Bobby gets hands-on with The Saboteur

And finally we get to talk about it!

During E3, UPSLynx and I got whisked off to the Pandemic Studios offices in Westwood to get hands-on time with The Saboteur. After being briefed a bit on the story and current progress, the Xbox 360 dev kit was fired up, and yours truly got to be one of the first non-developers to ever lay hands on the game.

I was a bit out of my element as I am a terrible FPS player with console controllers. My immediate inclination was to invert the Y axis, since that’s what I do on the PC. If I had a mouse and WASD, I would have been able to jump right in. As it stood, I began by steering the protagonist Sean Devlin crookedly down a black and white hallway in a black and white Nazi building. I rounded a corner and there was a Nazi soldier looking off in the other direction. This was my chance to step into the shoes of The Saboteur, and become Sean Devlin.

If only it had gone this smoothly...

It wasn’t exactly smooth, but I snuck up behind the soldier and cracked his neck. I picked up his gun, and that’s where the madness began.

I got into a major firefight soon after. I’ve seen the developers play the game, and trust me when I say they were much better at it than I was. Since I was so amazingly inaccurate (through no fault of the game–the failure was strictly my lack of skill with the 360 controller) I quickly reverted to the “spray-n-pray” method. After slow advancing through the room, getting random potshots off on Nazi soldiers, it occured to me that the developers kindly turned god mode on for us.

That knowledge empowered me. If this had been the real deal, I would have been dead several times over. I got quite a bit bolder as I ran up to soldiers, blasting them in the face.

While the game could indeed be played this way, one of the things the developers have focused on is giving the player many options and tools to get the job done. I suppose that’s the idea behind an open world sandbox game; you can choose the path and the method to accomplish your goals.

I made it outside and stole a truck, with which I then proceeded to plow down entire groups of Nazi soliders. I took the time to circle back around and take down guys that I missed the first time. I eventually made it out into the countryside, where I promptly got stuck due to my horrible driving skills.

If a skilled player had been playing (which I saw later), you may choose to take a path which leads to a dramatic cutscene 0f your stolen vehicle jumping a drawbridge that is being raised up. You eventually make your way to a farmhouse, where you encounter flamethrower-wielding Nazis. One of the cool features of the Odin Engine? You can shoot the flamethrower fuel tanks instead of killing the soldier directly. Guess what happens?

I handed the controller off due to my embarassing performance (and also because I think the Pandemic guys were getting tired of watching me butcher the ‘proper’ method of playing), and watched others do what I couldn’t–actually make it through the demo level.  Watching others play was a bit more enlightening.

A colorful world is a safer world

The Will to Fight mechanic is a fantastic technique for bringing drama to the game. In areas where there is a low will to fight, the graphics are black and white with strategic use of red and yellow. Lights are yellow, Nazi armbands are red, blood is red, and everything else is monochromatic. It’s definitely a sight to behold. As you perform missions and successes in a given area, the people around you (the residents) begin to have a high will to fight, and the color bleeds back into the world. The effect is stunning. You can, at a glance, tell where safe areas are, and where it is dangerous to go, strictly based on whether or not the world is in color.

The ultimate result of playing the game was this: I will definitely buy this game when it comes out. I’m very excited about the “Will to Fight” mechanic, and I can’t wait to discover more about what happens to Sean on his quest for revenge.