Tag Archives: GTA Clones

Sabotage!

Taking a quick look at this site the other day I realized how I somehow completely skipped posting about the last Xbox 360 game I completed. No surprise, as I was busy job searching, resigning from my previous one, and preparing to move across the country. Hectic times. The weird thing is that I definitely have vague memories of at least writing a draft for it, and I’m sure I would have had a lot to say about it. In any case, it’s been so long now that I really can’t go into as much detail as I’m sure I would have wanted me, so I apologize for glossing over the details a bit.

“Sabotaging the shit out of a Nazi blimp!”

Anyway, the game is The Saboteur. Pandemic’s World War II open world game. This is also Pandemic’s very last game before being shuttered. I personally really liked Pandemic – I enjoyed both of the Full Spectrum Warrior games and both of the Mercenaries games quite a bit, and I know hordes of people absolutely adored the Star Wars: Battlefront series as well. So, is this a glorious last hurrah, or simply the last nail in the coffin? To me, despite some rough edges, it’s definitely closer to a good send off than the total mess it could have been. The ex-Pandemic guys also have to be happy about the game becoming a bit of a cult hit in recent years, as it frequently gets mentioned as a “hidden gem” from the last generation.

“Yep, another GTA clone…”

The Saboteur is, much like the Mercenaries series before it, a twist on the classic Grand Theft Auto 3 style of open world shooter/driver. The twist this time is that you’re a resistance fighter helping to liberate occupied Paris during the war, employing both ridiculous war machines like Mercenaries, and also stealth and subterfuge, including a parkour system obviously inspired by Assassin’s Creed. The more contemporary urban setting gives it a feel much closer to GTA than Mercenaries, which is a distinct difference and also a bit of a disappointment as I can’t help but daydream about what an open world game set in and around World War battlegrounds, including all kinds of heavy weapons and over the top combat, could have been like. That idea is likely a part of the original concept of The Saboteur, but only shows up here and there – there are tanks, artillery, machine guns, and big explosions, sure, but you’ll be spending most of your time driving (cars, not tanks!) around in the city and avoiding guard checkpoints and patrols.

“Causing some chaos in the streets of Paris.”

The combat in The Saboteur shined the most for me when I went full crazy, purposely waging a personal war against every Nazi I could find, quickly escalating the alarm rating, stealing tanks, shooting down blimps and planes, and embracing the total chaos. This is only likely to happen a couple of times in the main story, but chasing achievements and in-game unlocks really presented some opportunities for wackiness. The other moments for me that I really enjoyed was the free-form takedown/takeover of Nazi fortifications and checkpoints. Clearing those out could be a lot of fun and sometimes require quite a lot of strategy, and also gain you some helpful currency for abusing the game’s supply stores. Unfortunately, this became a little too repetitive due to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of the checkpoints all over the game map. Those awesome moments started to be overshadowed by the feeling the I wasn’t making much of a dent when I zoomed out the map. Pity.

“Just look at all of those fucking blips. Ugggghhhh!”

While the game can feel a little on the clunky side, particularly the driving, which you do quite a lot of of course, it’s all quite serviceable, and certainly not as rough around the edges as Mercenaries 2 was upon release. The bigger problems with the game are probably less technical, such as it’s bizarre insistence on taking place in an alternate past version of World War II, where the timeline is different, things have different names and designs, etc. Plenty of World War II games have embraced fictionalized versions of reality, but The Saboteur never goes too far into approaching the occult, zombies, and super technology of Wolfenstein, for example. Instead, everything just feels a little bit “off” for no real reason, other than a license to be lazy with the facts. Combined with the humor and overall irreverence for the subject matter, the game almost feels like something along the lines of Inglourious Basterds, without quite sticking the landing.

“Our dashing hero, Sean Devlin.”

I should also give a shout out to the protagonist, Sean Devlin, who is sort of the personification of that whole thing. Luckily I was prepared for how ridiculously over the top this Irish (yes, despite helping the French resistance in Paris, you’re actually an Irish dude) knucklehead stereotype is. Some of his one liners were actually pretty funny, and I actually think he could have been developed into a pretty cool character with a bit more effort, and maybe he would have been if this game had gotten a sequel. Regardless, I’m definitely not as bothered by him as some people seem to have been.

“Enjoying a rare Mercenaries moment…”

One of the The Saboteur’s most unique features is that the occupied portions of the city are bathed in this ultra-stylish black and white, with only flourishes of color highlighting certain things such as the red on the Nazi uniforms and banners, the blue of the resistance fighters, the orange of fiery wreckage, or the soft yellow glow shining from windows at night. While a little jarring at first, this is a really, really cool look once you get used to it. When you liberate an area of the city, the palette of the area shifts into full color. The color looks fine, good even, but it feels a little odd to reward the player by making an area’s visuals less cool. Humph! It was a good idea that only almost works. Another landing that they didn’t quite stick…

We in the killin’ Nazi business!”

