The Saboteur - Self Sabotage (a little written piece!)

NOTE: Hi everyone - I recently tried to review The Saboteur for a video but couldn't bring myself to finish it. Rather than making a mean spirited video about an old videogame I thought I'd put together a little written thing here on Patreon instead. Enjoy :) (and sorry it's so negative Saboteur fans! I just needed to get this one off my chest)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Saboteur makes a good first impression. An open world game set in a 1940 Nazi-occupied Paris is brimming with intrigue, and The Saboteur boasts a striking visual aesthetic to match. Areas under Nazi control are drenched in a film-noir grayscale palette, with only the warm yellow glow of an apartment window or the deep red reminder of who you’re up against shining through. Whether you’re driving through dirt roads in the French countryside or brawling with Nazi officers at street level, The Saboteur is picturesque underneath its dated 2009 graphics engine.

Only adding to the romanticism is the story surrounding its release. Often dubbed “Pandemic’s Swan Song,” it’s heralded as beloved developer Pandemic Studios’ last hurrah before their closure at the hands of the big bad publisher EA Games, who purchased the studio only 2 years prior. Reddit and YouTube comment sections to this day sing the game’s praises as much as they condemn EA’s actions.

If there weren’t already enough reasons to want to like this game, I played it fully expecting to find nice things to say about it for a YouTube essay. Part of my YouTube channel’s shtick is shining a positive light on flawed games.

But I couldn’t bring myself to praise The Saboteur.

Not because it’s especially bad, per-se. Its mix of competent enough but uninteresting third-person shooting, driving, fist-fighting and stealth is mostly inoffensive. There are a lot of aspects that could be picked apart, the sneaking is especially underdeveloped, but any gameplay flaws could be forgiven in a better game.

The Saboteur is told through the eyes of walking, talking, drinking, beret-wearing Irish stereotype Sean Devlin. Even his name is as Irish as possible. Between random outpourings of tokenistic phrases, he can be found either flirting with or sleeping with either of the two female leads, or bonding with the other male lead about sleeping with the two female leads. A strip club serves as his hideout, where the topless women sing his praises every time you visit.

The Nazis here resemble Marvel’s Hydra. A barrage of comically large machinery and bad English-speaking German accents is led by a muscular, leather outfitted villain and his tightly dressed femme fatale sidekick.

Sean Devlin reluctantly joins the resistance only to get revenge on this villain who beat him in a car race and killed his friend. Both seem to weigh on his mind equally. Between the revenge and the women there’s nothing more to know about our banal protagonist.

Where The Saboteur’s premise and artistic flair allude towards a dramatic and stylish exploration of a horrifically tragic time in history, it instead throws all that potential out the window and opts for the 13 year old boy’s wet dream of a one-note revenge story about a flawless ladies man blowing up cartoon Nazis. How disappointing. I suppose it was naive to expect more.

In my search for things to like about the game, I told myself I had to judge The Saboteur for what it is rather than what it isn’t. There is no intrinsic obligation for it to engage with its setting, and I can enjoy juvenile silliness on some level. If The Saboteur just wants to have fun blowing up Nazis, then let's have fun blowing up Nazis.

I appreciate the attempts at creating open ended infiltration missions. The best moments had me sneaking into a base and shooting my way out, where I was scaling buildings and jumping between rooftops with an Assassin's-Creed-but-slower climbing system. Devlin quips that he learnt to climb by sneaking out of windows after one night stands.

Moments like this were fleetingly fun, but they were few and far between and executed far better in other games. A typical Saboteur mission is much more akin to a generic fetch quest. A heartbeat occasionally blips with some decent set pieces - climbing up through a base into a Zeppelin is particularly memorable, but it’s suffocated by the game surrounding it.

For all its Tarantino-esque sensibilities, The Saboteur keeps its tongue firmly away from its cheek. Dialogue is bafflingly self serious, where it seems like only the awkward polygonal flirting and Devlin’s Irishisms are intended to bring any levity. They don’t. Mission givers spend long minutes humourlessly detailing unneeded excuses for you to go blow up Nazis, and the cardboard leads don’t show any glimpses of chemistry.

The Saboteur wants to have its cake and eat it. It flip flops between telling a dramatic revenge story, and a pulpy send-up of the same thing. Ultimately it fails at achieving either, and doesn’t make up for it in any way.

I suspect the bland gameplay fell victim to EA rushing the game out the door and closing the studio. There’s an alternate reality where, despite its issues, The Saboteur is a fun, explosive, open-world shooter with multiple ways to approach objectives, and I certainly respect that the developers were put in a very tough situation.

But the writing, which could’ve neatly tied a bow on a messy game, is inexcusable and painfully dull. There’s never any attempt to engage with this unique setting. It’s just background for a tactless power fantasy. A selling point to set it apart from Grand Theft Auto. A beautiful aesthetic that never goes any deeper than the pixels on the screen.

Pandemic failed to capitalise on the game’s potential on purpose. The Saboteur self sabotaged by being wilfully stupid.