Pumping Irony

I recently finished Pandemic Studios‘ swan song title, The Saboteur and thought I’d write a bit on my experiences. As usual with me, don’t treat this as an official “review.” There are plenty of those out there already; hit up Metacritic. As a disclaimer, any screenshots I include were obtained from the game’s website; I do not have the capability of taking my own screenshots from my Xbox 360.

It’s no secret that Pandemic Studios hasn’t been their usual selves the past few years. Their recent games have been a bit on the sub-par, glitchy, and unpolished side of things, and in the case of The Lord of the Rings: Conquest utter trash. It’s also no secret that all their games with the aforementioned reputation are games released since their acquisition by EA. Coincidence? I’ll leave that for you to decide. The Saboteur does show a lack of polish in certain areas but overall it’s minor and I’d have to guess a good portion of it could have been worked out if EA hadn’t shuttered the studio and forced an early launch.

Before launch I was undecided on the game. I loved the film noir visuals but I was concerned about two issues. First, support. EA announced they were closing Pandemic three weeks prior to launch. I wasn’t sure at the time if there would be any post-launch patches (they call them Title Updates on consoles) or additional DLC. Since then, EA has kept a team of former Pandemic members attached to the project, already working on patches for the PC edition, etc. No idea if the game will see additional content in form of DLC however. Second, I was concerned that an open-world single-player game would not hold my attention. I never finished any of the GTA3 series; I haven’t finished GTA4 yet (I’m on the last mission, which kicks my ass every time); I own GTA4: The Lost and Damned but haven’t even started playing it yet; I find myself getting frustrated (this is putting it nicely) and quitting because I die so often in Red Faction: Guerilla that I don’t know I’ll ever manage to finish it. But take an open-world game like Crackdown, Mercenaries 2, or Saint’s Row 2 that allows co-op and now we’re talking! Aaron and I have done a bit of Crackdown and quite a bit of Mercenaries 2 in co-op and those sessions are enormously fun with crazy moments of mindless, wanton destruction accented by our own pitched laughter. From a difficulty standpoint, I feel RFG could use a co-op mode, though I won’t completely dismiss the notion that maybe I simply suck at the game. Nah, couldn’t be that. But when thinking of The Saboteur, there are two things in gaming that we just never tire of killing: Nazis and Zombies. The Left 4 Dead series and Borderlands‘ first DLC “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” have the co-op zombie killing covered quite well. I was hoping for some co-op Nazi slaying adventures but it’s not happening here — The Saboteur has a story crafted around a specific character, and those types of games only work in single-player. In the end, after reading tweets and forum posts from Pandemic developers who worked on The Saboteur, combined with my fond remembrance of their pre-EA products, I felt I owed it to myself to get the last “real” Pandemic game. Turns out, it’s a great game, so I’m doubly glad that I did!

World War II has been a common (arguably overused now) setting for games, so part of Pandemic’s challenge with The Saboteur was to come up with a unique take on it; a task in which I feel they have succeeded admirably. Rather than being set in one of the more famous battles or theatres of the war, the game takes place in a stylized Nazi-occupied Paris. The character you play, Sean Devlin, is not the cliché infantryman we might expect from a WWII game, but a chain-smoking, skirt-chasing, smack-talking whiskey-drinking Irish race car driver/mechanic who is drawn into the French Resistance after being captured by a Nazi agent Kurt Dierker, who executes Sean’s best friend Jules because he suspected Sean and Jules were members of the Resistance. Afterwards, Sean does rather unwillingly join the Resistance and becomes a one-man army in his plot for revenge against Dierker. For the full storyline, visit the Wikipedia entry.

The Saboteur uses an upgraded version of the engine Pandemic used in Mercenaries 2 so I’ll be making several comparisons between the two, and perhaps occasionally tossing in a comparison to other open-world games as well. On a side-note, while many reviews refer to open-world games as “sandbox” games, I don’t consider them sandbox at all. At best, they may be non-linear but only to an extent since there’s always a story involved, and stories are linear by nature.

