Good On Paper, Better in Practice
I have quipped about EA’s The Saboteur getting my good-on-paper-award for 2009 and I fully intended to write a looooong blog post about what sucked and why it could have been so much better if only EA had actually cared about the game and not just rushed it to market so that Pandemic could be shut down because California is so expensive.
But now, one month later, I find myself racing towards my first ever Platinum Trophy (that’s 100% completion/1000 Gamerscore for you XBOXers), even replaying previous missions for that, so it obviously can’t be that bad, right?
Sure, all the nits worth picking are still there (dodgy writing, horrible NPC voice acting, clunky animations, questionable design choices, obvious disinterest in historical facts, anachronistic music selection, pointless nudity, general cheesiness) but after evading my 50th alarm by kissing a random girl on the street I have to admit: this is fun. The lofty concept of “emergent gameplay” becomes nail-biting reality when you are trying to escape cross-country from a bunch of “Terror-Squad” Nazis (See? Told you it was cheesy) with flamethrowers and souped-up machine guns who look like they came straight out of Killzone 2, while a zeppelin shoots at you from above and a tank appears precisely in the direction you were running, his front cannon slowly tracking your increasingly hectic movement across the french countryside. Whew!
Other open-world games offer similar experiences but while the above scenario would lead to certain death in GTA, it works in The Saboteur because
- you have a large game world with no dead-ends to get stuck in
- your player character is basically a bullet sponge that can also survive pretty high falls
- the world is littered with installations to blow up and an exploding fuel-depot at the right moment can take out a significant number of pursuers
- the developers had the magical idea to make all the damage the player does to these installations persistent, thereby creating a real sense of acomplishment even in mindless destruction
This list doesn’t read well but it plays great. The fact that you can actually survive these hair-raising situations makes you look forward to the next mission, to the next chance of wrecking strategic havoc and the next harrowing escape from insurmountable odds.
The Saboteur does so many things wrong that it would be a death sentence to any other game – but it delivers on the promise of open world gaming and I have realized that that’s where it counts.
Now on to that last trophy …
