The Saboteur

Obviously, The Saboteur isn't representative of the peak of next-gen gaming but for my money, this is the most fun and addictive gameplay I've experienced in 2009, and I'll probably be pulling it off the shelf in 2010 to work on those secondary targets.

The story was well told, the acting believable, the action enjoyable, and the new ideas implemented will inspire future games, but when all is said and done, the game just feels unfinished in too many areas to feel like a AAA title.

It's a shame that Pandemic Studios isn't around to work on a sequel for The Saboteur, because this is clearly one of its best games. The difficulty could've been tougher and the dialogue needed more work, but overall, this is a splendid action/adventure.

The Saboteur causes mixed feelings. Paris is very living and the use of the black-white contrast is superb. On the other hand the game is rather glitchy and isn't polished up at all. The fun that you get out of sabotaging Nazi's makes up for most of it though.

Pandemic's effort is commendable, but The Saboteur feels like it had a saboteur of its own lurking in the code. No matter how many times I came back to The Saboteur, or how badly I wanted to love the game, the unrefined gameplay became less, and less tolerable.

A decent idea that falls short for a variety of eminently fixable reasons. [Feb 2010, p.80]

It's hard to imagine why anyone would opt for The Saboteur when they've got Assassin's Creed II as an alternative. Beyond its Parisian setting, The Saboteur fails to add any new ideas to the sandbox genre other than breasts.

An underrated Game! A Masterpiece! The Saboteur on Xbox 360 is an Must Play Game!

I love the style and vibe of this game, the music is very fitting, and the black & white setting is very well made. The story is boring but serviceable, and the gameplay is surprisingly good.

"Pandemic's Swan Song" as it's been called. While the game's atmosphere and concept are outstanding, the game just fails to hit on all the essentials. Gameplay is both good and bad. Where the auto cover and auto reload systems are a great idea, they are also very finicky. I ended up not even using the auto cover half the time cause it was unreliable. The normal gun fire mechanics are fine, but cover+fire is only half available. Usually you get blind fire as an option, in this if you tried to blind fire, your character would still pop out from cover to shoot. The other part of the gameplay that I didn't like was the Assassins Creed traversing and hiding. It felt extremely out of place and it was just a frigging nightmare to climb up buildings. Climbing takes far too long and is not smooth at all. The controls for everything is rather sluggish. Pretty much the only thing that seemed half decent with controls was the driving. The story was rather boring. The WW2 **** games have run their course and are now to the point of just being tiresome. Granted the story is still better than a lot of games out there, it still has been done to death. For me, the game became so tedious, monotonous and just plain boring that I stopped after completing all but the last 5 main story missions. The overall game experience made me absolutely hate The Saboteur. Best part of the game is the Inspiration. When various aspects of the city are under heavy control and overall morality is low, it is visible with the black & white with colored highlight art scheme. When you do missions that remove the **** presence in that area the natural color will restore along with the hope of the civilians. Worst part of the game is the Civilian A.I. You are going to run over people and other drivers are going to hinder you. The civilians never get out of your way and when you are running from the **** you'll end up mowing several down. The horn feature on the cars does absolutely nothing, they still won't move. It is the worst civilian A I that I've ever seen. "Hey, there's a slow moving tank coming, time to cross the street"........*squish*

I have zero-resistance for this kind of game: you can drive a car around when doing missions, I like GTA, Mafia and this game all for this reason. I also like Paris. The story of the game is OK, but too short and I dont want to replay it after finished it the first time. Still spent hours in this game to clear all the red dots and had that song 'feeling good' plays in my head for days. I think this game deserves more publicity.

Pros: -open world, lots of stuff to do. Cons: Bad gameplay, slow climbing, stealth, cover doesn't work, difficulty spikes, tank controls are awkward. Bad graphics, this game does have a good art style, but it's often too dark, and once liberated the colours bring out the bad textures. Horrible voice acting, really irratating. Ridiculous story.