Shoddy port, and some poor design decisions. Worth playing, but get it on consoles.
In Saboteur you play as race driver, Sean Devlin in Germany for a Grand Prix. After the German driver cheats in the race, you break into a Nazi compound in order to destroy his car as payback. Well you get caught, and your decision turns out to be a poor one as the Nazi's assuming your spies execute your friend. In a stroke of luck you manage to escape, unfortunately just as the Nazis invade France. You swear you'll have vengeance and set off to blow stuff up.
It's a pretty solid story and it has quite a bit of emotion to it. Of course just like Medal of Honor Airborne, a lot of this is undermined by completely ludicrous enemy design, but still. It's interesting enough to keep you playing and adds plenty of support for your vigilantism.
The game play is pretty solid. The mission design is impressive and gets better as the game progresses. By the end you'll take on and destroy some stunningly massive Nazi installations. You generally use stealth, but if things go sour the gunplay is great. All the weapons are useful and have a nice kick to them. The rag dolls make some funny and exaggerated deaths, even with a pistol. Grenades can be pain to use overall though, and the destruction level isn't as high as something like Red Faction Guerrilla, Silent Storm, or games like that.
Vehicles are a mess. Everything controls very poorly, and they feel like you're driving underwater. Because it's the 1940's top speeds are lower as well, which doesn't lend itself well to chases. Eventually better vehicles overcome some of these deficiencies, but in the end the problems persist.
There is one major flaw with the gameplay. Stealth is underdeveloped. All uniforms are exactly the same. Dressed as a Gestapo General? No matter that grunt is still suspicious of you. This is definitely annoying. Dressing higher up doesn't even slow down detection, the grunt will be just as suspicious of you in engineer outfit as a general's. He doesn't even hesitate. There is also one more weird thing with the stealth system. If you blow it a guard will blow a whistle calling for everyone to show up and kill you. Well let's say to creamed everyone in the building, but the last guy manages to blow his whistle. Even if no one could possibly hear it; you get swamped by magical Nazis.
Graphics have a nice artistic flair to them. In Nazi oppressed areas the game drains the screen of color but levees the Nazi symbols red. This creates a beautiful contrast and looks stunning. In addition to complement the Noir feel, Nazi areas are almost always drenched in rain. As the resistance gets stronger in any one area color returns. Unfortunately this is also when you notice that the engine isn't all that great. Distant LOD is horrible, and textures are pretty bland. Shadow work could've been a lot better as well.
Then in addition to the fact that the engine doesn't look that great, it barely runs. If you have a multicore expect streaming issues especially while driving. The game will lock up constantly, and entire parts of the city will disappear. EA released a statement detailing how to set affinity in order to prevent this, but the problems still persist as it isn't a foolproof fix. In addition lowering the affinity absolutely destroys your performance. Now that Pandemic went under I guess we can't expect a patch anytime soon (the one they did release didn't even touch this problem). Still if you have a decent DUALCORE PC, then you should be able to run the game with no problem. A single core is likely far to slow.
Sound is pretty buggy too. Often while driving the engine would just cut out and sputter, and no it's not a gameplay mechanic as I was still cruising along at top speed. Cutting the ignition and then starting it again fixed it, but it would persist a moment later. While the voice-acting is pretty good it has to suffer a horrible script that's only good at overloading you cheesy movie cliches, sexual slang, and endless profanity. Devlin may be Irish (No offense intended), but please spare us in the game at least.
Saboteur isn't a bad game, in fact it's very good. Unfortunately it's hampered by some under designed gameplay features, and poor handling. When you combine that with a poor engine that doesn't even run well on modern systems, I'll pass. While if you can get it to work fuss free you may like it, you'll won't be missing out on much is f you pass it by.