Anyone who knows me knows I am a rabid Francophile, so when a video game allows me to explore Paris, a seldom-explored locale in video games, I am absolutely on board. As Pandemic's swan song, the developers truly went for broke with this one releasing this game by the skin of their teeth before EA, their new owners, shut them down. A Grand Theft Auto-like set in occupied Paris right after the German invasion of France, you play as Sean Devlin as he's reluctantly dragged into espionage operations for various French resistance organizations culminating in the execution of the main antagonist, Kurt Dierker, at the top of the Eiffel Tower. The Saboteur offers a fun, destructive playground of an abridged version of 1940s Paris and the surrounding countryside that kept me entertained for hours.
Sean Devlin - loosely based on William Grover-Williams - is the protagonist; he encompasses every single Irish stereotype in history - alcoholic, womanizing, foul-mouthed, smoking like a chimney, and nominally Catholic. After fleeing Ireland for France for legal troubles, he's taken in by the Morini racing team where he befriends Jules Rousseau. The story officially begins at Saarbrücken where the Germans have organized a race to prove the superiority of German engineering and racing right before their invasion of France in World War II. The game's main antagonist, Kurt Dierker, leads for most of the race but shoots out Sean's tire when he passes him resulting in Dierker's victory (amusingly enough, there is a way to unlock a perk that adds a gun to your car this early in the game; you can use this to kill Dierker before the cutscene activates and roll the credits early). As a side note, the announcers at the race are just absolutely obsessed with Sean. Sixteen or so racers, and the announcers only say something when Sean passes someone. Seeking revenge, Sean and Jules sneak into Doppelsieg, a German automotive factory, much to the chagrin of Veronique, Jules' sister. After being captured at Doppelsieg, Dierker reveals himself to be an SS commander and believing the pair to be spies executes Jules. Sean escapes only to witness the German invasion of France. Rushing back to Jules' family farm, he rescues Veronique and Vittore before the Germans burn the farm to the ground.
Cutting to a couple months later, Sean is hiding out in the back room of a cabaret owned by Jules' family. On Sean's bedside table is an almost comically oversized picture of Jules. A moveable fake wall keeps Sean obscured from any Nazis, and peepholes are cut into it with a view of the changing room (cheeky). Venturing out of Sean's hiding place and the changing room is the main room of the cabaret, featuring a lavish interior and a singer on stage performing to a room full of Nazis. If you step on stage, the Nazis start booing you. It is here that Sean is convinced by Luc, a member of the French resistance and a walking French stereotype (champagne, women, cheese, etc.) to perform missions for the French resistance. While terrorizing the German occupiers in France, Sean is introduced to a colorful cast of side characters (side-quest givers) - Father Denis, a defrocked priest who gets Sean to assassinate a couple of Gestapo; Duval Mingo, a resistance leader who seeks revenge on his ex-girlfriend who left him for a Nazi officer; Felix Kwong, a Freudian psychologist who seeks to damage the Nazi occupiers' morale and also thinks that the massive AA guns on the rooftops of Paris are a phallic symbol representing the oppression of French women; Margot Bonnaire, a resistance leader who cares little for people but much for French art and culture; and Skylar St. Claire, Sean's casual girlfriend who is revealed to be working for the British Special Operations Executive.
Eventually, Luc's resistance is forced to flee into the catacombs where Luc sets a plan in motion to assassinate the Nazi leadership by blowing up a car at the end of a race through Paris. The plan succeeds, and in retaliation, Dierker assumes leadership of the Nazis in Paris and goes full scorched-earth on the resistance; ultimately Luc is killed in the catacombs, the cabaret in which Sean had been living was burned down, and a Nazi scientist which Sean had rescued earlier was recaptured and forced to continue his work on atomic weaponry at Doppelsieg.
At the climax of the story, Sean rescues the scientist, blows up Doppelsieg, and returns to a Paris whose citizens have risen up and fought back against the Nazis. Dierker went insane in the face of his failure and started executing his soldiers atop the Eiffel Tower, upon which Sean ascends to the top, shoots him, and delivers a one-liner that implied a sequel that would never be made - "I'm just getting started." While we will never know of Sean's future exploits, the promotional material for the game implied that he survived the Nazi occupation and lived to an old age.
