PlayStation Holiday Preview Event
The Saboteur
By Jorge Figueiredo - October 19th, 2009
While I was walking across the floor in one of the rooms at the Sony PlayStation Holiday Preview Event, I was compelled to check out a screen displaying unfamiliar gameplay. Corey Lewis from Pandemic invited me to have a seat on the couch as he showed me his team’s upcoming release, a single-player sandbox stealth adventure game.
The Saboteur is a stylish title that takes place in Paris during World War II. You play the part of Sean Devlin, an Irish racecar mechanic whose friends are being killed at the hands of the Nazis. After you witness the brutal killing of close friends, you finally reach your threshold and kill the Nazi responsible for the heinous act. From that point you become devoted to ridding the city of Nazi scum.
The game plays very well. I’m not sure if it was the final build that Corey was demonstrating, but it was fairly smooth and looked really good. He handed me the controls and it was far more intuitive than I would have thought, given the level of complexity of what your character can do. Your character will seek cover automatically, which is awesome, and can switch between melee and ranged combat, depending on what’s needed. Parkour seems to be a huge element in third-person-shooter games these days, and this game is no exception to that.
A really neat element to the game is the WtF system (That’s Will to Fight, not what you are probably thinking). Using colour, this system informs the player how scared the local civilians are. In an area with low WtF, the colours are dark and gray (with the exception of the vibrant red on the Nazi flag) and the citizens are cowardly. The more you harry and harm the Nazi cause, the farther away from gray the colour palette gets. In areas with high WtF, the local citizenry are braver and the Nazis are a bit harder to find, as they are probably a bit wary of having the crap kicked out of them.
The game will involve all sorts of interesting ways to deal with missions. From a basic standpoint, you can choose to use either stealth or obvious action to complete them. Within this framework, you have a cadre of weapons, explosives, and tactics with which to deal with whatever comes your way. Like to keep a low profile? Sneak up and waylay a Nazi guard and then sneak around in his uniform. Like the direct approach? Go shoot some Nazi bastage in the head and call attention to yourself, Desperado.
I’m really intrigued by this game and am looking forward to learning more about it as the release date approaches.
The Saboteur is set for release in North America on December 8.
