1. Summary
2. Background
3. Hype

While The Saboteur looks great, it is also building on the back of countless games like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Assassin's Creed. It also has a lot of expectations to be a great game. While Pandemic is known for making fun sandbox games, they are often held back by their own ambition or execution, so it's a matter of opinion whether or not The Saboteur will be better than previous releases or along the same lines in terms of quality. This is where a critical eye towards the hype comes in handy, and we definitely have that!

The most hyped feature is the progression of the world from monochrome to colored landscapes. While this is good in theory, there's a lot of ways it can screw up. For example, if the game just suddenly becomes color after you escape and the Will to Fight has risen, that's a problem. If the game fades out, then fades in and color suffuses the landscape, that's another problem. The only real good way to do it is to have color slowly bleed into the landscape, with some elements, such as clothing, having color while building are still dull until the Will to Fight has risen. In other words, there's plenty to screw up in regards to the color suffusion touted as a major part of the game, but only one or two ways to do it in a way that doesn't break the player's experience of the game.

The parkour is also another dangerous balancing act. You can go the entire manual route, like Crackdown, or the entire automatic route, like Assassin's Creed. The best way to handle it is somewhere in the middle, because full manual makes players confused and overwhelmed while full automatic disconnects them from the action on the screen.The best is probably somewhere in the middle, much like Mirror's Edge: you do some things automatically, but other things must be done on your own. We can say this, though: taking out soldiers on the rooftops of Paris after scaling walls using parkour is excellent no matter how you slice it. Athletics-style takedown.

Open-world games all suffer from the same malaise nowadays, and hopefully The Saboteur will manage to avoid it. This sickness is something that is simply called narrative. Rather than allowing players to explore the city on their own, craft their own unique stories, and give them a big playground to party in, developers are still forcing players down the linear pathways of their youth. The only difference is that it looks like they are getting real freedom because it's a big map. Crackdown was one of the first games to push forward the open-world model by having everything available from the start. By making the later bosses (which could be handled at any time) tougher than earlier ones, they set up a natural progression, but players could simply attempt to skip to the "final boss" at the very start of the game. This sort of sequence breaking is absolutely essential for a good sandbox game, but we are still treated to gradual progression through linear stories. Yawn.

Finally, there's the setting. World War II has been done over and over again, and while The Saboteur distinguishes itself from your standard title with full swastikas on display and a unique art style, it's still about killing Nazis as an Allied soldier. We've seen games like this time and again, from Call of Duty, to Medal of Honor, to Company of Heroes. There's been no real change. No playing as Spain, or Italy, or even Germany, and it's a little disappointing that the genre has failed to innovate the perspective or story whatsoever.

The Saboteur has a lot of potential, and will no doubt be a decent game. That's not the issue at heart here, but rather Pandemic's ability to make a great sandbox game instead of an average one. Hopefully The Saboteur will sidestep the problems that befell previous titles and set itself apart as an excellent entry that everyone must buy. We are not holding our breaths, though.