I've already beat this game a couple of times long ago so I knew what to expect going in; therefore, I chose the hardest difficulty which was manageable except for a couple of missions towards the end. Anything easier and the game turns boring quite quick. On the hardest difficulty, it took me about 20 hours to beat the game and an additional 100 hours to sabotage all Nazi targets thereafter. I beat the main game and destroyed all sabotage targets, but I stopped short of the 100% by leaving some perks unearned - I just don't have the motivation to finish the game off.
The game itself is nominally open-world, but there isn't any story outside of the extremely structured main quests and side-quests. The world map spans a miniaturized Paris, the surrounding regions of Champagne-Ardenne, Lorraine, Bourgogne, Le Havre, Normandie, and Picardie, and Saarbrücken across the border in Germany. At the edge of the map is No Mans' Land where you get destroyed by Luftwaffe strafing runs if you wander in far enough, but if you manage to survive there's quite a bit of interesting buildings that have no reason to exist since you're really not supposed to be out there. Speaking of buildings that shouldn't exist, the developers fully modeled a castle in Lorraine that housed a cancelled mission, the details of which are enshrined in a piece of concept art from early in the game's development, but it is possible to enter the castle using a glitch. That's the real tragedy of the game, you can tell from exploring the world and reading in between the lines that there was supposed to be a lot more content but I'm thankful that we got as much as we did.
The greatest stylistic choice the developers made is the will-to-fight mechanic. Areas of the map that the Nazis have well under control are rendered in high-contrast black-and-white, like a noir film, with the red from blood, Nazi flags, and lipstick providing a pop of color. However, when you complete a mission in the area, the area's will-to-fight increases and the world returns to color. There are three areas that never have their will-to-fight restored - Picardie, because the Nazis presumably annexed it, Saarbrücken because it's in Germany, and Jules' family farm, representing a permanent scar on Sean's soul knowing what happened there.
Another strength of this game is the soundtrack. The entire soundtrack consists of sultry jazz and there is nothing more satisfying than walking away from a shootout to the tune of Nina Simone's Feeling Good. Other tracks of note are Koop Island Blues by Koop, The Finger Points to You by Maxayn, Caravan by Ella Fitzgerald, and L'Homme Que J'Adore by Allison Adams Tucker. The soundtrack sucked me into the world and overall made the world more intimate; it has stuck with me even more than the game itself. I was able to grab the soundtrack at this link and I often listen to it as it's a great collection of classic and modern jazz.
You will spend a lot of your time Assassin's Creed-climbing but the city of Paris is rendered in such detail that it really didn't bother me much until the very end; on the contrary it was an absolute joy to explore the city (more on that later). And in case you were wondering, yes, you can jump off the top of the Eiffel Tower and survive by landing in a tiny pond at the bottom. Any other locale and I would have gotten sick of the climbing much quicker.
There is nothing wild about the gunplay. It's a standard run-and-gun third-person shooter with a surprisingly well-implemented cover system. You get all the standard Western-front World War II weapons - Kar98, Springfield, MP40, MP44, Luger, Trenchgun, etc. but I never used any of those. Instead, about the only guns worth using are a scoped weapon like the unlockable Terror Scoped Rifle and the silenced Viper submachine gun which allow easy, long-distance assassinations and stealthing through missions. The game also has a brawling mechanic, but I never bothered using it - it's a lot easier to shoot your enemies and I was never low on ammo.
However, the name of the game is "The Saboteur", not "Rambo" - you will spend a vast majority of your time blowing up things, not killing enemies. To this end, the main mechanic in the game is planting explosives and taking out Nazi installations. This part of the game is quite tedious on paper, but exploring the world is such a joy and if it were in any other locale than Paris I would have put this game down long before beating it. It took me only about a couple of tries before I figured out enemies' line-of-sight so I was able to walk into restricted areas, plant explosives, and run away before being seen.