Content

From an overall story perspective, both The Saboteur and Mercenaries 2 are focused on revenge. Each has story missions and occasionally you’ll meet other NPC’s who have side missions which you can accomplish in a non-linear fashion. Mercs2 has other random content such as destroying billboards for cash or finding resources that you can have your helicopter pilot steal for you, and the side missions usually consisted of uninspired tasks such as “Complete this race course” or “Deliver this package,” each of which had three levels of gradually increasing difficulty. The side missions in The Saboteur are focused on the individual agendas of that NPC’s role in the Resistance, which makes for more engaging gameplay. The story missions in particular are varied and a lot of fun, some of them bordering on epic in scale, which is a tremendous improvement over the lackluster story missions of Red Faction: Guerilla. The characters found in The Saboteur may come off like period-piece stereotypes, but it’s ok. It’s written as a somewhat pulpy story so those characters are fun. The bad guys are bad guys and we can’t wait to exact revenge for the wrongs they’ve done to Sean and his friends.

Rather than having random bits of destructive content (which later respawn) like in Mercs2, The Saboteur has hundreds of “ambient freeplay” locations scattered about Paris and the surrounding countryside. These might range from Nazi guard posts, to loudspeakers emitting Nazi propaganda, to scenic spots which will scroll out to a brief rotating vista perspective. All these “ambient freeplay” events are persistent: once destroying that Nazi location, viewing the scenic spot or picking up the postcard, that freeplay location is gone permanently. As such, all ambient freeplay locations are indicated on the UI mini-map, and maps of each area can be purchased that will display the locations on the full-sized map as well. There are also a few freeplay races that will unlock new race cars for Sean to drive.

Another improvement over Mercs2 is the handling of in-game cinematics. In Mercs2 you’d click Y to interact with the NPC then get loaded into the cinematic where the camera angles were scripted. The Saboteur doesn’t do any loading at all (though it does load into hideouts and shops), it just shifts to a cinematic perspective — with the player able to swivel the camera at will — while the game world continues “live” around you. This can lead to some funny situations, much like the cinematics in Guild Wars, when NPC’s decide to path or perform actions at the location Sean and the mission-giving NPC are conversing.

Graphics

The game uses a visually striking film noir art style, where areas that are oppressed by Nazi influence are depicted in black and white, but like Sin City have small bits of color thrown in. Nazi’s have bright red armbands, and all Nazi flags are also red. Resistance members have bright blue armbands. Areas of “inspiration” have a yellow tint, such as windows on buildings (my guess is the citizens have hope in their homes but are overwhelmed by despair outdoors?) or monuments like the Eiffel Tower which stands out like a bright beacon. When completing certain story arcs and liberating an area of Paris, we see Pandemic’s “Will to Fight” technology in action as the scenery shifts from black and white to full color in realtime, indicating you have given the citizens in that area “inspiration” and make them more willing to fight back against the Nazi occupation that remains. The actual WtF effect is very cool to see, like something you’d see in a movie, and thankfully it isn’t over-utilized.

In comparison to Mercs2 it seems Pandemic managed to get the engine able to handle more high-resolution textures and still maintain great performance. There are still some muddy low-resolution textures but I felt they were fewer and far less noticeable. There is still some pop-in but it seemed to be limited to foliage, etc. The pop-in was slightly more noticeable in Mercs2 or extremely noticeable in Brutal Legend, which suffers from a noticeable lack of polish and performance. The best part is that as I said, the only real pop-in objects I actually noticed were scenery fluff rather than having huge boulders, ruins or entire buildings suddenly appear in front of you like you’d see in LOTRO or DDO. The trade-off for getting more high-res textures in the game is that the background is even lower-res than in Mercs2 so I’ll give that game the point for better long-distance visuals overall. Also, while the explosions are bigger and better in The Saboteur, the destruction factor is probably higher in Mercs2 which seems to have more debris resulting from its explosions. The sky in Mercs2 was a flat low-resolution animated texture, while in The Saboteur the skies are very well done with higher resolution textures and effects. In the black and white occupied areas, the darks clouds roil through the sky and occasionally break into rain showers, while in the full-color inspired areas there is a full day-night cycle: bright blue skies with wispy white clouds during the day, crisp stars and full moon at night.

