Review: Saboteur

Publisher: EA Games

Welcome to occupied France circa 1943 where Nazis rule the roost and the French underground is starting to make waves.

You play Irish race car driver Sean Devlin, who has a chip on his shoulder against Nazis due to his best friend, Jules, being executed by Nazi racing driver Kurt Dierker. After escaping Dierker's clutches, Devlin heads for Paris where swear he swears revenge on all Nazis and is determined to hunt down Dierker and make him pay for killing Jules.

EA have spent time on the graphics, and it shows, with 1940s-era Paris looking particularly crisp, and parts of the countryside also looking like a nice place to visit if not for the number of Nazi flags flying in the breeze.

However, gameplay is not so straight forward. It can be a bit irritating, with the controllers not as malleable as they could be. This is especially so when Devlin is in a car and as he is supposed to be a racing car driver, you would think that controlling a car would be nice and easy. Not so, it's very sloppy and frustrating as the car slides all over the place, and it can take you an age to get from one place to another – like the initial journey by Jules and Sean to race Dieker.

The rest of the game play is OK though, with prompts in the right places so you know where you're going, while enemy contact is pretty straight forward, too. Devlin does a lot of blowing up and easily defeats his enemies with his fists and other weapons of choice My biggest problem with this game is that it came too soon after Assassin's Creed and is in a similar vein. Unfortunately for EA, in this reviewers opinion, Ubisoft did a better job.

Overall, the story is a good one, and if the developers had just spent as much time on the story and graphics as getting the movements right, this would probably be an exceptional rather than average game.

3 out of 5 Shacks