It’s really a shame that The Saboteur isn’t given higher billing at GamesCom. I personally thought it was one of the more refreshing and stylized games around instead of the usual rounds of sequel this, or rehash that. If you don’t yet know (shame on you), The Saboteur is set in World War II. Yes, it’s a WWII game, except that it’s NOT. Unlike most WWII games which portrays famous historical events and battles, you’re now playing the part of the underground resistance. You’re never in the limelight as the hero Your work is only apparent in the background, and is only seen as inspiration to the resistance. As such, the developers, Pandemic Studios had a lot of room to wiggle with the story since it doesn’t have to be historically close to accurate.

Tom French, Lead Designer for The Saboteur

The Saboteur has you playing in the shoes of an Irish race car driver name Sean Devlin and is set in German occupied Paris. Life goes on for most people, and you race cars and go to pubs. Till one day, your best friend gets killed by the Nazi and you swear bloody revenge. That’s the basic principle. The game makes use of stylized black and white with color accents, very noir-like. Normally, one will associate this with the feel of some recent movies like Sin City and The Spirit. I came to that very same conclusion as well, but now that I managed to actually play the game, it’s actually lot different. For one, the art style is more water color in nature than dark and gritty. When you’re deep in German territory and everything is Black and White, the color highlights aren’t that striking – as in their more like glows than highlights. However, since the draw distance in the game is pretty impressive, you can sometimes see far away into areas that are less occupied, and there’s suddenly a burst of color. Sometimes, it can seem a little cartoon-like in nature, but the game doesn’t really take itself seriously, sort of like Indiana Jones. And because of this, the whole color palette just plain works. The more, I played it, the more I loved it.

So, let’s get on with the preview. The GamesCom build unveiled a new level: Train. It shows the wide-ranging story elements of the game, and how versatile it is to create a sense of immersion into its world. Your primary objective is to rescue a scientist from a train, your secondary objective is to blow up the tracks over a bridge to derail the train, faking the death of the scientist and covering your rescue.

The demo starts with our hero Sean at the bridge first. He needs to plant explosive charges at key points and setup the detonator trigger on the tracks. Sean climbs up on the bridge with ease. Tom French, Lead Designer at Pandemic explains that you can climb any and all surfaces in the game as long as it looks climbable. If you come across a ledge, or a fence, you can expect to be able to climb it. We were assured by Tom that you won’t come across the dreaded invisible wall where you jump at what is clearly a rock outcropping only to find that it’s a solid wall and you fall to your death. Once on the bridge, you can either choose stealth to avoid soldiers, disguise by stealing the costume of a downed enemy, or Rambo, simply blasting everyone away like a normal action shooter. The game happily lets you choose and adapts amazingly well. If you happen to choose violence however, the game features an intelligent cover system. You won’t need to activate it by pressing a button. Whenever you move behind something that can afford cover, you’ll automatically duck and hide, with the ability to peek and shoot. However, you can just as easily come out of cover by moving away. This made gunfights more fluid and engaging. You don’t have to always remember to press a button to get in and out of cover.

After you’re done planting your bombs, you have to get out of the area, back onto the countryside, and drive to your next location where Sean meets up with his contact. You then continue to the train yard where the scientist is being held. This segment is played out on top of a moving train (obviously), with you trying to shoot your way to the scientist’s cabin. There’s plenty of fire power here, including the use of a mounted machine turret. This is the closest to a standard shooter than we’ve gotten so far, but there’s still a lot of continuity to it. For example, Sean was spotted by a sniper tower, alerting reinforcements to come. If somewhere earlier in the game you have taken down that tower, you won’t have been spotted now. Things destroyed in game stay destroyed. In fact, you earn cash by destroying key German installations.

During the course of our demo, we noticed that completing certain objectives or tasks will unlock something called Perks. These seem to be player enhancement bonuses, such as a shorter bomb fuse time. When asked however, Tom refused to comment, saying that they’re not yet ready to announce the list of Perks, what they do, and how to get them.

The Train level demo was intended to show how dynamic a story level can be, with multiple segment and covering a lot of ground without resorting to simply forcing you to go from one plot device to another in a linear fashion. It still does in a way; I highlighted your objectives at the start because of this, but like the cover system, everything runs fluidly and you don’t feel locked down into doing something just because.

We’ve got some brand new screen shots of the Train level in the gallery. The videos are being uploaded and will be posted soon.