The Saboteur™

One major caveat to this review: if you've got a quad-core or less CPU then this review is irrelevant. Go ahead and ignore it in that case. Turns out after some research, this semi-complete game (since those geniuses at EA shut down the studio right after it released) won't even launch if you have a CPU with 6 or more cores. In order to get it to even run you have to disable any cores past the 4-core count, as the application cannot handle them at all. Another lovely QA gem from the wonderful folks at EA... *Should this issue get patched via gog themselves (I have zero faith in EA if I hadn't made that clear earlier) I will of course update/remove this review*

I bought The Saboteur quite some time ago, and I thought I'd never get to play it. After all, who keeps a machine around with a quad-core (or lesser) CPU these days? Because, as noted in the store page, "at the moment The Saboteur is not compatible with CPUs that have more than four physical cores". But then... I discovered a patch. An insanely simple patch. Only a single byte needs to change in the main executable, Saboteur.exe: the byte at 0x9f56d0 from 0x76 to 0xeb. (Search the Web for patch programs or patched versions.) Yes. One lousy byte. That's it. Once I changed that byte, the game, which up to that point, altogether refused to run on my machine, came to life. And what a game it is! It's called the swan song of Pandemic Studios, which was shut down shortly after this game was completed. Set in Nazi-occupied Paris, the ambiance of the game is almost perfect. It reminds me ever so slightly of 1960s Budapest, where I grew up: the cobblestones, the old cars, the clothes. But Budapest has no Eiffel tower that you can climb, to be greeted by a panorama of the entire city. (Bring your sniper rifle, in case there are stray Nazis to hunt.) The songs are great (more than once, I refused to exit a vehicle in the game, because I just wanted to listen to Ella Fitzgerald finish her song about her desert caravan.) And the story is decent. (As it turns out, it was inspired by a real-life character, Grand Prix champion turned special agent William Grover-Williams.) About my only major complaint is the save system: You get to save your stats, but that's all. Your location, the environment, mission progress are not saved. (Makes you wonder why they even bothered with a quicksave function.) I can only guess that GOG has not published a patched version of the game for legal reasons. Still, with that single-byte patch, the game can be played on modern computers and it runs well. And it's well worth playing.

I played this on XBox 360 when it first came out and am excited to purchase a PC copy here. This was a very good game. It is not perfect in its execution. Although it tried a few new things, it failed to be truly innovative--and I suspect the reason is that the Pandemic wasn't quite sure exactly what sort of 1930s/40s aesthetic they were going for. But it's worth your time. Visually, the game clearly was meant to evoke the pallet of film noir. Until you liberate a neighborhood, the game renders it in a monochromatic gray scale that is frequently punctuated by red Swastika armbands and Nazi flags. Slipping between from one pool of inky black shadow to the next feels engaging and dangerous. Once you successfully liberate the area, color comes flooding back into the world. The other rewards for liberating a region are not particularly meaningful, but you do feel some sense of accomplishment towards the end of the game as you look around and realize how colorful France has become. What is perhaps disappointing is that Pandemic was trying to tell a pulp fiction story in a film noir world. You look at the environment and expect The Good German, but the one-dimensional characters give you The Rocketeer instead. And that's okay; you'll root for the heroes and despise the villains. But you'll occasionally wonder what this game would have been like if they'd inhabited this world with more complicated characters. At the end of the day, though, the environments are usually interesting, the mechanics usually work pretty well, and the action is satisfying. If you have not tried it before, the Saboteur is worth your time.

This game is very very good! The press knew it, the gamers who played it knew it, Pandemic Studios knew it and sadly EA did not care. For some reason Pandemic got shut down before they could even fix all the bugs in the game or release planned DLCs or god forbid a sequel. I played this game on PS3, but the Xbox version looked slightly better and the PC version looked a lot better. The gameplay is closest to Assassins Creed mixed with a bit of GTA and a feeling of the Mafia games. Although I never really was a huge fan of Assassins Creed games this game got me good. The feeling you get when walking through black and white areas is intense and you feel so happy when you freed an area and you see color return to the peoples lives. The cars are fun to drive, the guns are fun to shoot, combat is balanced. The voiceacting has minor flaws but overall I enjoyed it a lot (and I pick on voiceacting a lot), the soundtrack is so good that I sometimes returned to this game just for the soundtrack. If you can look past some bugs this game is so worth it. It is definitely not a bugfest. Depending on how much time you put into this game of course you will find more bugs. Sometimes you will see a tank spawn on a wall, hopping up and down and taking damage until it explodes. The bugs are more funny than gamebreaking. Overall this game had a feel to it that I never got anywhere else and that is why I recommended it to so many people - sadly probably noone will have played it. If you have the slightest inkling to buy this game or you feel like you might enjoy it - please buy it and give it a try! It was a 40 hour fun game for me.

Had a blast playing this open-world atmospheric Irish-bomber-vs-Nazis-in-Paris game years ago on the Ps3, and was glad to see GoG get the rights to it after its somewhat disastrous PC port. Alas, at first the brave techs at GoG couldn't figure out how to get past the serious problem of the game freaking completely out if it detects the existence of more than 4 cores (a situation which didn't exist during its original release). As of the September 2018 hotfix, this has been demonstrably cured for many users, including myself. (Although the game still freaks out for another reason: my XBox360 controller's right-stick x-axis swirls uncontrollably. Still, the game is perfectly playable with traditional keyboard controls, and why would I not want to use mouse-aim anyway?!) Notice that some users still experience hardware incompatbility problems for various reasons. I'm running Win 8.1 on a high end Intel processor with a Ti1080 gfx card, and the game looks amazing at 1080. (I did play it that way on the PS3, which could unofficially upscale to 1080.) Be aware that the language is harsher than the rather PG-13 violence, and that the game features quite a bit of saucy toplessness (or might as well be -- pasties can be toggled on the main menu.)