The last game from Pandemic Studios, “The Saboteur” can be quickly summarized with Grand Theft Nazi: Paris. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then GTA is much loved by the game developers at Pandemic. A disclaimer; I have never played any of the GTA series, and have only seen YouTube videos of game play.

They didn’t appeal to me and I may never play them myself, but I know enough of them to agree with this assessment of “The Saboteur.” With that out of the way, I really am having a fun time playing this game. Who can find fault with killing dirty rotten Nazis? You can shoot them, blow them up with carefully placed dynamite, run them over with anything on two, three or six wheels you can hijack, drop artillery shells on them or, my favorite, get real close and stealth kill them!

In between all this cleaning up Paris of the Swastika wearing invaders you can do little errands for the French Resistance, run street races, deliver messages and contraband, see the sights and kiss the girls: Quite a vacation for around $50. The driving interface is not super smooth, the third-person shooting is okay, and as a platformer, this is not the slickest I have played; but as a combo of those, it is lots of fun.

You may already have heard about the color change mechanic to show how far you are in the game. As you enter Paris after the invasion by the Third Reich everything is a washed out black, white and grey, with the only color provided by the bright red of Nazi flags, armbands and the occasional dim yellow lights in a permanent night time.

This Paris is not the famed City of Lights, but a perpetually rainy and spirit dampening prison for the proud French. As you perform missions and destroy Nazi targets, however, color and light return to the city. The people of the streets begin to help you fight back, and soon resistance fighters join you in the battles around the city.
I bought this game at Amazon.Com and have been playing since just before Christmas (a present to myself!). There are plenty of achievements for you completionists out there, as well as a number of different ways to get some of them. The protagonist, Sean Devlin, who is based on a real historical spy, has “perks” which you can advance through two methods. These perks influence skills in the game such as shooting, driving, fighting and the titular sabotage.

The first is to take all the story arc assignments, handed to you by characters such as a defrocked priest, a Spanish black marketeer or an Italian racecar designer. As you complete some of these story elements the various perks will be unlocked. The other path is to perform the specific tasks listed for each level of the skills. An example is the stealth kill level three perk, which requires performing a successful stealth kill on 5 German generals. Not an easy task since each is protected by a pair of bodyguards and lot of suspicion.

The suspicion and stealth functions are shown through a couple of mechanisms. In the lower corner of the screen is a mini map, which has a warning when you are being watched that looks like a lit-up exclamation point. It also tells you when you are in disguise, in a suspicion zone or trespassing. As you take actions which would make the Nazis uncomfortable (like waving guns around, planting bombs or even running in a restricted zone) the outer edge of the mini map will fill with a suspicion meter. This starts out white then turns yellow as they give you the hairy eyeball. An auditory cue also plays when you are being scrutinized.

The mini map will let you know when you are in a suspicion zone due to a yellow area highlighted in the map. This mechanic is easy to use once you are familiar with it, but might not work for those with color blindness or difficulty with low contrasts. If you set of an alarm the mini map will begin to flash red and you will hear shouts, shots, whistles and alarm klaxons and the now enraged Nazis call in their friends to help kill you. If you stick around or continue to cause mayhem the alarm level will raise higher and higher, making it difficult to escape.

If you successfully stealth kill a Nazi you can steal their uniform and walk into the various bases, and often you will need to do this to complete the various missions. However, some higher-level opponents are able to see through the disguise if you get too close or do something out of character in their sight. Even running in disguise will make them give you the hairy eyeball; let alone shooting their friends with your silenced pistol!

A few disclaimers more; the game has nudity and vulgar language, not to mention the prevalent violence. The nudity is seen on dancing girls in one of the first bases the protagonist uses in the game, but this is optional, and comes with a code included in the game box, so it needn’t be unlocked if you prefer to leave that out. I don’t know if the language can be turned off or not, and I play the M rated version.

I have been to Paris in real life, and this game replicates the feel of the city quite well. Twisting streets, narrow alleyways, and beautiful buildings. Many of these are experienced in game by climbing and running along rooftops; essential to completion of some of the missions. Mind you, the scale is totally off, and of course you can’t run around modern Paris shooting people without consequences, but for a game this is a bonus (at least for me).

The developers even used a Lego-type tool to make each building unique, giving the sandbox game a very wide-open feel. It even helps with in-game navigation as certain streets and buildings will become landmarks in the game as you go about the missions. There are a number of open-ended jobs to do involving destroying sniper towers, fuel stations, propaganda speakers and anti-aircraft guns in Paris and the surrounding countryside. These provide contraband, the currency used in game to buy more dynamite and better guns, from the black market dealers, of course!

Fun, open-ended, nice use of color and a rich environment with decent game mechanics make for a worthwhile game. With the amount of open-ended play, this should provide many hours of enjoyment.

Game accessibility summary

Precision – Yes, this requires small movements in some locations in the game world; specifically while climbing rooftops, aiming weapons and when sneaking behind enemies.

Deaf Gamers – Close captioning is present in all cut scenes and major narrative events.

One Handed – This game is designed for three platforms; Xbox 360, Playstation 3 & PC. You would need an adapted controller for the two consoles but a reconfigurable keyboard or adapted mouse could work for someone who is one-handed.

Other Alerts – This game allows pausing and saving, however, if you save in the middle of a specific mission your progress is lost. Between missions, there are lots of free-play target options, however. The close captioning has options for cut scenes, all the time or off. Many environmental events, especially when sneaking, have visual and auditory cues. This seems well adapted to deaf gamers. Game play is also adjustable to varying levels of difficulty, and if you die on a mission, you have the option to retry or go back to HQ, making the frustration level of dying low.

Major targets also remain eliminated, even if you die mid mission, meaning only the remaining targets have to be finished, again reducing frustration and rewarding your progress to that point. Eliminating some targets prior to a specific mission will mean they aren’t present during the active part of a mission, making its completion all the easier for your earlier efforts.

Subtitles – This game has good options for subtitling and there are no dialog choices to make; to take a mission, simply approach a mission giving NPC in game and choose to speak with them. After that all your objectives appear on the screen as a text box in the upper right corner, or a count-down or progress bar just below the text. The location of targets are marked by pins on the map and a GPS highlighted track in the mini map.

Color Blind – This game relies heavily on the colors white, yellow and red to show stealth and alert status, though it is supplemented with icons and text in the mini map display. Enemy vehicles and troops are red in the mini map, resistance fighters are blue and civilians don’t appear. Resistance fighters are noted by a V in a circle, so they can be distinguished when present. This game could be frustrating for colorblind gamers until they become familiar with how enemies appear in the mini map. The icons and text might help somewhat.