There was once a game development studio called Pandemic Studios, who released a lot of projects that were either extremely critically and financially successful, like Star Wars: Battlefront and Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, or more polarizing, but still highly beloved like Full Spectrum Warrior or Destroy All Humans!. But then, after lots of delays, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was launched to more mediocre reviews and there were reports that the game was released in a state deemed unfinished by the team. The Lord of the Rings: Conquest had even worse reviews and was relatively quickly forgotten. And the final game of the studio, The Saboteur, was launched after one of the development offices was already closed by EA and almost immediately after the game launch to relatively positive reviews, the whole studio was shut down.
Which came as a shock to me – I played The Saboteur when it was first released and considered it to be among the best and most enjoyable examples of sandbox-y open world games – games that I rarely enjoy. I remembered loving its sound design. How the parkour felt much better than what Assassin’s Creed did at the time (with only 2 first games launched). How its approach to stealth and sabotage felt like a perfect “simplified Hitman in open world”. But memories can often be incorrect, so for a while I wanted to revisit the game and give it a fresh look. Thankfully, it’s still available on GOG, and plays pretty well on modern hardware.
While there is a clear Mercenaries heritage with The Saboteur, the game is focusing on entirely different aspects of open world titles and is far more story driven. There’s a lot of nazi stuff to blow up in the game world that gets you the currency to buy more explosive tools. But the main focus isn’t really on this “freeplay” aspect and unlike Mercenaries, you cannot level entire buildings or have entirely non-linear interactions with “factions”. Instead, the main focus is on a linear story divided into several Acts. And while a lot of the objectives during the story missions can still be completed in a huge amount of ways, the game often creates bottlenecks to deliver cinematic moments.
Although, the story in the game is very disappointing. It actually has nuggets of what could’ve been interesting and some of the characters are cool. But for the most part, it feels rushed, very undercooked and it’s hard to get a clear read on some of the characters as one moment they almost feel charming and potentially interesting, the next they are unlikeable and hollow. It serves its purpose and actually has several nice moments, but overall feels like a promise of something that simply never materializes.
The game shines with the gameplay, however, and setups that developers create for players to exploit and create a fun moments. A lot of basic elements feel right even today. Shooting (with the controller) feels good with all types of weapons. Planting bombs to blow up nazi equipment is incredibly satisfying. Driving cars feels great and a few non-scripted races in the game show that the developers could’ve done a good racing game within the game if they wanted or had time. You can climb all buildings as long as there’s stuff to grab on to and it’s responsive and clear enough to be fun, without being too specific or too easy to not care. Stealth, with the ability to disguise yourself in nazi uniform if the enemy was killed by hand, is complex enough to give you time to think and plan, but also simple enough for you to not sit for minutes waiting for patrol routes to sync up. Even difficulty-wise it’s mostly spot on, with fun automatic cover helping you when you need a bit of time to hide, but you can just run and gun a lot of the time with little risk of dying.
The highlight of the whole experience for me is the fact that the game has so much incredible detail to it that even in modern linear games you might not get, let alone huge open world titles. The sound design here, for example, is incredible – the way the music from cars blends between playing out of the car, to when you sit in the car to then slowly fading into a more prominent “less realistic” mix as you start driving is something I wish more open world games with cars would do. It was also an early example of “as I was saying” dialogues, when any interrupted conversation would continue after the interruption is done. The little animations of the main character as he flicks the lighter to inconspicuously smoke when idle and then throws away the cigarette if you start running is perfect. The way the black and white regions of the map that are oppressed by the nazi regime and full colour regions where nazi oppression has been lessened blend still looks beautiful. The idea of this transition itself – genius. Although, game does look better in black and white for today’s standards.
And really, the today’s standards is the biggest real issue of the game. I still maintain that it was among the most enjoyable open world games for 2009 (and has aged far better than Assassin’s Creed II, for example), but it’s 2023 now and we’ve had some notable improvements in the genre. As far as parkour goes – it can be clunky and modern Assassin’s Creed titles do it much better. Stealth – MGSV has shown how stealth in an open world can work amazingly, whereas in The Saboteur the AI can often be a bit too dumb for its own good. Lack of auto-saves for freeplay target completion is not something modern games tend to do either, meaning that you need to manually save for each thing you do between missions (that do have auto-saves). A lot of the interface in the game is also finicky and hard to work with when modern open world games make it all so easy and fun…
There are also some technical aspects of the game that were a necessity for the hardware the game was made for and impact the playthrough in a negative way. While the game looks quite good even today, the draw distance is horrifyingly low and more importantly – it affects gameplay. If you are on a roof with a giant anti-air gun you simply cannot shoot at things that are considered out of distance. You might still see them in their lower detail version, but shooting them does nothing. For a game with focus on destruction and ability to climb up really high, this is often distracting and disappointing. It’s also not uncommon to see different cars in the city randomly flip out and even explode, seemingly due to how they are loaded into the world. Playing with the controller might become an issue, because the game has two separate settings for controllers built-in and it may randomly assign both to your single controller, requiring manual editing of settings files. At least the game is stable on modern hardware and runs well.
Even with its issues, however, even in 2023, I feel like the game is really fun to play. And I would’ve loved to see it remastered as on a surface level you wouldn’t even need to change much for that to happen. It wouldn’t bring the developers back, unfortunately, and the rights are still with EA, but I’d love to see it happen nonetheless. While Mercenaries may have been far more ambitious with their truly non-linear full sandbox approach, I appreciate how The Saboteur managed to bring some of that fun into a structured linear title and there are no other open world games to this day that do what this game was doing. If you get a chance, definitely check it out.