Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 5: “The Citizen Kane of Video Games”

In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.

“The guy grinning like a cat with a cream flavored a___hole?”—Sean Devlin, The Saboteur

By now, the story of The Saboteur has long passed into video game legend. In 2009, Electronic Arts published a World War II sandbox action game, one with an impeccable graphical twist. It was in stark black and white, and with each section of Nazi-occupied Paris you liberated the game would get brighter and colorful. But, the thing got middling reviews and worse sales, and developer Pandemic Studios was unceremoniously closed just a few months after release. EA has been one of the great villains of video game culture for decades, this horrible monolith that seems to want nothing more than to antagonize its staff and squash every unique idea it can find. They earned it for a reason and over the years, The Saboteur has become something of a cause célèbre amongst anyone frustrated with the publisher. Here was a game that tried something new, really new, and was targeted almost because of it. I’m certain anyone reading this can think of a few favorites that suffered that fate.

Image: Microsoft. This image from the Xbox Store might be an actual screenshot or just concept art. After beating the game, I’m unsure myself. But it’s good at depicting the general premise.

Of course, it wasn’t as though The Saboteur was the era’s only example of EA’s artistic ambitions, or its chicanery. They helped BioWare reach untold blockbuster success with Mass Effect and Dragon Age but meddled at every turn. They pushed for unique IPs like Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, and Brütal Legend, only to abandon them or demand changes that clashed with what made them unique in the first place. And then there are all the companies they bought and hollowed out, of whom Plants vs. Zombies’ PopCap Games is one of the luckier ones. It is easy to hate EA because they’ve spent forever as the loudest example of this industry’s many problems, but mixed in with that is are the many good and great games they’ve published. Today’s topic is fully in that complicated legacy.

I ignored The Saboteur when it came out because it, well, seemed like a bog standard open world crime game buttressed by an admittedly cool art style, and because I bought my Xbox 360 in 2010. It wasn’t a new blockbuster or a tragic symbol of the industry. Just a failure. One possibly symbolic element is that even though the vast majority of EA’s 360 offerings are fully backwards compatible on Series X, including two I already reviewed for this series, this one isn’t (though it got re-released on Steam a few months ago, thankfully). So for this one, I’ll be playing on my original, fourteen-year-old Xbox 360. Screenshots will be ones I can find from official sources, mainly the game’s store pages on Steam and GOG.

And unfortunately, my late teenage expectations were accurate. What we have here is a mediocre, aggressively GTA-inspired sandbox crime game with painfully undercooked emphases on stealth mechanics and bomb planting. Since your hero can climb most walls, and since there’s an element of ostensible subterfuge, it also feels like a direct response to Assassin’s Creed in the year Assassin’s Creed II came out. There are mechanics for sneaking, brawling, shooting, and none of them feel particularly satisfying—I’d call it a jack of all trades, as a lot of these open worlders are and as Assassin’s Creed II fully was, but it doesn’t even rise to that. The main feeling I kept having was that this would probably be better as a dedicated stealth game, something like Hitman where you have multiple options for espionage. Perhaps Velvet Assassin, another and worse reviewed WWII stealth game from 2009, provided that?

Image: Steam. The action of The Saboteur generally falls into a simple pattern: slowly, painfully stalking one Nazi at a time, and then getting spotted and shooting your way out. There are very few ways to go from the second to the first once you’ve been found.

The Saboteur promises a wealth of player agency with its mechanics. You can, in theory, do levels with more or less of an emphasis on stealth, sneaking in garb stolen from a stormtrooper you left dead on a tower or tricking guards into investigating a planted bomb. In practice, not so much. The stealth is incredibly unreliable—it’s usually safer to not be dressed as the enemy, since they’re actually more alerted to other guards than civilians—but the gunplay isn’t great either and it’s nigh impossible to get back into stealth once you’re found. You can climb up walls and across convenient cords, but how you can climb is extremely restrictive. Climbing down ladders is a giant gamble. I found it a pain just to get quests from the defrocked priest played by Steve Blum because the cathedral he’s in is filled with guards. And a lot of missions are very clearly meant to only end in a shootout. At the same time, it’s interesting seeing a sandbox crime game try this “immersive sim lite” approach. It implies a way this genre could have evolved.

