like the old time, guns, girls blood...
If nothing else, the Saboteur definitely makes an impression.
Almost every aspect of the game has an interesting facade that is stripped away to reveal something much more shallow and repetitive. At its heart, The Saboteur is plagued by inconsistency. Blood-soaked clothes are suspicious, but blood-streaked, bullet-riddled vehicles don't elicit as much as a second glance from wandering patrols; hitting a civilian in a car at full speed sending the person rocketing down a winding avenue is ignored, but walking too close to a soldier wearing the wrong kind of jacket will send your suspicion meter so high that pulling a gun becomes the only option. While there are things to like about the game, every moment like my first post-demolition drive is matched by an equally frustrating situation that broke me out of the experience.
Not everything is bad news. The Saboteur's largely monochromatic rendition of Nazi-occupied Paris is striking and works quite well. There's little visual confusion to be had (unlike this year's other major release to feature black-and-white visuals, Madworld), and tiny hints of color indicate targets and points of interest. Completing the French Resistance's objectives causes color to return to areas as citizens in those neighborhoods regain "the will to fight." Too often, though, color is the only indication that anything has changed. While there are isolated instances where a public standoff between the citizenry and the Nazis will occur, they're rare-and you're probably going to be just as likely to catch a Nazi beating if you step out of line.
Sonically, you'll take the good with the bad. Licensed music from such artists as Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone do much to sell the setting of Paris (usually at night), though the small number of songs had them repeating more often than I'd have liked. Conversely, the original score is so boilerplate it might as well not be there at all. The voiceover cast is competent, but amounts to little more than reasonably executed clichés. This is unfortunate, as the game's story does little to develop or invest the player in the Resistance. While my interest was caught by allusions to motivations for many of the characters I met, there was too little exploration of any of them to keep me invested. What I was given instead was a cast of largely unlikeable characters that curse and threaten each other for goals that were usually depicted as selfish, despite their common goal of fighting the Reich. I just wasn't given enough information about the participants to care about them.