I did feel that the game “felt” better while in black and white, however. Much like old movies where special effects worked better in black and white, in The Saboteur the darkness hides nearly all of the pop-in, plus the whole film noir thing just works for this game. Once playing in an inspired, full-color, area it’s still very pretty but it loses a certain je ne sais quois and looks like pretty much any other open-world game. There is a downside to the black and white at times: not only are occupied areas in black and white but they are also depicted as overcast nighttime which means some areas can appear extremely dark and become very difficult to see what’s happening. As a result, there were several occasions when I slammed into other cars or objects while driving that I couldn’t see, or got stuck in dark alleys and couldn’t see my way out or even tell which way was up or down.

Controls

Pandemic tightened up the controls from Mercs2 and re-mapped some of them to match what we’ve become accustomed to from other open-world games, which was a good move. The exception would be brawling, which is clumsy and stilted by forcing the player to hold the left trigger the entire time rather than using it as a toggle, and also lacking any sort of soft-targeting mechanism which, for this type of game, would have made all the difference in the world. Brawling isn’t totally unplayable but it’s frustrating. The shooting aspect is competent and an improvement over Mercs2 but not as good as the smoother execution seen in Red Faction: Guerilla. Granted, RFG has a great competitive multi-player mode which gave Volition explicit reason to polish up the shooting aspect of their game.

While the controls are tighter, they do feel a bit heavy at times, especially A-button actions: jumping and climbing. When jumping, there is a very slight delay between pressing A and the animation. Nothing serious, and it’s easy enough to learn the timing, but it’s something I feel could have been tweaked. Climbing can feel slow and tedious, having to press A for each climb or B for each descent but I can’t think of a better way to do it. Sean isn’t an acrobatic assassin like Ezio in the Assassin’s Creed games, after all. I think mostly it’s just that the climb animations are slower than they could have been.

Animation-wise, I thought the majority of Sean’s animations were very well done. The way Sean hunches his shoulder and slightly over-swings his arms while running looks a little “off” at times, but I didn’t find it distracting. The citizens you see wandering Paris are also well animated, but they don’t always have a smooth transition between animation sequences, roughly jerking between sequences instead. These are only noticeable if you’re just idling around watching them or if they happen to be in the background of one of the in-game cinematic mission dialogues.

Driving is an improvement over Mercs2 though it still doesn’t feel totally right. To be honest, I have yet to play any open-world game that had driving controls, physics and responsiveness that has met my expectations, including any of the much-lauded Grand Theft Auto series. The majority of the cars drive like what they are: big, heavy 30′s and 40′s era clunkers.  I found myself settling into the vibe of the era and driving a bit slower to accommodate for the cars’ feel, but after adjusting to how they drive, some of them started to feel more natural and I could anticipate how well it could corner, turn, slide or how it would handle if I slammed the emergency brake.

Audio

Wow! Just wow! Pandemic really outdid themselves in the audio department. All the sound effects are very well done, the voice acting was great, and the soundtrack is phenomenal. I’ve read a few complaints over Sean’s Irish brogue but I didn’t have a problem with it. I don’t know any real Irishmen so I wouldn’t know the difference between “Hollywood brogue” and the real thing. There are a handful of cheesy lines, but that’s the writer’s fault not the voice actors, and besides this is a one-man army game — the equivalent of an action movie — so a few cheesy one-liners are par for the course. The soundtrack includes classics by Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald and many others, including some newer tracks such as 2007′s Koop Island Blues and Pandemic brought in award-winning composer Christopher Young to score the game’s theme song. Even though most of the songs in the soundtrack were not actually from the 40′s the important thing is they fit right in; they simply feel right. I can’t think of a single track that I wished I could skip while playing the game, and that’s a first for any open-world game I’ve ever played. Sure, music in the style of 40′s and 50′s jazz and swing isn’t something I’d load onto my Zune and listen to in my free time but I’ll admit some of the songs stuck in my head a few days at work.