Sabotage targets are AA guns, sniper towers, refueling stations, missile installations, propaganda equipment, statues of Kurt Dierker, along with collecting postcards, climbing views of the surrounding area (lifted directly off of Assassin's Creed I might add), driving off ramps, and collecting SOE supply drops. However, I found very little reason to engage in sabotage before beating the game. The main point is to accrue the in-game currency, contraband, which can then be used to purchase items at black markets scattered across the maps. When performing quests, I found it expedient to just use weapons picked up from dead Nazis since you won't be able to replenish ammo with the exotic weapons available only at the black market; therefore, I really only bought dynamite in case the mission called for sabotage.
Firing weapons within earshot of enemies, killing enemies, and sabotage all contribute to your GTA-style wanted meter, and your wanted level doesn't go down. The only way to get the fuzz off your tail is to escape the search zone which is centered on Sean as long as the enemy can spot him and widens with every wanted level. You can also escape by entering hiding places scattered across the map without being spotted. If you understand the enemies' line of sight it's quite easy to cheese hiding places and they come in very useful especially at higher wanted levels. You can also call in the resistance for getaway help. I personally have never used the getaway functionality but it's there if you need it.
So you've climbed to the top of the Eiffel tower and shot Dierker. It's your call after you beat the game whether to put the game down or to explore the gorgeous world that must have taken tens of thousands of man-hours to construct. Indeed, there is so much of the map that you never encounter over the course of the game, and sabotage targets provide a perfect excuse to explore these places. Even returning to old mission locations to finish up sabotage is rewarding. When playing through the story, it's much too easy to zone out, follow the purple line that leads to the next destination, and complete the mission. Revisiting these locations to finish up sabotage revealed a lot of detail that I would have missed otherwise. That high place Sean climbed in order to assassinate the executioner about to kill Veronique? That was the Notre Dame cathedral. That big arch under which Sean assassinated a Nazi general holding a book-burning? That was the Arc de Triomphe. That cemetery Sean and Skylar broke into to steal a box from the Nazis whose contents are never revealed and are left to your imagination? That's the Père Lachaise Cemetery, the most visited necropolis in the world. I could feel the love the developers poured into the world, painstakingly modeling landmarks that don't even play an important role in the story; it felt wrong to just put the game down after finishing the story especially since this was Pandemic's final game. I ended up destroying every single sabotage target and learning a lot about Paris and the surrounding area along the way.
On the flip side, however, the game is imperfect. The most irritating mechanic is fall damage, arguably more dangerous than enemies; I have had to replay so many sections due to it. Eventually, I figured out roughly the maximum I could jump and various glitchy ways to arrest my fall so towards the end of my playthrough it was not as big a deal. The driving is nothing to write home about, every car handles like absolute crap except the race cars because the game does take place in the 1940s after all. You can technically sabotage your car by strapping explosives to it, jumping out, and waiting for the car to collide with something but I killed myself way more often than I destroyed my target doing this, so I didn't bother with this mechanic. You can get into a tank and go on a rampage but the combat in this game isn't fun enough to warrant doing this more than a couple of times. The characters are quite bland; I honestly can't remember a single detail about any character unless they were a ridiculous parody of their countrymen like Luc, Sean, and Dierker. Finally, climbing takes way too long in this game, but I understand it was a product of its time - for some reason, back in 2009 people thought Assassin's Creed was the best thing since sliced bread.
Game source - GOG (19.99 USD, but often on sale for 4.99 USD)
GPU - AMD RX580 8GB
CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
OS - Linux (ran with wine-ge on Lutris)
Control - Mouse/Keyboard
In my opinion, this game is flawed in not detracting enough from its two main inspirations - Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed, both of which I hate. However, the developers did an amazing job bringing the city of Paris and the surrounding country to life and creating one of very few open worlds I actually explored after beating the game. The sabotage mechanic provides a great catalyst for exploring the world rather than relying on the player to make their own fun as in other open world games. While the characters are rather forgettable the world absolutely is not. Pandemic's closures is one of the great tragedies in the video game world, my heart aches knowing we will never see a sequel or remake of this masterpiece, nor that we will ever experience the full potential of the world with all the cut content restored.