The Saboteur™

the version on gog is quite broken. Fortunately, it's fairly easy to patch (instructions in the gog-forum). But I don't get why gog didn't do it themselves. They did for other games

The Saboteur is a unique third-person action game in which you takeon the role of Sean Devlin, an Irishman who inexplicably winds up joining the French Resistance during World War II. Your mission is to defeat occupying Nazi forces by any means necessary, including shooting, bombing, stealing vehicles, and generally causing all kinds of mayhem across an open-world Paris. Think Assassin's Creed, Grand Theft Auto, Mercenaries, Red Faction, and Inglorious B******s thrown into a blender and you'll have a good idea of what you're in for. In the positive side, the setting and atmosphere of this game is fantastic. Its refreshing to see a game portray World War II from a perspective other that of the "Big Three" (USA, UK, USSR), and 1940s Paris is lovingly recreated in a detailed, if somewhat superficial, open world that was legitimately ahead of its time when this game was released. The stark black and white graphics and sleazy jazz soundtrack add to the atmosphere. Gameplay is varried and always fun, and the game generally leaves it up to you how to handle most missions. Infiltrate in disguise, set off an explosion as a distraction, or go in the front door blazing away with a machine gun? The choice is yours. Unfortunately, the game falls short in several areas that undermine its promising concept. The tone of the story is weirdly inconsistant; it seemingly can't decide if it wants to be a serious war drama or a cheesy B-grade action affair, and the switiching between the two is jarring. The controls can at times be clunky and awkward, and it's frustringly easy to accidentally jump off a ledge insatead of climbing it or accidentally pop out of cover duing a shootout and get killed. Finally, this game was originally made for consoles and ported to PC, and the lack of optimization and options definitely shows at times. Reccomend you play with a controller/gamepad if possible. Overall, The Saboteur is a great concept unfortunately let down by spotty execution.

The game is OK, but I wanted to post this to let you know this game will have problems if you have more than 4 cores, and not run at all if you have more than 8 (that includes hyperthreading) Presumably there is a bug in the code to just use whatever cores are there, but the game isn't tested for it, and fails if you have more. Should be fixable by an easy patch, but I don't expect that to happen. What you can do is to either limit the number of cores available in BIOS, or start Msconfig and set the core limit here: Boot->Avanced Options->Number of processors. Set that to 4. Restart windows. Remember to turn that off, when you are done playing though :) It is a mess, but at least you can play the game. And of course restart windows again.

Remember when video games were first and foremost about having fun? This game perfectly encapsulates that era. The plot is B movie stuff, but in the absolutely best way possible. The liberation mechanic with black and white getting color as you free areas is really cool and I'm surprised we haven't really seen anything like it since.

Great open world game with a unique twist. Colors are added to the world you liberate. Great concept and wonderful WWII gameplay. I wish they are doing a sequel.