Judging from all the middling reviews, I expected The Saboteur to be yet another broken Pandemic game. I picked it up anyway, spurred on by the $20 price drop, and you know what? This game is feckin' awesome! Sure, you have the horrible accents, the prepubescant obsession over sex, and some messed up bugs (one nasty one in particular required me to restart the console, as everything was surrounded in messed up lines), the game works. It clicks in some oddly beautiful way that I can't explain. If they had never released Mercenaries II and instead called this game Mercenaries: Vive Le France! that would've been perfect. This is the game I wanted when they were picked up by EA, and now I have it. I am willing to let Pandemic go now.

Amen.

I'll need to pick it up sometime.

NOT buying it for you. =)

Yeah its really a lot better than most reviews claimed. The driving is a bit sloppy and some of the AI for stealth actions borders on retarded, when you get to a certain skill level you can place and light dynamite in full view of germans and get away with it if you're in uniform. Also its too easy to be ignored, walking towards a tank and being noticed all the way until you hit the hull and you're just outside the vision arc of the guards who don't turn their heads to look at you... Thankfully that isn't THAT easy to exploit until you get the disguise bomb placement thing. For the vast majority of the time I was enjoying the game.
Also the last level is one of the most atmospheric I've played. The effect was probably amplified by the amount the action shifts and by the song being played on the piano (it's one of the times where its helpful to listen to the radio in the game so you can remember the lyrics and contrast them with the visuals)

didn't you play enough open world games last year?

If you get this game and have an ATI card note that you must get the patch otherwise it will run poorly or not at all (EA was apparently too busy firing the developers to do any QA testing). Aside from this glaring oversight it's a good port of an interesting game.

Someone's been watching Zero Punctuation ;-)

Just want to add that it's a BETA PATCH so if you have an allergic reaction to anything untested then don't use it.

If you want to see this game done right, Red Faction: Guerrilla. It is probably cheaper too.

Aww.... I knew someone was going to say something along the lines of this.

The OP is right. Saboteur is a very good game, save for a few horrible pieces of dialogue (and the accents). The controls can also be fiddly on consoles, luckily they are better on the PC version.
But as an over-the-top sandbox nazi killing simulator, it does a lot of things right. I also enjoy the fact that running and gunning is going to get you instantly killed, and the stealth element works so well in the game with Sean being able to scale most buildings, and get disguises to mingle with the nazis.

It's some good mindless fun, the AI, as mentioned above is very dumb at times. ATI card users don't even bother.

No, it isn't.

Who said they're bad things?

:(