News will undoubtedly have reached your ears by now of the untimely demise of Pandemic shortly after review code for The Saboteur was dispatched to the press. It was thus with a rather heavy heart we sat down to play this – conceivably the last ever title from a team who had brought us Full Spectrum Warrior and the Star Wars Battlefront series. But is it a fitting eulogy, or more of a public execution?

It’s World War II. Well, almost. Racing driver Sean Devlin is an Irishman visiting France, but as revenge for a race-day vendetta goes horribly wrong and Dierker, his German rival, turns out to be a Nazi officer, the worst tour of Sean’s life takes a further downturn as a full German invasion force marches straight through the border town he’s staying in, invading Paris and the whole of the surrounding area.

Three months down the line, drunk and down on his luck in some Montmarte strip club, Sean is inveigled into the French resistance by an oppressed yet passionate author-cum-revolutionary. Assisted by a sexy British female spy, a Spanish black market trader and a wizened Italian mechanic, Sean’s going to avenge his pitiful situation and, in doing so, bring some colour back to the occupied streets of Paris.

The colour part isn’t metaphorical, and is The Saboteur’s central and, it turns out, most engaging gimmick. With full admittance of its inspiration, Pandemic has tackled Sin City’s moody (lack of) colour palette full-on, with Nazi-infested areas of the City of Love mired in stark blacks, whites and greys, with only gunfire, explosions and those ever-present Swastikas picked out in piercing reds, screaming their violent authority through the perma-black sky, driving rain and weird, reflective mist. To begin with, the lush rainbow hues that lie in opposition to this wash of misery are centred only around the Belle – Sean’s initial homebase and host to all other kinds of Parisian delicacies (see Pay Per View) – but, as you may expect, the more missions you win, and the more the Resistance’s cause flourishes, the stormy skies and acrid shadows are pushed back to the boundaries as gay Paris recovers its, um… gaiety.
We hope we’ve convinced you that the concept is actually bang-on, and such a comic-book notion is only enforced by the idiotically stereotypical characters. Consciously idiotic, we’re absolutely sure. When your racing rival is an impossibly tall, blonde, square-jawed German who makes a bratwurst joke the moment he enters a room, your love interests are a headstrong French revolutionary avenging her dead brother and a sexy, posh-voiced English spy, and you yourself are a rugged Irish chap who’s always drunk, likes fist-fighting and greets passers-by with “Top of the morning to you” with regularity, you become keenly aware that Pandemic has made absolutely no efforts to shy away from the irresistible ‘Allo ‘Allo clichés that could and, luckily, have come with this kind of adventuring territory.

And from the very start, you’re drawn effortlessly into this historical farce of secret meetings in lamp-lit caves, leather-clad Nazis with tiny pince-nez perched on their noses and giant zeppelins exploding high above the Paris skyline in balls of triumphant flame.

… continued