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.
Writing a review about Doom on GOG.com is kind of like writing a book review of the Bible, right? Like, hey guys, there's this book you probably haven't ever heard of before; it's called the Bible. And since I presume you've managed to go your entire life up until this point without ever having heard of the Bible, I'm going to do you the service of telling you, as a perfect stranger over the Internet, what I think of it. "It" here being the Bible. Everyone on this website born between 1980 and 1985 is guaranteed to have played the following three games: (1) minesweeper (2) solitaire (3) Doom. If you've never tried it before, feel free to grab a copy so you have something you can talk about with other human beings. Or don't! Because you obviously already know what you're getting for your money.
*Or, you know, a thinking woman's shooter. Unlike just about every other shooter series, this one includes female special forces operators from around the world! So basically, you ought to play this for the same reason that you probably ought to read Hamlet. It's a dated story, but it's also an important game that did a lot to push the genre. When R6 came out, pretty much every shooter out there was some variation on Doom or Quake (with a special mention to Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight). This game did something radically different: in lieu of bunny-hopping, it rewarded you for thinking, and it punished the hell out of you for not thinking. It not only spawned the tactical shooter, it defined a lot of what you can and cannot do in other shooters. There's no bunny-hopping in Modern Warfare 2 mainly because Rainbow Six said that's stupid. I want to emphasize for those of you who never played this before, though, that in the early R6 titles, you spent about 70-90% of your time in the planning phase drawing out your assault. Especially because that disappeared completely from the series starting with R6: Vegas, that might come as a shock. A lot of old-timers are going to tell you that planning out each intricate move is a mainstay of the series, and Vegas did violence to Rainbow Six by abandoning it. Truth be told, a significant reason that the planning phase used to be such a huge portion of the game is that the path-finding AI used to be terrible and simply could not be expected to adjust on the fly during the execution phase. That started to change with Raven Shield, which also introduced context-sensitive menus during the execution phase; I'm pretty sure the reason the planning phase disappeared after that game was that future designers realized you could do 80% of what you wanted using only the context menus. SWAT 3 and SWAT 4 also went the same direction. Have fun!
It wasn't until Fallout 3 that a studio finally developed a game world and story that was as immersive as Bloodlines's. The NPCs are amazingly written with terrific voice-acting. and most of the quests (even the side quests) tell an interesting story. There will be moments where you'll like an apex predator stalking through the darkness; there will be moments of terror when you discover that you're a lot further down on the paranormal food chain that you'd originally believed.