That would probably be a nice way to sum up the entire game. It all sounds amazing on paper, and it is executed mostly competently, but somehow it just doesn’t gel together to reach the heights of excellence it could have. Still, if all of the elements of The Saboteur sound appealing to you, as they did to me, you’ll probably enjoy it. It’s just a shame that Pandemic isn’t around to release a sequel that really captures all of the potential that this game has with a The Saboteur 2 (and while we’re at it, a Mercenaries 3!)

(Screenshots from mostly the PC version swiped from various sources.)

Redemption: Zombies

As promised, hot off the heels of completing the main Red Dead Redemption single player campaign I installed and started playing the game’s expansion pack / DLC Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. Undead Nightmare is interesting for sure, being something of a “total conversion” of the main game with some different gameplay elements and a different flow than the core game. The (obviously totally non-canon) story revolves around RDR’s protagonist having to track down a cure to an evil undead invasion that has taken over the frontier.

“Lovely family…”

Now, given how “straight” the story and characters of Red Dead Redemption are I really wasn’t sure of what to expect of the expansion. Zombies, really? Was it going to be serious or totally ridiculous? The answer is somewhere in between though for the most part it keeps its serious tone and most of the more fantastic elements and humor are delivered in a very dry way which I found amusing in itself. That actually effected the entire feel of the expansion for me too – on one hand I felt like I shouldn’t take my playthrough too seriously, as it is just a silly spin-off story. On the other the fact that the world still feels dark and gritty and, over the top moments like when I found and then “broke” one of the four fucking horses of the apocalypse aside, the tone is never really completely shattered helped continue to keep me almost as immersed as the original campaign.

The zombies themselves are obviously a game changer. The whole “zombie headshots” thing definitely had a major effect on my game. Zombies will usually go down with a single shot to the head or by being burned, anything else seems to have very little effect on them. Personally I didn’t make going for headshots a priority at all in Red Dead Redemption proper so this new focus on lining up my kill shots really changed the whole dynamic of combat for me, especially when ammo was extremely scarce early on. Zombies also behave unlike any other enemies in the original game and the new special zombies add even further variety to the combat.

“Headshot, headshot, headshot. Learn to abuse Dead-Eye!”

Probably the biggest departure from the main game, mechanics wise, is the introduction of a town invasion system. All of the main towns and camps in the game have a limited number of survivors. They’ll come under attack at some point (it seems to be on some sort of timer) and you’ll need to help repel the attack and clear the town of zombies. If you wait too long or things go badly you might lose some survivors. The less survivors the more frequently the town will be attacked until such a time that it can no longer be cleared back out, losing you access to small weapons caches and a bed to save your game and fast travel with. While defending these towns can get a little repetitive on a whole I found the system pretty fun. I do wish I had paid more attention to the fact that you can “assist” survivors to speed up the process of clearing out a town, however, as a few of my earlier attempts to clear towns out were lengthy and fairly exhausting affairs.

Then there were the bugs. I don’t know if this is a wide spread problem or not (I’ve read some things that implied that these issues were only caused by a very recent patch) but boy was my game fucked. It seemed like after playing for a while NPCs and zombies would start spawning with invisible bodies, as in you could only see their clothing. This made going for headshots a little challenging given how few zombies have the fashion sensibility to sport hats. Worse, whenever this happened I would often notice certain events failing to trigger. The first graveyard I had to clear in the story took me well over an hour due to having to restart it over several times, with one of my runs netting me something like a hundred kills before exhausting all of my ammo and depleting my will to fight on. I’d also often run into a seemingly related glitch where trying to save my game would cause it to freeze. Thankfully the generous checkpoint system meant that this was never more than a bit of an inconvenience but it was annoying all the same.

“On a pale horse (running the hell away…)”

Overall would I recommend it? Even with the bugs I experienced I could easily recommend it to anyone who liked Red Dead Redemption and likes massacring zombie hordes. Even if you only want a little more time with John Marston and company and don’t care much for zombie games I’d probably recommend it if nothing else but for another opportunity to run through Red Dead’s excellent world, albeit a slightly twisted version.

Xbox 360 screenshots looted from a cursed Aztec tomb because I’m a bad, bad man.

Redemption

Next off of my Xbox 360 (now firmly “last gen”) pile of shame is Rockstar’s critically acclaimed open world Western game Red Dead Redemption.

