Does 'The Saboteur' Stand a Chance?

Quite literally putting the colour into World War II: Pandemic's Tom French helps us fight, climb, and race our way through a uniquely stylized, Nazi-occupied France.

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Perhaps the most patently unreal (and attractive) of the game's components is a visual device called Will to Fight, which owes no inconsiderable imaginative debt to the mighty Okami. When you begin, the world is predominantly rendered in soulless black and white, a stark pallor alleviated only by the odd splash of orange firelight from windows or the gruesome red of a Nazi flag. As Sean does his thing - nosing out wily Hun generals, battering a battalion or detonating some key installation - that world gradually returns to colour, symbolising the resurgence of native spirit. It's impossible to truly eradicate the Nazi presence - this is not, French tells us, a game about altering the course of history - but their ability to intervene can be minimised. In fully coloured-in areas, the invaders keep to their compounds while Maquis resistance fighters patrol the streets.

This striking feature had its practical kinks, not least those caused by the absence of tone or nuance in a 3D environment. "Black and white was really hard to do," French admits. "If you just take the colour out of the world you get a very flat world, and obviously with Sean having this ability to climb, you would not be able to read the environment and it would be a terribly hard game to play. I'm a big fan of the Sin City comic books, and so earlier it was like 'we need that colour, put in the Swastikas and the red flags,' because firstly it would be bold and dramatic, but it also helps them pop out of the environment.

"And then when the [Sin City] movie came out, on the DVD Robert Rodriguez had these really great special features where we learned a lot about character lighting and shadow, and just how that can create depth in the environments and really help characters pop off the screen."

Sean has a decent set of tools for dismantling the goose-stepping cohorts - a dynamic cover system, contemporary weapons (or exciting variations thereon) like MP40s, MP44s, flamethrowers, Luger pistols and rocket launchers, and some satisfyingly unprincipled melee moves like headbutts, grabs and throws - and there are old tactical standbys like handy oil barrels ("a designer's best friend") or exploding back-mounted tanks ("a designer's best best friend") if the head-on approach suits. Sometimes, though, it pays to be sneaky. Our hero is more agile than his sturdy head-down demeanour suggests, swarming along drain-pipes and grabbing ledges to steal up silently behind unsuspecting rooftop guards.

"Doing stealth in a sandbox game is really, really hard," French reflects with a wince, "In a level-based game they can script every patrol path, and you know pretty much where the player's going to be, and so you can have that moment-to-moment stealth gameplay, but in a sandbox game especially where Sean's as mobile as he is, you can get 360 degrees of approach, and then there's the vertical aspect where they could be up on a roof, so you don't really know where the player is.

"And so we had to really treat them all as tools and mechanics that the player can use at will. So if the player doesn't want to use stealth and they want to go guns a-blazing, they can. It's just harder, a lot more brutal. It's part of the fantasy, but we didn't want to be harsh. We didn't want to fail the player for not being sneaky because they didn't want to play that way."

It's difficult to say, having yet to pick up the controller ourselves, whether The Saboteur's territorial colour chemistry, roughneck hero and flights of historical fancy will spur it ahead of the formidable competition. But the game's smoky, stylised continental opulence is alluring, and if nothing else all the fundamentals of a solid non-linear run-and-gunner seem to be there. EA has yet to make a real dent, score-wise at least, on sandbox action gaming: for all its ostensible over-familiarity, this could be the company's best shot at the genre this generation.

The Saboteur is slated for release on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 this year.

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