not just immediately grabbing the other side, or grabbing at all when you need him to, like trying to grab a wire. It's definitely a game made in the aughts with all of the bad movement and awful game and narrative design that statement entails.

So, why do I think it still holds up? This game oozes style. The noir black and white visuals with splashes of reds, yellows, or blues with full color in liberated areas is such a cool motif and still works so damn well to tell a story while also just being visually interesting. I think, though, while the story here is not great, Pandemic Studios' games only really use a vague story as a driver to make really interesting open world games. I think they really understood the genre and it wasn't until Breath of the Wild did another game really nail it in a way it felt The Saboteur did. The climbing in this game felt unreal in 2009 in comparison to its contemporaries. Lots of games were trying to figure out this freedom of movement and I think Pandemic Studios should be applauded for doing the best attempt at it. The market shifted on open world and freedom of movement took a big back seat until BOTW's climb anything, paraglide everywhere made the case with a massive exclamation point (though maybe telling that the only game since BOTW that understood this was Tears of the Kingdom). Now, I will take the rose-tinted glasses down a bit and say that the climbing has aged here. I think this argument probably seems silly if you first played this game now at least. It is a good reminder that this is a 15 year old game and give it a little grace. The open world design here is a map without a whole lot of different markers, which runs counter to the direction of Ubisoft open world games and heralds the noiseless maps of BOTW or Elden Ring. The free play elements of The Saboteur feed into the main game in a brilliant way. You can go in and clear out sniper towers and tanks and it'll make missions in those areas easier. And the free play stuff is definitely a good 'turn off your brain and listen to a podcast' gameplay loop. It can get repetitive and lacks variety after a while however. Fun to do in small doses when the mood strikes or when you know a mission is going to be in the area. These freeplay targets are also not critical to complete, they help to earn funds to buy upgrades or just as a fun distraction.

I think the last point I want to make on 'yes this holds up' is that the shooting and blowing things up is still just fun! Tossing a grenade from a roof down to a group of nazis and watching them ragdoll away is hilarious. I think shooting in third person games is such a tricky thing to nail. Rockstar only started to get it right after acquiring Team Bondi and how good it felt in LA Noire has then followed with GTA V and Red Dead 2 having some of the best feeling shooting in gaming. Pandemic was great at this with far less resources than Rockstar. It would have been interesting to see how they could have improved their systems into the Mercenaries game they were working on.

But I think the bigger picture includes a discussion of Pandemic Studios as a whole and the death of the AA game space. The last three series they made games for (Mercenaries, Destroy All Humans, The Saboteur) show that they understood making an open world fun and doing interesting things in the space. Their games are clunky and the stories are forgettable, but they are fun. They are games that have stuck with me for being fascinating and introducing mechanics that not many developers were going for. I think we started to lose these mid-tier games around this time as the industry chased bigger budget games and every game jockeys to be a blockbuster. Unfortunately, we are seeing the cost of these decisions now, with wide spread layoffs even if a game does well because it was not enough. News of more and more layoffs at game studios weighs on me and breaks my heart with each one. Now more than ever, we need more games like The Saboteur. We need more developers to be able to take risks with style and mechanics. And most importantly, these corporations don't punish these developers with layoffs or studio closures. I would love to see more games like The Saboteur and more studios like Pandemic be able to thrive instead of suffering the same fate that Pandemic ultimately did and like so many other studios did and continue to do.