While I was walking across the floor in one of the rooms at the Sony PlayStation Holiday Preview Event, I was compelled to check out a screen displaying unfamiliar gameplay. Corey Lewis from Pandemic invited me to have a seat on the couch as he showed me his team’s upcoming release, a single-player sandbox stealth adventure game.
The Saboteur is a stylish title that takes place in Paris during World War II. You play the part of Sean Devlin, an Irish racecar mechanic whose friends are being killed at the hands of the Nazis. After you witness the brutal killing of close friends, you finally reach your threshold and kill the Nazi responsible for the heinous act. From that point you become devoted to ridding the city of Nazi scum.
The game plays very well. I’m not sure if it was the final build that Corey was demonstrating, but it was fairly smooth and looked really good. He handed me the controls and it was far more intuitive than I would have thought, given the level of complexity of what your character can do. Your character will seek cover automatically, which is awesome, and can switch between melee and ranged combat, depending on what’s needed. Parkour seems to be a huge element in third-person-shooter games these days, and this game is no exception to that.