The Saboteur is a third person shooter developed by Pandemic Studios, makers of the Star Wars: Battlefront and Mercenaries series. You take control of Sean Devlin, a potty mouth Irish mechanic and race car driver living in Paris with the Rousseau family in pre-war and later war torn France, giving the middle finger to the Germans with a frenzy of explosive action and cliché phrases.

 

Almost immediately after starting the game a flashback commences. You see Sean with best friend Jules and romantic interest Veronique fixing up their car to go to a race just across the border. All is well in pre-war France and Sean couldn't be happier. To show his racing enthusiasm he soon gets in to a bar fight with fellow racer Kurt Dierker. After a pleasant exchange of fists and blood you flash forward to the actual race. Sean is pulling ahead in the race and just as he reaches pole position nasty old Dierker decides he won't stand for that, pulls a gun out and shoots out Sean's tyre, causing Sean to lose the race. To make it even Sean and Jules decide that Dierker's treasured car should visit the bottom of a river bed. Sean and Jules get captured, a strange turn of events occurs and Sean manages to escape Germany and reach France just as the Germans begin their invasion. What excellent timing. Due to what has happened Sean sets out to get revenge on Dierker, which drives most of the plot. To pass the time Sean also joins the French resistance so that he has an excuse to blow **** up.

  

The story works but it isn't exactly amazing. Whilst I enjoyed it sometimes I got so caught up in getting through the missions that I actually forgot my objective. I often only realised after madly spraying bullets at all the Nazis I could see that I was meant to be rescuing some person or picking up some casket of some sort. The characters also aren't exciting or memorable. Sean is your typical Irishman (in other words, a brawler and a drinker), Luc (the leader of the French resistance) is your typical French nationalist and Skylar (Sean's other romantic interest, that sly dog) is just your stereotypical Brit (the posh blonde bombshell stereotype, not the yellow teethed minger). They're alright characters, but nothing special.

 

 

The gameplay is very much Assassins Creed style with guns and dynamite. Sean is, somehow, a master of free running (which he claims he picked up from climbing out of girl's windows at three in the morning). However, the free running is quite clunky. Sean will often not grab on to ledges that look extremely grabbable. You also have to tap a face button every time you want him to jump one ledge up. This can become frustrating at times. Sean can mysteriously handle a gun perfectly right from the beginning, most likely due to his shady past life in the great country of Ireland. If going in all guns blazing and explosions galore simply isn't your thing most missions also have the option to use stealth, which can be vital to Sean's survival when infiltrating Nazi controlled locations. If you're planning to go with the stealth option you can grab a Nazi uniform and enter under the radar. This is done by simply killing a Nazi in a way that spills no blood (so in other words a simple snap of the neck rather than plastering him with bullets or blowing him up) and then stealing his clothes whilst nobody is looking. When in the uniform you can go about restricted areas without anyone being any the wiser. This will also allow you to carry guns in public without anyone caring. However, you still can't do "suspicious" things like run, jump or climb (it's a well known historical fact that Nazis can't jump. Look it up.) because this will ruin your cover and cause Nazis to sound the alarm. However, Sean can't enter "suspicion zones" (zones of high importance, or areas where gunfire and/or explosions have recently been heard) because the Nazis will pay too much attention to him and see through his disguise.