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.
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.
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.
Gallery
50 Comments