It's World War II. You're a member of the French Resistance, and you've got to blow up buildings, assassinate generals and generally make life hell for the occupying Nazi forces.
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Want to See Saboteur's Nude Scenes? Don't Buy It Used
The Saboteur, which will be released Dec. 8 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (reviewed), delivers on this exciting premise ... sometimes.
Occasionally, the game finds its groove, usually in the missions where you skulk around the backsides of buildings and plant bombs without any stormtroopers spotting you. But Saboteur often dumps this compelling gameplay and puts you into a situation where all you do is empty your machine gun into a hallway full of guards, turning a unique game into a workaday shooter.
In short, Saboteur clearly wants to be both a stealth game like Assassin's Creed and a sandbox shooter like Grand Theft Auto. It pulls a groin muscle trying to straddle the two disparate genres.
Kind of true story
The Saboteur is very, very loosely based on the true story of William Grover-Williams: Protagonist Sean Devlin is an Irish race-car driver who begrudgingly ends up in la résistance after the Germans kill his best friend. The game's plot doesn't prove powerful or riveting: It's just there to give Devlin the motivation to go from set piece to massive set piece, an excuse to do things like hijack a zeppelin or climb the Eiffel Tower.
And make fun of Nazis. "Some master race!" he says as he shoots one in the head. (Or my favorite: "Who's the Übermensch now?")
The stealth elements distinguish Saboteur's gameplay from Grand Theft Auto, but, by and large, it's a copy of the Rockstar Games' formula: Get around a big city by jacking cars, find missions that mostly involve shooting people, and escape the long arm of the law.
Especially that last one. I have a strong feeling that the working title of Saboteur was Run From the Nazis, because that's mostly what I ended up doing. Apparently the Reich's militia had better radar equipment than the cops in Liberty City, because they would never get off my back. This isn't just used as a punishment for being spotted: The alarm bells get set off at various times during your adventure as a matter of course, and all the running like hell becomes tedious very quickly.
What Sean Devlin can do that Niko Bellic cannot is climb buildings. Unfortunately, The Saboteur suffers from a somewhat clumsy mechanic: You must keep jamming on the A button to jump to the next handhold, and you can only scale certain surfaces.
The ability to jump and sneak and frolic on the rooftops, and the stealth gameplay in general, gives Saboteur its modicum of originality. But although the game sets you up with a variety of ways to sneak undetected, none works very well.
For example, you can sneak up on a Nazi, kill him silently and take his uniform as a disguise. But even if the stealth kill works (sometimes it just doesn't happen), it doesn't much matter if another guard witnesses the bloodbath. The other guards show up on your radar, except when they don't. It's hard to know if you're going to be spotted, and I became an expert at executing the move that is most crucial to success at stealth: Pause the game and hit the button that sends you back to the last checkpoint.
To sneak or slaughter?
The real issue with Saboteur's gameplay isn't that the stealth is difficult or wonky – it's that sometimes it's necessary and sometimes it's impossible, and the game doesn't tell you which. Occasionally, you'll be slaughtered if spotted, but more often, you're not supposed to sneak: You're supposed to get out your MP 40 submachine gun and paint the town red. How do you know which? Trial and error. Lots of restarts.
Entering a mission, I'd never know whether it was going to proceed relatively smoothly, or whether I was going to be pinned against a wall of egregious bullshit for half an hour. True examples:
- Had to rescue an operative from a heavily guarded building, sniping six guards before I could get in, then killing about 10 more before we could escape. Afterward, Nazi tanks appeared and set our getaway car on fire. Operative bails out of car, getting self killed; I get bumped back to the beginning of the mission. This repeats itself again and again until we miraculously make it out without car being set on fire.
- Was told to steal a car "without damaging it." Spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out how I was going to snipe seven guards without being seen and sneak the car out of its gated yard. Finally realized that "without damaging it" meant "just drive it right slap-bang through a 2-ton wrought-iron gate."
- "Fightback areas" are supposed to let you shut down the alarms by hunkering down and killing soldiers until they flee. So I try it once instead of driving away. After killing the requisite number of Nazis, the alarm ends. But all the Nazis I didn't kill are still there. And I'm still standing there like a dumbass holding an MP 40. Which they see. And the alarms go back on.
- Obnoxious, overplayed song "Feelin' Good" is one of the only things on the radio, even though it wasn't written until 1965.
OK, that last one isn't as bad, and I'm not entirely down on anachronisms: I'm thankful that every car Devlin steals contains a GPS unit, for example.
Saboteur is a big game — I played 15 hours and finished about 75 percent of the main and side missions. You get rewarded for going out and destroying the hundreds and hundreds of Nazi guard towers, tanks and miscellany that dot the landscape.
But it's a big game best taken in small doses: An hour or two of clamber up the side of a building, snipe some guys, drive like hell, lather, rinse, repeat was plenty. Any more than that and I started to think maybe the Nazis could just have France, if they wanted it so bad.
WIRED Fun, unique setting; good controls. Sabotage premise occasionally delivers.
TIRED Trial-and-error gameplay loaded with aggravating misfires. Favors vapid kill corridors over sneaking missions.
$60, Electronic Arts
Rating: 
Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.
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