The Saboteur

It is really hard for me to stop playing this game. Earlier today I described it to someone as "Red Faction: Guerrilla with real Nazis" (as opposed to Martian Nazis), and I'm having a hard time coming up with a better comparison. The biggest difference between the two is, where in RF:G you felt like the leader of a rebellion, in Saboteur you are pretty much a rebellion all by yourself. This game also has friendly AI, but it doesn't come up very often; almost invariably, you rely solely on your own personal ability to infiltrate and demolish.

This being said, it's occurred to me that your enjoyment of The Saboteur is entirely dependent upon how much you like killin' Nazis. The game's prologue leads you to believe that it's a mission-driven game, but that's really not true; looking back at some less-than-positive reviews from the game's release, I can now immediately understand that these people did not "play the game right." Not that it's their fault, but - if, rather than taking your time to surgically extricate the Nazi presence from France, you instead try to charge through the game's story missions, you will find that these missions are made difficult by Nazis being fucking everywhere. Also, the game world will be predominantly in black-and-white. So, frustrating and depressing, all at once.

I will readily admit that this aforementioned Nazi presence is staggering - I've spent most of the past several days blowing up tanks and lookout towers, and the game's stats screen informs me that I've only done around 20% of its "freeplay" targets. That's a lot of Nazis! Fortunately for me, and my opinion of the game, I love killin' Nazis.

Progress: Act 2