#THE SABOTEUR PC FREE#

Despite the fact that he closely resembles DJ Mark Radcliffe he's hard to warm to initially, a smirking presence in a flat cap who spouts cartoon Irishisms at you unless you press the B button in time during cut-scenes, and who otherwise stumbles through a script so bad you start to suspect Pandemic littered it with all those F-bombs so sarcastic reviewers couldn't quote much of it to you. The big problem is that Devlin is actually kind of a tool, and that means if you want to play Saboteur you're going to have to be kind of a tool as well. Pandemic was presumably aiming for a kind of rough-and-ready Gerard Butler-style charm with its protagonist. While the history books may not remember that the battle for the West was largely fought by a drunken auto mechanic who entered most shootouts yelling, 'Top o' the mornin' to ya!' it's something players will struggle to forget. In order to get to his target, Devlin ends up, you know, freeing most of Paris from the yoke of oppression. EA casts you as Sean Devlin, a swarthy Irish biffer cutting a swathe through occupied Paris in order to avenge the death of his idiotic French chum Jules, who got his head tortured off following an ill-considered frat prank in which they drove a high-ranking SS officer's fancy motor off a cliff. There are smart moments, such as the restaging of the outbreak of fighting in Europe as a higgledly-piggledy car chase through the burning fields of France, but they're fairly thin on the ground. Whatever Saboteur's strong points, the story isn't one of them. Period music is pitched somewhere between raised-eyebrow jazz and the kind of sultry sax that might play in the background if you were being fellated by a young Vera Lynn. Instead this is conflict drawn in urban espionage and deadly tricks: a close-up battle set in an open world, paid out slowly in missions from various anti-fascist factions. While it certainly isn't perfect, you can at least applaud the fact that it's a World War II title which doesn't force you to plod through the Normandy Landings yet again. The game lurking under this war of art designs is slightly wonky - if charmingly so, by and large.

#THE SABOTEUR PC FREE#

By the end the city of light is just a big brown blur: far, far uglier, yet presumably now free of the deadly elegance of the Jackboot. Pandemic's final game stages the fight for the soul of occupied Paris primarily as a battle between different fashion houses, pitting the nasty militaristic chic of the National Socialists against Sean Devlin - a man clad in rustic hues who appears to have been kitted out by the Edinburgh Woollen Mill.ДЄt the start of the game Paris is beautiful, swathed in stylish black and white and shot through with the blood red flags and banners of the Nazi party. It's also a theme that gives The Saboteur its one big idea. That's a fairly depressing notion: the 'philosophy' that reduced so much of Europe to a crumbling cinder was, at least in part, born from Hitler being crazy enough to have an idea about how the world should actually look. Apologies for mangling a quote I can only half remember, but I'm pretty sure someone clever once said the true appeal of fascism is largely aesthetic.

The saboteur pc