That goes double for the art style, which is as good as advertised. When a district is under the most extreme, checkpoint and stormtrooper-laden occupation, it doesn’t have just a standard grayscale palette; it’s murky and inky and kind of hard to see. The only colors are bright neons: yellow lights, red Nazi armbands, the flames of a book burning at the Arc de Triomphe, the blue scarf of a murdered French rebel. It brings to mind Sin City and that other 2009 cult flop, MadWorld. And when things are nice(r), Paris is colorful, soft, and filled with inspired Frenchmen who the menus claim will fight alongside you. I’d be in bucolic Picardie, and right to the left I’d see the Champs-Élysées as a gloomy nightmare under a massive cloud cover. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t for the look to be this intense or stylized. I can’t call it an unmitigated triumph, if only because the darkness leads to regular gameplay problems, but this is the kind of thing the industry should’ve been doing more of back then. However, that isn’t the only artistically intriguing part of The Saboteur. It’s also impeccable at representing a phenomenon that swept through the culture in the late Aughts, an obsession with trying to quantify and almost gamify the idea of games as art.

Image: Steam. In The Saboteur, going from the black and white sections to the color ones comes with a noticeable downturn in difficulty. It’s often better to just go from one to the other to shake off pursuers.

Gamers and gaming culture have always suffered an inferiority complex. Perhaps it’s because it started with eccentric hobbyists, or maybe it’s due to outside views of the medium as juvenile or unsophisticated. You can try to show a “non-gamer” that a game has artistic ambitions, but how do you present the artistry of gameplay, of interactivity? That’s what makes a game great as art. That’s what gives this medium purpose. Without that, you’re stuck competing for headspace against clichés: gruesome violence, cutesy mascots, silly anime aesthetics, or the limitations of pixel graphics. The cultural touchstones of the industry look inherently basic and immature. Because of that, we’ve culturally absorbed an anxiety about games not being respected as artistically relevant. Of course, we’re not alone—any fan of, say, comic books or anime can tell you the same thing about their community. People want the things they like to have more meaning to more people. Gamers are just loud about it.

As technology evolved with each gaming generation, developers became able to depict ideas through graphics or mechanics that had previously been relegated to text, box art, ads, or role playing abstractions. The jump from PS1 to PS2 let us see heroes and NPCs with facial animations and realistic movements. The jump to PS3 was even greater, allowing a depth and subtlety that could portray complex emotions visually. While this was going on, players were getting older and interested in more serious storytelling. Magazines and news sites about games were starting to explore in-depth criticism, not just reviews. Sales increased to the point where video games began to commercially rival older artforms. And more of us were online as lurkers or commenters or creators seeing this sea change. What this built was a space where games could tell more complex or emotional stories, where creators had more investment in exploiting that, and for players more numerous and interested than ever before. And it worked!

Image: GOG, which has more of the promotional screenshots with the HUD and user interface. You’ll notice how even the in-game map matches the color state of the district while our master of sabotage Sean sets it straight, this Watergate.

Well, sort of. Blockbusters like Mass Effect and Fallout: New Vegas wielded their high definition power like a mighty sword. Most were bloated and ugly to some degree. But they were all linked by what may be the single stupidest phrase in the history of gaming (well, maybe behind “John Romero’s about to make you his b___” and “asymmetrical dementia”): “the Citizen Kane of video games.” It was a perfect shorthand for an industry so lacking in awareness of its own worth. Gamers seemed to want “a” game, even just one, to prove the legitimacy of their favorite medium. They wanted to shove this Work of Art right in the face of Roger Ebert and anyone else who didn’t care about this stuff. Ignoring the fact that the actual “Citizen Kane of video games” is Super Mario Bros. and has been since 1985, or that this perpetuates a decades-long reduction of one of history’s greatest films, it’s stupid. Colossally stupid. It ignores that what matters in an artistic canon is not one magic bullet but multiple works, and that many of those multiple works were here long before BioShock, the first game to really garner this description. And time has, uh, been a bit mixed to that one, hasn’t it?

The Saboteur is a perfect subject for examining what it means to be a “the Citizen Kane of video games” because of the ways it is and isn’t actually deep. The cool art direction, for instance, totally works. Dynamic color palettes aren’t a new idea (they are, after all, the basis of every flashback with a black and white filter), and neither is implementing it as a part of the story. That’s the premise of middle school YA staple The Giver and middling Nineties comedy Pleasantville. But tying it to your progression is special. The art direction warns you of a difficulty spike before reacting to your actions. It’s a combination of aesthetics and player input, and it pushes the idea of you bringing this gorgeous metropolis back from totalitarian rule. An idea that can be used in any visual media is tied to interactivity. Great stuff.

