The Saboteur [Review]

The Saboteur [Review]

Roydon Cerejo, Jan 12, 2010 1229 hrs IST

Overall it's good fun but don't expect anything new in the gameplay

Unique presentation, good graphics and sound, moderate system requirements

Monotonous gameplay, no damage system for vehicles, certain moves can't be performed when disguised

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Graphics and Sound

The game is built using an engine called Odin from Pandemic Studios, while Havok has been used for the physics part. The physics work well on the characters, which can be seen when you ram into civilians on the street. Here's something hilarious though, while driving through the countryside I see cows grazing, so naturally I turn the car around and head straight for them, just to see how the physics would look. To my horror, they just fell apart like a porcelain vase with bits of gut and ribs. It actually looked as if I ran over a watermelon! Paris is rendered well with plenty of attention to details on the buildings and d cor of that era. Initially there was an issue while using an ATI card and a Core2Duo CPU, as the game would simply crash. However, Pandemic has now released a Beta Patch that addresses this issue with the final version yet to come.

There are plenty of traditional French songs in the backdrop, which give you a feel of that era and compliment the gameplay well. When the action heats up, the tempo of the music changes, making it quite intense. I was able to play the game quite smoothly with everything maxed out on the following system:

CPU: C2D E7200 @ 2.5GHz
RAM: 2GB DDR2
GPU: Galaxy 9800GT
Monitor Resolution: 2048x1152

I was getting a very solid 30+ FPS throughout the game even in battles. You'll notice very slight slowdown here and there, but I think that's a bug in the game itself since even reducing the resolution did not solve it.