The Saboteur opens on a lie. Sean Devlin, an Irish race car driver and mechanic living in Paris, travels to Saarbrücken with his mentor Vittore Morini, his best friend Jules Rousseau, and Jules’ sister Veronique for the 1940 Saarbrücken Grand Prix. He loses because Kurt Dierker, the Nazi champion, shoots out one of his tires.
Sean and Jules break into the Doppelsieg factory to sabotage Dierker’s car in revenge. Dierker captures them, reveals himself as an SS Commander, and tortures Jules to death while Sean escapes. That is the engine of Pandemic Studios’ open-world action game, released by Electronic Arts in December 2009 for PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. It is a revenge story, and it knows it.
Trailer, via GOG.
The Filter That Tells You Who Owns the Street
The Saboteur’s best idea is color. Areas heavily controlled by the Germans are rendered in black and white. The exceptions are specific and deliberate: characters’ irises, city lights, blood, the blue symbols of the French Resistance, and German symbols, which are bright red and complete with swastikas. That is not decoration. It is a readable map of who owns the street you are standing on.
German soldiers are present in large numbers in those zones, which makes detection far more likely. To inspire a district again, Sean must weaken the occupying forces. Complete main and side missions, and the borough slowly returns to its natural colors. The Germans are not completely evicted. They retreat to military bases, barracks, checkpoints, HQs, and other strategic sites, and Sean has a better chance of escaping them.
The shift is mechanical and visual at once. The French people also become active. In a colored area, if Sean fights German soldiers, the French Resistance, the Maquis, and even passing French civilians will intervene against the occupiers. The game’s thesis is that liberation is not a solo act. It is a crowd deciding it has had enough.
Sean Devlin Climbs Buildings in Seconds
Gameplay combines driving, shooting, melee combat, and exploration. Sean has parkour skills that let him climb tall buildings in seconds to facilitate traversal. The open world covers Paris’ various boroughs, the surrounding French countryside, and parts of Germany. The player moves on foot or by vehicle, played from a third-person perspective.
Perks upgrade abilities and arsenal. Better accuracy with a sniper rifle, more ammo for all weapons, more damage. Perks come from actions rather than menus: evading high-level alarms, sniping targets, demolishing a set number of German installations. The game rewards the behavior it wants you to repeat.
The arsenal supports the fantasy. The Saboteur asks you to blow up zeppelins, derail trains, implode bridges, destroy armored tanks, and level enemy facilities. The modes are single player. The themes are action, historical, stealth, sandbox, open world, warfare. It is a shooter with role-playing and tactical elements bolted on, and it mostly holds together.
Luc Gaudin and the Cabaret
Three months after Jules’ death, Sean is living in La Belle Du Nuit, a cabaret owned by Jules’ family. Luc Gaudin, a local writer, Veronique’s love interest, and leader of a resistance group, talks him into joining. Sean is tasked with disrupting Nazi operations by killing high-ranking officers and destroying military installations.
The supporting cast is a roster of resistance leaders and members. Le Crochet, a hook-handed veteran Legionnaire. Father Denis, a defrocked Catholic priest. Duval Mingo, whose lover betrayed him to a high-ranking Nazi. Felix Kwong, a clinical psychiatrist. Margot Bonnaire. Skylar St. Claire, Sean’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, warns him against the break-in.
Sean himself is based on William Grover-Williams, a real racing driver. The game uses that as a foundation and builds a hard-drinking, street-tough mechanic on top of it. He emigrated to France to escape his criminal past. The pitch is personal redemption in the first open-world action game set in Nazi-occupied Europe. That claim is the game’s own, and it is worth noting how much of the marketing leaned on the novelty of the setting.
What the Map Does Right
The color system is the strongest thing The Saboteur does, and it is not a gimmick. It gives the player a reason to care about a borough beyond a completion percentage. Gray Paris is oppressive to look at. Color Paris is a relief. The game makes you feel the difference before it explains it.
The resistance interventions in colored zones are the second-best idea. Civilians joining a fight is a small mechanic with a large implication. It says the occupation is not just a set of enemy spawn points. It is a relationship between an army and a population, and that relationship can flip.
The parkour is functional. Climbing a building in seconds is a traversal convenience, not a statement. But it fits the fantasy of a saboteur who moves above the streets. The game is at its best when Sean is moving, fighting, and watching a district change color behind him.
The Repetition Problem
The Saboteur drew generally mixed to positive reviews. It was praised for its visuals, sound design, setting, amount of content, and entertaining gameplay. It was criticized for repetitiveness and for its storyline. That split is fair, and the criticism lands harder than the praise.
The mission structure leans on the same verbs. Kill a high-ranking officer. Destroy a military installation. Weaken the German forces. The color system gives those verbs a visible payoff, but it does not vary them. By the time you have liberated a few boroughs, you know the shape of every remaining one.
The story has the same issue. Dierker is a torturer and a cheat, and the game gives him little beyond that. The resistance leaders are introduced with vivid one-line descriptions and then largely recede. The premise is strong. The execution of the premise is thin.
A 1940 Paris That Never Quite Exists
The setting is the game’s best asset and its most underused one. Nazi-occupied Paris is a real place with a real history, and The Saboteur treats it as a sandbox with a color filter. That is not a crime for an action game. But the game keeps gesturing at something bigger. The Maquis. The civilians. The blue resistance symbols. Then it hands you another installation to destroy.
The tonal mix is also uneven. The summary promises a seedy underground world where the women are sexy, the missions are epic, and the revenge is satisfying. That is a specific register, and it sits awkwardly next to the torture of Jules and the German invasion of France. The game wants to be both a pulp revenge fantasy and a story about occupation. It does not fully commit to either.
What it does commit to is the look. The black and white with red and blue accents is a genuine visual identity. Very few open-world games from 2009 have a signature that readable. You can recognize a screenshot of The Saboteur in a second. That counts for something.
The Verdict
The Saboteur is a flawed game with one great idea and a lot of competent filler around it. The color system is the reason to play it. The parkour, the perks, the arsenal, and the resistance allies all support that system well enough. The repetition and the thin storyline keep it from being more than a cult favorite.
A 7.8 out of 10 is the right score. It is not a great game. It is a good game with a distinctive hook, and the hook is worth the price of admission. Pandemic Studios built something with a real point of view, and then ran out of ways to express it. The result is a game you remember for its map and forget for its missions.
The Saboteur scored 7.8 out of 10 across five outlets, according to the IGDB critic aggregate. That number puts it in the company of well-liked games with obvious flaws, not overlooked classics. The mobile versions arrived in January and March 2010. The console and PC version is the one worth seeking out, and the black and white map is the reason.
Release Schedule
| Version | Platform | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| The Saboteur | PlayStation 3, PC, Xbox 360 | December 2009 |
| The Saboteur Mobile | BlackBerry | January 21, 2010 |
| The Saboteur Mobile | iOS | March 24, 2010 |
The Numbers
- Title: The Saboteur
- Developer: Pandemic Studios
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Release: December 2009
- Platforms: PlayStation 3, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox 360
- Mobile versions: BlackBerry, January 21, 2010; iOS, March 24, 2010, developed and released by Hands-On Mobile
- Genre: Action-adventure, open world, third-person
- Modes: Single player
- Setting: German-occupied France, World War II
- Protagonist: Sean Devlin, based on William Grover-Williams
- Critical score: 7.8/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 5 outlets)
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