But this is also very much a game from 2009 trying to be serious, which means a lot of violence, a lot of sex, and a lot of depictions of violence and sex that are hilarious and always were. A lot of this silliness comes from antihero Sean Devlin, car mechanic turned race car driver turned French Resistance fighter based loosely—loosely—on real life British Grand Prix spy William Grover-Williams. Sean is Bald Whitem’n circa 1943, all unclever wisecracks, grim cursing, the occasional queerphobic invective, and an embarrassingly bad Irish accent courtesy of Robin Atkin Downes (the voice of Travis Touchdown, leading to the third unintentional No More Heroes reference in a row for this series). He’s a hard man, the kind of hard man we supposedly wanted to be, even if his talent for driving is compromised by poor mechanics that led me to accidentally run down dozens of Parisians. And of course, he’s a great lover who lives in the backroom of a cabaret, so every time he leaves his GTA-style safehouse to blow up a Nazi tower he’ll be met with flirts by French women rocking 2009’s most artistic lingerie and tassel graphics. And for people who purchased the game at launch, they could get DLC that made them topless. You know, art!

Image: Steam. The two male leads of The Saboteur: Sean and Luc, the French Resistance leader who slowly ropes in the antifascist cells across Paris. They’re both rather unpleasant, something true of the whole cast. That was another thing for prestige games then, characters that were aggressively mean as a way of feigning maturity.

I do hope I’m not coming across like a prude. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of content, and to be honest, I’d like to see more games with a healthy and open attitude towards the discussion and depiction of sex (which this game does not have) or a greater sense of gonzo energy (which it does). But this can’t be “the Citizen Kane of video games.” It is a medium at about its most gleefully immature, and Kane was a smart movie by a director experimenting with techniques that were new, untested, or relatively obscure. This game’s experiments or ambitions are real, but they’re less lofty than it thinks. This could have inspired new games by its mechanics, or its visual style, but absolutely not by its story. It’s even wanting when compared to that year’s Bayonetta, which is more puerile but also more self-assured and self-aware. Maybe we didn’t need The Saboteur to have a mission where we stalk a German general preying on sex workers. Maybe.

On that note, another way a game back then could be a “the Citizen Kane of video games” was to cover a serious topic, like philosophy or the War on Terror. World War II was a great subject for them, with its war crimes and genocides, clash of empires, tragedies of scared refugees and humble GIs, and the burgeoning realization of how interconnected the world really was. The Saboteur happily ignores all of that. The active collaboration of the fascist Vichy government goes without a mention, and if you had any expectations of realism, the giant zeppelins in the skybox (and the fact that Nina Simone’s 1955 standard “Feeling Good” is on the radio in 1943) should clear that up. Our villain is Kurt Dierker, a sexually predatory German celebrity race car driver who’s also a mass murdering Nazi commandant. Heinrich Himmler meets Dale Earhardt. You shoot him off the Eiffel Tower at the very end of the game, and that causes the color to come back to the city’s center.

Image: GOG. Sean regularly slides down convenient cords, but this time, he’s doing so to escape an exploding blimp. By this point, any pretensions to realism or seriousness are fully gone.

This is fine. The Saboteur is deeply pulpy, it doesn’t have to be a lesson on the horrors of 20th Century fascism, and my problems with its tone are mostly in its choice to have a deeply irritating cast. The game is most fun when it’s an blood-soaked version of an old WWII comic, with Sean blowing up massive Nazi turrets or rescuing a German scientist forced to build a superweapon. It’s telling that the jazzy, bassy score is full of retro-inspired licensed songs by Maxayn, Koop, Scrubs composer Jan Stevens, and only rarely something actually recorded in the Forties. This is about the vibes of the War. And that hits a fever pitch in the bloated finale, when Sean’s cadre of annoying clichés—the pampered writer turned newfound leader, the nebbish Jewish German émigré, the Italian father figure—are cut to ribbons over the radio while you bomb a car race, fly to Germany for a spell, and returns to see an entire city in revolt. The best side missions lean into this, like a Manchurian Candidate riff where you escort a brainwashed Nazi or a sniper hunt for a target with body doubles.

Of course, the best way to be a “the Citizen Kane of video games” was, of course, to ape cinema and noninteractive art. We prove ourselves a true medium by appropriating an older one. There are a few nods to films, most surprisingly Raiders of the Lost Ark (and A Storm of Swords’ “Red Wedding” two years before Game of Thrones), but mostly this comes from overwrought cinematic set pieces. For instance, there’s some platforming in an exploding blimp that led to Sean leaping repeatedly, and hilariously, into an airborne inferno. This is something Uncharted had popularized and Uncharted 2—whose star Nolan North shows up here as a hook-handed French general—would refine two months before The Saboteur came out. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with this trope, but my only issue here is that the gameplay, graphics, and mechanics lead to constant deaths and kill what should be a brisk pace. A very serious shootout in a catacomb during that bonkers climax is so dark you’ll regularly walk into a bottomless pit. Just one more way the tone always feels compromised.

