Taking Back France With The Saboteur

It's been so long since we'd heard anything about Pandemic's Saboteur, I was beginning to wonder if the game was even still in production. Indeed it is--EA has begun the PR cycle in earnest for this open-world action game set in World War II-era, Nazi-occupied France, which is now known as The Saboteur. That cycle began with a lengthy hands-off demo that showed the visual style, narrative tone, and over-the-top action Pandemic is going for.

You're Sean Devlin, a rough-and-tumble Irishman who starts out as a race car driver in late 1930s Germany. Through a series of early, unfortunate events Pandemic didn't reveal, Devlin gets a tad upset with the Nazis and vows revenge against them. The game then jumps a few years later into wartime France, where Devlin has joined up with the resistance movement to--you guessed it--sabotage the German occupation. If all that sounds like a slightly far-fetched origin story, I should note Devlin is inspired by a real-life badass named William Grover-Williams who did the exact same thing. So there's actually some veracity to this whole race-car-driver-turned-Nazi-saboteur thing.

The first thing you notice when you look at The Saboteur is its stark aesthetic. You'll play large parts of the game almost entirely in black and white, with only certain specific colors highlighted. More often than not the highlighted color is red, very similar to the technique used in Sin City (which Pandemic cites as a major influence on the art style). It's a striking effect; you'll be sneaking your way through some German base with only the bright red of warning lights, swastika-emblazoned Nazi armbands, and spilled blood highlighting the scene. The designers will use this selective coloration to bring the player's attention to important areas of the scene, such as targets you need to destroy or places you need to investigate. Color will also give you an idea of where you've been and what you've done. Areas of Paris where you've completed a lot of missions and subverted the Nazi war effort will rapidly regain their color, to the point where you can stand on a rooftop and literally see which areas of Paris have felt the effects of your efforts and which ones are still under oppression.

Vichy France is certainly a grim setting, but nobody will accuse The Saboteur of taking itself too seriously. For one, the game plays fast and loose with its timeline. There will be zeppelins flying over Paris, for instance, even though they'd been decommissioned before the war started--because, let's face it, shooting down a zeppelin with a panzerschrek is fun. Devlin is a snarky, shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy, somewhere between Indiana Jones and Die Hard's John McClane, in Pandemic's own words. The core third-person shooting has got the kind of one-man-army feel to it you'd expect with a character like that; Devlin soaks up bullets via recharging health, gunning down German soldiers and officers with giddy abandon.

Mechanically, The Saboteur borrows lots of established tropes from other games. There's a cover system that snaps you straight to walls and barriers automatically. Devlin is a strong, acrobatic guy; he can climb up building faces and over rooftops as nimbly as Assassin's Creed's Altair. And true to the game's title, there will be plenty of instances where sneaking and stealth kills will get you to your objective with less noise and less danger.

The sample mission I saw involved Devlin blowing up a gigantic artillery gun the Nazis had installed on a building rooftop. (There's that loose interpretation of reality again.) This involved, well, a lot of climbing over rooftops and shooting German soldiers with shotguns and sniper rifles. Pandemic did point out that in this particular mission it would have been an option to steal a disguise and sneak toward the gun instead. In addition to story missions like these, there will be the standard open-world-game side activities. Though, instead of collectible items, per se, you'll be doing things like assassinating important officers or blowing up targets of opportunity instead.

Pandemic's open-world Paris is condensed and simplified; major landmarks are closer together and the overall size of the city is smaller than the real-life version. That lets the designers put more detail into the individual buildings, though, which really look quite nice. Storefronts are modeled out with actual objects behind their windows, and that sort of thing. You should still have room to drive around and explore, though; as a former race-team member, Devlin will have access to some speedy hot rods to drive around the city streets, in addition to other slower, period vehicles.

That tighter focus extends to the game's storyline too. Pandemic says The Saboteur is "not about the war, it's about Sean." I'm tentatively interested to see where that story goes and how the action plays, once we're able to get our own mitts on the game. Open-world games and World War II settings are a dime a dozen these days, but I'm hopeful The Saboteur has enough unique hooks to stand out in the crowd.