I’ve been wanting to play this damn game since its pre-release hype train first started rolling down the tracks. First of all, I definitely consider myself a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series and Rockstar Games in general. Second, a Western? A serious, open world Western done by a studio I like, using proven tech? Sign me up, right? Third, after its release the game got more or less lauded by critics and gamers across the board. Actually, the fact that the game (shamefully) never made it to PC is one of the few things brethren of the “PC Master Race” have to be jealous of the unwashed console masses over. So, yeah, this game has definitely been high on my list for a while now.

So, at long last…

“John Marston, brooding in the rain…”

One of my first impressions was my surprise about just how damn slowly the game takes off. Sure, the first plot point is early and suitably dramatic but after that? Molasses city. Worse yet, I felt a little bit of that old open world “err, what do I do now, and why do I give a shit about doing it?” feeling set in almost immediately. Another factor here is the engine. GTA 4’s engine (which Red Dead Redemption uses) is beautiful and impressive in many ways, but it feels seriously clunky in some others. Shooting, riding horses, hell, just walking around can feel a little awkward sometimes with getting stuck into odd looking animation loops or clipping through objects in weird ways probably the most common offenders. As I concluded with GTA 4 years ago, once you get used to the engine’s “feel” and some of its idiosyncrasies it’s just fine, good even. Besides, blowing a bandit off his horse with your revolver feels magnificent. That lead up definitely hurts the early game though.

So I wasn’t quite as impressed as I thought I’d be at first. Boo hoo! Soon though, the absolutely incredible execution of Rockstar’s world crafting started to steer my opinion back around. The rolling plains teaming with wildlife, campfires in the Mexican desert, seedy frontier towns filled with whores and bandits, and other appropriate tropes of the genre are all here and feel just great. The immersion started taking hold to a serious degree as I found myself riding my horse from location to location more appealing than the various “fast travel” options and being overly concerned with Marston’s wardrobe and preference in firearms. As I’ve mentioned here before, being able to feel deeply immersed in a game world tends to be one of the more compelling factors in whether or not I’m going to love a game and have no doubt, this is where RDR shines the brightest.

“The environments are damn beautiful, in an empty sort of Western USA kind of way.”

I would definitely have to say the game’s serious tone has a lot to do with this. GTA 4 was mostly a serious affair but served with a massive side of the often not-so-subtle satire the series is known for but RDR is almost entirely straight-laced. So focused in fact, that while your character is free to go on murderous rampages if you desire (apparently not too out of character given his outlaw past, though that is debatable) he has absolutely no interest in patronizing the local working girls due to being a dedicated husband. Wow, is this the same Rockstar?

I wouldn’t go as far as to say the game’s writing is anything amazing, however. I mean, the game is filled top to bottom with clichés from classic Westerns and while this mostly feels like honest tribute from fans of the genre, I feel like a few of the characters I encountered early on were walking stereotypes. This is a common trait of Westerns though, even in some of the more acclaimed modern movies, and the few characters that develop into being likeable and fairly interesting (John Marston, our protagonist, chief among them) more than make up for that. One of the bigger underlying themes of the story, the death of the “old west” as it is an allegory for the way we grow and change, is fairly well worn as well. It could have still been a damn fascinating theme if delved into a little deeper. Shame that. As an aside, this game has got me absolutely fiending to watch gritty modern Western movies like nothing else. Argh!

“Herding cattle is just one of the many tedious virtual jobs you can toil away at.”

One last, minor disappointment is with how damn similar this game plays (mechanically speaking) to any other GTA inspired open world game. Sure, you’re on a horse in the plains instead of on a Faggio in Liberty City, but damn! Part of me would actually much rather this game have been a much shorter, more focused experience that took chances with some different mechanics. It would have probably lost something in that, sure, but the déjà vu I felt while racing from point A to point B while trying to shoot all of the red dots on my mini-map certainly detracted from the experience if only a little.

Finally, I know it’s been spoiled a million times over now but I’ll still avoid mentioning specifics: I thought the unconventional structure of the ending was quite interesting. The game continues on after it would seem like a typical place for it to have concluded and does so more than once! Not in a “ha ha, got you!” kind of way, it’s actually fairly consistent with the rest of tone of the game. I’ve yet to really decide whether this was a good thing or not (I can’t stand playing a game when it feels like it’s worn out its welcome and false endings definitely don’t help) but it is fun to think about in any case.

Anyway, overall the experience was awesome. Not perfect by a long shot, but unique and worthwhile all the same. I regret not jumping into the game when it launched so I could experience the fun looking multiplayer a little but that is a common downside to clearing out one’s backlog, I suppose. Next up I’ll be playing through the expansion pack, Undead Nightmare, but first I think I need to watch another episode of Deadwood…

Xbox 360 screenshots shamefully stolen from elsewhere, as usual…