Polish

I’ve already mentioned a few areas where The Saboteur could have used that little extra touch of polish, but I’ve got a few more:

The map. In Mercs2 we pressed the back button to immediately bring up the full-size interactive map. The Saboteur uses the Back button to call Resistance Strikes — either a small group of NPC’s to help Sean fight, or a Getaway car — so the map is included in the pause menu. That’s fine, but we press Start to pause, then click A to select the map, which is the first option. Then we’re presented with a small non-interactive map of Sean’s immediate area. To get to the full-sized interactive map, press A again. That extra press of the A button sounds minor, but you use the map so often that it becomes an issue. Each mission typically has Sean driving quite a ways to different locations so that small non-interactive map is useless. I would have preferred dropping it altogether and just going straight for the full map since that is what we’ll be using to navigate and set waypoints anyway.

Positioning and collision detection. Press the X button to kick open a crate of Nazi or Resistance weapons or ammunition but the game is very picky about it. Sometimes, even if the “Press X” text is shown, indicating Sean is in the proper position, if Sean is in a tight corner between objects where there isn’t room for his kick animation, the animation will play but the crate won’t break open. Some of the Nazi towers are placed in such a way that Sean won’t grab the ladders to climb up or down. Some of this could be related to the overall control scheme but it’s definitely something that could have used some more time to smooth out.

AI. This is by far the greatest weakness and in-your-face lack of polish in the entire game. Granted, there’s hardly a game out there with AI where we don’t complain about the AI, but in The Saboteur, and indeed Mercs2 before it, the AI is particularly retarded. The citizens of Paris have a selection of ambient voice-overs as they walk along the sidewalks but should Sean bump into them, rather than “Excuse me” or “Watch where you’re going” like you’d see in GTA4 and many other games, they’ll utter something inappropriate like “Hey, where did you get those shoes?” Drawing a weapon in public might get a voice-over “He’s got a gun!” reaction but gunfire won’t necessarily cause the citizens to run for their safety, though explosions will. Driving like a maniac will incite one of two reactions: citizens on the sidewalks will do nothing whatsoever, or they will panic and run into the street directly in front of you nearly guaranteeing you run them over. Worse, they don’t know what beeping your horn means so they won’t get out of your way and you end up running them down. Sometimes you can kill a Nazi and his partner a few feet away won’t notice because he’s looking a different direction. Cone of vision is a nice thing and all, but jeez, a little situational awareness would be a nice thing for AI programmers to consider.

More of a design decision that polish, I was especially bothered by a lack of consequence for killing the innocent citizens Sean is supposed to be protecting. I’d read an interview from last year where this was talked about as if the developers were proud of the fact Sean could go around blatantly killing every citizen on the streets of Paris and the Nazi’s wouldn’t care. I find that to be a disturbing decision. If the Nazi occupiers were trying to impose a strict sense of order and control, wouldn’t a mad Irishman running down Parisians in the street be a violation of that control? Not that I want the authorities chasing me for every single minor act like the GTA games do, but some reaction from either the citizens themselves or the Nazis (or both) would have made things a little more interesting. Pandemic did add “atrocities” to the game. Killing 5 civilians within 30 seconds will disable all hiding spots for 1 minute. Big whoop. I don’t know if there are any additional atrocities or not; I was busy having fun and exploring rather than going on a French killing spree. Every other recent open-world game has an immediate consequence for killing innocent civilians. Crackdown and GTA will sic the cops on you; Mercs2 penalizes you $10K for each civilian killed; killing a citizen in RFG will decrease that Sector’s morale. Something more meaningful than losing hiding spots would have been nice, and I also would have appreciated knowing the potential consequence immediately upon killing one civilian rather than waiting until I’ve killed all 5 and activating the atrocity.

I would say that The Saboteur is easily the best game Pandemic produced during their time with EA, despite its minor issues. I really feel that if Pandemic had been allowed a few more months, the level of polish on most of the systems would have been much higher; brawling being the exception because they’d need to rewrite a better system. But it’s still the most downright fun open-world game I’ve ever played, which should be obvious since it’s not only the first one I’ve ever completed (well, except for all the ambient freeplays) but also that I stuck with it and completed it so quickly, given my attention span and heavy work schedule this month. I recently finished the story part of Brutal Legend but find myself currently uninterested in returning to do all the little side missions and find all the hidden locations, but I can’t wait to get back to The Saboteur to work on more of the ambient freeplays. There’s just something about killing Nazis that never gets old…

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.