Image: Steam. A promotional image that references the dramatic train heist. Like a lot of big, flashy cinematic pieces in games at the time, it’s very long and very easy to die in. A lot.

The recurring tonal struggle of The Saboteur is a common one for games of its setting and genre. The game waffles constantly on how gritty and serious it should be. On one hand, there’s a bombastic train heist and Gestapo thugs able to take several full rounds of machine gun fire, but the whole thing ends with Sean walking onto the Eiffel Tower grounds amidst a riot, going up the elevator set to a somber remix of “Feeling Good,” and shooting an unarmed and crazed Dierker after he has murdered his own staff. And reborn by antifascist hope, Sean says “I’m just gettin’ started!” to his underwritten love interest Veronique to segue into the postgame for finishing outstanding missions or scaling a few more landmarks. At least he found an answer for what he wanted to be; the game didn’t. The main culprit is that the writing is awful, but I also think its being a, well, GTA ripoff might work against it. I assumed this would be a great format for a period piece about a terrorist, but oddly, no; the optional missions mostly sapped my energy and digital Paris isn’t fun to explore. If anything, the genre is an albatross that was probably expected or demanded by the publisher.

But Assassin’s Creed II didn’t have an albatross. Neither did Uncharted 2, or 2010’s Just Cause 2. Each of those equally pulpy games does something this one tried with far more panache. AssCreed did the urban stealth period piece. Uncharted was hailed as the most cinematic video game ever made. And Just Cause has more pizazz in how you blow up everything carrying a regime’s logo. But they’re also safer in other ways, even beyond them all being sequels. The Saboteur had an art style that went against the tastes of the era. It demanded far more effort for playing “your way,” while punishing you from making a mistake or straying from its path. You wouldn’t think so given the sheer immaturity, but this is challenging in its own way, and not just in terms of difficulty. I wouldn’t say that its fate was inevitable, but even when you discount all the problems, it was in a market unreceptive to its charms. It should’ve come out a few years earlier or a few years later. Even the early 2010s public might’ve been kinder.

By then, people had finally stopped using “the Citizen Kane of video games” as a descriptor. It had no purpose. Video games had become the most lucrative sector of the entertainment industry, and prestige blockbusters and indies gave the industry more artistic clout than games like this one ever could. Many were meant to be artistic, to challenge our notions of what a game could be or tell stories noninteractive media could not (or that older games would not). And so, the pendulum swung in the other direction, and we suffered angry, at times criminal pushback by reactionary gamers paranoid about a space they thought was theirs alone. I’m not suggesting harassment campaigns like Gamergate or online caterwauling about “artsy games” were done by the same people who had whined about games not getting enough respect, but they orbit a similar planet. Both bristle at the idea that games can be defined by someone who isn’t them.

Image: GOG. I suppose The Saboteur can be seen as a barometer of how games have and haven’t changed. It’s tackier and cruder than modern blockbusters, and far less polished, but a lot of the beats are still there.

World War II games have also fallen a bit out of favor. In 2009 alone, The Saboteur was competing for space with the aforementioned Velvet Assassin, the open world Wolfenstein reboot, Battlefield 1943, but also over twenty other games about the Big One. It’s not really surprising; WWII has more iconography than any other war of the 20th Century, and having the most unambiguously evil belligerents on one side makes it easier to give players a safe moral binary. And some are still being made. But we’re certainly not getting twenty of them in one year anymore. Of course, the industry is still the same in other ways, at EA especially. If you’re jonesing for some of that late-Aughts feeling, they’ve (allegedly) frozen a follow-up to last year’s rapturously reviewed Dead Space remake. Presumably one more victim of Game Pass.

Despite everything—the juvenilia, the bad controls, the poor gameplay, the sheer degree to which it was derivative—The Saboteur has cultural clout, and I get why. I mentioned Assassin’s Creed II earlier, but while this was a tired GTA-alike, AC2 was the real debut of the Map Game, the open world where everything is gamified and everything’s a chore. Ubisoft took a satisfying mixture of stealth and platforming and used it to smuggle in a Skinner box nightmare filled with handholding and aggressive diversions. That model became such a default for years while games like this fell by the wayside. This isn’t to say The Saboteur is free of that design philosophy, but with its comparatively old school style and that great aesthetic, it feels special. Like it was from some world where studios were more free to toy with art and graphics. Pandemic got a chance to do that, EA punished them for it, and for better and worse we’ve never played anything quite like it since. That’s what people like, I think: a road not taken.

Next game: Wii Sports Resort.

Read all of “Gun Metal Gaming” here.