The Saboteur

The Saboteur is Pandemic's swan song. Since the studio was recently dissolved by its parent company, this is the last hurrah from the ambitious development house that brought us Mercenaries and Star Wars Battlefront. Like Mercenaries, The Saboteur is an open-world, sandbox game that benefits from an impressive scope but is noticeably rough around the edges.

The Saboteur has one of the more intriguing setups of any game this year. Players are thrust into Nazi occupied France and given the opportunity to turn the tide of the war one explosion at a time. The setting is both sexy and dangerous, with a colorful cast of characters that border on period-piece stereotypes. You take on the role of Sean Devlin, a hard drinking womanizer with a past who has fled his native Ireland to try his luck at race car driving in Grand Paris. Sean's main competition is an Aryan named Kurt Dierker who cheats his way to victory and provokes Sean to get even off of the race course. What starts as a prank against Dierker quickly escalates to a game of life and death and ensnares players in a blood oath to kill him and remove his Nazi brethren from the country.