67 - Inglorious Saboteur

More adventures of LoveFilm, where I get to try out poorly made, unfavourably reviewed and generally unliked games in the name of science.

The Saboteur is one of those frustrating games. It’s an enjoyable experience, no doubt, and it certainly has some really interesting concepts and neat ideas, but the flaws are in the execution. It just feels slightly off, like the controls and feedback aren’t quite honed.

It has shooting a bit like Uncharted, but the guns feel limp and the cover isn’t sticky. It has building scrambling like inFamous, but the buildings aren’t quite designed for it and it’s a pain to navigate. It makes you want to play it like Assassin’s Creed, but where Ezio is a limber, athletic gazelle of the Venezuelan rooftops, Sean is a fat Irish man farting about on a Parisian balcony.

But my main bugbear is that for a game that encourages stealthy play, disguises, coercion and sabotage, I find some missions near impossible to complete without alarms, bullets and major bloodshed. I looked up a bunch of YouTube videos for one mission, named Grand Theft Limo, where you have to steal a heavily guarded car from a compound. Every video shows the same tactic; run past the guards, soak up the damage and high tail it out of there.

I feel like I should be able to rig up an explosion and make a diversion, or descend from the rooftops unnoticed. I want to pick off enemies one by one, like Arkham Asylum, but it just doesn’t quite come together. Then again, I have this same problem with Assassin’s Creed, so maybe it’s just me being rubbish.

There’s also the monochrome visual trick - to show which areas are still under strict Nazi control, and which have been inspired, by your heroic efforts (i.e. blowing shit up), to rise up and rebel. The former are stark black and white while the latter are colourful, bright and sunny. It’s a neat trick, and definitely helps the game to stand out.

I want to play it some more, so this isn’t the last you’ve heard from me. I’m not sending it back to LoveFilm yet!

My last two LoveFilm games, Dante’s Infero and James Cameron’s Avatar The Film The Game The Disc The Level The Achievement, were gash and I sent them back in a few hours.